Guest Blogger Bio: David Fishman is a blogger and SEO strategist living and working in Atlanta, GA. He is employed by Response Mine Interactive, a mid-size digital marketing company specializing in new customer acquisition. Feel free to contact him at david.fishman@responsemine.com if you’re interested in an experienced guest blogger for any SEO or online marketing subject.
Shortly after I began the journey in the world of search engine optimization and taking to make money online, I went through a dark phase. I call this phase my Analytics Addiction.
What else can you call it, when one spends the hours I did poring over the data from my Google Analytics account? I would spend hours every day reviewing every single keyword that had ever been entered to find one of my websites or blogs. I had multiple statistics tracking codes on each website and I would analyze the different results produced by each traffic tracker.I would search for my primary keyword on Google three or four times an hour. Each incremental shift upward in the rankings would set off a round of celebration. Each incremental shift downward would send me into a foul mood. I would yell angrily at my family for disturbing me, re-read some guide or other about how to drive traffic to your website, and just generally be an unproductive moody cuss.
These days, I check my Analytics once a week, usually on Mondays. I check my primary keywords a little more often, but I am still far less concerned with my statistics than I was back in those dark times. I even close the tab on Firefox that says “Google Analytics” without my eye twitching and the bookmark in my browser is basically unused. I would call myself cured.You know they say, though: “once an addict, always an addict”. I am proud of my progress but I still have to remind myself to remain strong when I start a new project and the results start coming back in those few heady weeks.
Some of us are familiar with a phrase called “paralysis by analysis”, an affliction often affecting new bloggers and webmasters who are overloaded by the massive amount of information available to them. Indeed, the information IS daunting and I can understand the reasoning of those who pay money to obtain a guide that tells them in what order they should do the things they already know how to do.
I think my situation was similar. You could perhaps describe it as “paralysis by Google Analysis”. Once I had uploaded some quality content to a website, got a few back-links, written an article or two and seen my first keyword traffic, I stopped. I began to obsess over the numbers, over the statistics. I expected a rolling snowball effect, to see my initial efforts doubled and tripled at a steady pace. I was spending all this time examining numbers and celebrating minimal rank changes when I should have been writing new content and submitting articles.
I guess the moral of this story is: if you’re an article publisher, blogger, avid Tweeter or Adsense user, you should spend more time writing quality articles, Tweeting useful links and optimizing your page content than worrying about your article views, Twitter followers or page impressions. I find that if you just write the content and get the back-links, the numbers will take care of themselves.Then you can return to being a human being, instead of a drooling, number crazed madman who spends his nights waking up in cold sweats muttering “the pageviews, the pageviews!”.
Not that I would know anything about that.