Blog writing serves a variety of purposes. A means of pushing fresh content out onto your digital platforms. A source of keywords to help attract people to your site. A cathartic outlet for all of those burning issues that occupy your mind (OK, maybe less so the latter in the marketing sense). Sometimes when tracking blog traffic for our clients, we’ll notice a seemingly arbitrary surge of viewers on a particular blog—and we’re not talking one that just hit the presses, but one that’s months or even years old. It’s great news, but why does it happen? The reasons for a random increase in blog traffic may be difficult to pinpoint with 100 percent certainty, but there are some general concepts that likely hold true.

What do you mean by blog traffic?

By blog traffic, we are talking about the number of web users who visited a particular blog title on your page. Other metrics that we consider for a given time period are:

• Entrances (how many times someone entered your site through that page)
• Bounce rate (the percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page)
• Exit percentage (how often the users exit from that page/set of pages when they view that page)
• Search queries (that were used to find your site)
• Which pages appeared in search results (and how many times they were clicked on)
• And more!

The purpose of these analytics is to confirm what’s working and call attention to what’s not. This is in an effort to curate content that drives more traffic to website pages.

Reasons for a random increase in blog traffic

Inquiring minds want to know—why would an old blog suddenly get so much attention? Here are our thoughts.

One of your links was shared…and re-shared

This may be the most obvious reason as to why you suddenly see a spike in traffic on a blog that has been out there for a while. Wherever a link to your blog existed online, someone out there found it and shared it. And then that person shared it to someone else who shared it…you get the picture. Think of it as a process similar to “going viral” (albeit on a smaller scale). This could have originated from you re-sharing a blog link to your business’ social media email list, for example. Or, others could have done the same on their own social pages. Either way, it could account for a random increase in blog traffic.

Your keywords are working

This might be the item on today’s list to get the most excited about. Someone (or multiple someone’s) could have stumbled across one of the blogs in your archive by finding it organically in search results. This would mean that the keywords you identified when writing your blog related to someone’s Google search. Hooray for effective SEO! An increase in traffic could mean multiple people are finding the blog via Google search, or this could be the predecessor to our first point—if theoretically the link to the blog was shared (and re-shared) after it was found.

The blog’s content is seasonal/relevant

Recently, we noticed a random increase in blog traffic on a client’s blog from two years ago that focused on haunted places in the area. Could it be because the so-called “spooky season” is on its way? We can only speculate, but sometimes a jump in blog visitors could be due to the fact that your blog topic is seasonal or relevant to the time of year and whichever holidays or events are going on at said time. Again, all of these points connect in a way—because it’s likely that someone was searching for “haunted places in X city” (point number two) and then shared and re-shared (point number one).

You published new content

Ideally when maintaining a blog, you add new content to it on a somewhat “regular” basis. We always applaud consistency when it comes to blog posting! We also like the idea that once someone is on your blog page, he or she will want to stay awhile. Hence the concept of this last point. Someone clicked the link to your latest blog, then stayed to browse your past blog topics. This could be the impetus to everything we’ve already mentioned—a gateway for people finding your existing blog content.

Summary

A random increase in blog traffic is a great thing! Questioning and identifying its origins can give you validation behind the blogging practices you already have in place—and motivation to continue to refine those going forward.

McNutt & Partners is a full-service advertising and digital marketing agency. Contact us today for your marketing needs! Call 334-521-1010, or visit our contact page.