Traffic Report December 2017

Hi all! Happy New Year’s eve! I write this as we are surrounded by Family and I hope you find yourself surrounded by loved ones tonight and welcoming 2018 and the goals to be achieved therein!

Though the blog has been active a little over a year now, growth has taken second place to learning how to use the tools and resources to improve the quality of our content and how to present it to you, dear reader. And while time flies by, and we draw 2017 to a close, I want to take a moment to remark on everything we’ve done towards those efforts.

December Traffic metrics & sources

Sessions: 643

In December, due to the Holiday season and people searching for recipes, there have been 642 sessions to the site.

Unique Visitors: 561

While there have been 642 sessions to the site, 561 of them have been by unique visitors. The remaining 82 have been by repeat readers.

Takeaways:

Since it’s december, I like to take a look back on the year and see the road traveled.

A look at 2017 year metrics & sources of traffic

Traffic Totals:

Unique visitors in 2017: 2700

woo hoo!! Although the numbers are not impressive, for a fledgeling blog, it’s well worth celebrating! When I started this

Visits to the site in 2017: 3600!

Traffic Sources

55% of traffic comes from organic searches, which means that people are searching the recipes online and finding the site. This is great news for our SEO! The recipes are showing up and people are finding them online.

30% is from Direct links, where users either entered the url itself, or, clicked on the url on social media (Facebook or Twitter) and accessed the site that way. Sometimes that behavior is not registered as Social Media links.

12% comes from Referral links: where the majority of the traffic in this category comes from Foodgawker.com where we share every recipe for submission.

 

Major implementations to the blog:

Since starting, I’ve been iterating everything on the blog to improve the experience and functionality of the site.

Food Blogger Pro  

Starting in January, I started a subscription to Food Blogger Pro, the awesome Pinch of Yum’s sister site run by Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom and their team. They developed courses and tools to help improve blogs and interview leading bloggers and industry professionals to provide the best information to grow your blog. Their help has been invaluable in growing this as far as it’s gone.

Tasty Recipes

I’ve tried other recipe sharing plugins before setting on Tasty Recipes. It has a high degree of customizability that you need to make recipes as you need them to be- listing instructions and dividing by sections so they are organized and easy to follow. Other plugins are more structured, and by extension constrictive, limiting what you can do with them and how to to present the recipes on the blog.

Plus! The plug in has integrated SEO, which improves people finding the recipe on search engines. That was unbelievably useful!

New Theme and the Genesis Framework

the first theme that the blog started with did not have the structural design to allow for different widgets in the layout, I could not add footers, headers, or extra functionality beyond the very basic. Being able to add extra widgets to the layout, including sidebars and footers, I was able to make the site look better!

Including a landing page as well as the blog site gives a better overall feel to the site. By not landing on a specific blog post, but an overall look of the different parts of the site, the reader could explore better. Based on my research, the site themes needed to be on the Genesis Framework, which is the current leading standard.

Goals for January

Recently I took a trip to New Orleans! It was a wonderful time and I look forward to sharing it with you guys. The food was exactly as you’d expect it, fantastic, and full of character. I am working on a minibook of the 10 dishes to try in New Orleans! And I look forward sharing it with you guys.

For now, I’m signing off. I hear the fireworks.

Happy New Year everyone!

-Maury