Greekgeek's Online Odyssey - Hubpages and Online Article Writing Tips

Lens Updating Tip: A Google Spot Check

Keeping 400 lenses reasonably updated is serious business. We can do a quick scan for broken images, links and videos, but here’s a meaningful update you can do in five minutes: a quick tweak that can improve traffic to a lens.

  1. Click “Stats” under the lens name.
  2. Click the “Traffic” tab.
  3. Change the “Date Range” pulldown menu to 90 days.
  4. Look at the “Keywords” chart that shows what searches have brought people to the lens. Figure out which is the top keyword phrase (often combining a couple different variants from the list). For instance, here I tried “wooden rack oven puller,” whose words include a few of the other top searches:
     




  5.  Do a Google search for that phrase and turn OFF personalized search results (which are tailored to your own web browsing habits) by clicking the globe button at upper right:




  6. Look closely at the blurb / description. This is what the majority of people searching for your lens will see. Is it as good as it could be? Or is there something you could do to add a Call to Action, encourage people to click on the link (see How to Get More Clicks, Sales)?

    In this example, it’s a “how to make your own X” page, which is very obvious from the lens title and link. In fact, the page is also a “where to buy X because you’re too lazy to make it” article! But the blurb gives no indication that I’ve included “where to buy” as well as “how to make” information. Therefore, I improve that sentence very slightly, taking care not to disturb the keyword search phrase (or popular variants):

    It’s a clumsy tweak, but now the blurb should attract buyers as well as DIYers.

  7. Ping it with the ping tool added to the lens workshop’s sidebar by SquidUtil’s workshop add-on.

The wording of your blurb depends on (a) your goals for the article (sell something, inform people of something, get them to click on a free download button, get them to visit your website — to name a few) and (b) what your audience is looking for. Make sure your page has what they’re looking for, then make sure your blurb tells them you have what they’re looking for!

The above steps can be done fairly quickly: (1) check traffic stats (2) search the top phrase(s) and see what the blurb looks like (3) edit your lens in that spot to make sure the wording is as good as possible.

Over time, this may be a simple but effective way to boost traffic to the lens.

4 Comments

  1. Heather426 says:

    Very nice hint! I’m “only” at 300 or so and only keeping up with about 200. Shortcuts are appreciated.

  2. lisadh says:

    Excellent tip! I’m going to try this with my lenses.

  3. Thank you for this. I don’t even have 50 lenses yet, but I’m working on building more and already having difficulty keeping up with all the updates. I’ve been experimenting with these tips all morning and appreciate so much your taking the time to share them.

  4. Sheri Oz says:

    This is exactly what I was looking for. I knew there had to be an approach that would be logical and simple. Thanks for this “aha” moment!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

WP-SpamFree by Pole Position Marketing

Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser.