Keeping track of what is being done on your website can not only give you an idea of whether the website is perceived as pleasant to use. But also what content works and what doesn't. Your most popular content and pages can further help you make a success of your website. In this blog post, let's cover how you can track this and take advantage of it.

Tracking page views

Tracking page views within your website can be done in a number of different ways with a number of different types of tools. Most will already be familiar with Google Analytics which can be used for any website, but there are also local tools available within WordPress, for example. These further keep the data of your usage and your users local, and are therefore more privacy friendly than other solutions. Take a look at our knowledge base, and our previous blog posts to get all the information on this.

Most tools are installed with a few clicks and then immediately track your data after that. We generally recommend activating this right after completing the website so that you have as much historical data as possible when looking back over a year. This can give you insight into various aspects that may also be important to other parties.

Most popular content of your website

The most popular content of a website can be a specific product page, a landing page for a certain category, your homepage or a blog post. When you have a clear picture for yourself of what not only gets the most visitors in, but also what gets them to click through, this can be used to get a lot more out of your website. You don't have to gamble as much, and you can clearly see for yourself where the visitors come from, which pages they view, and whether they find the necessary information to proceed to a purchase or other conversion.

Leveraging your website's most popular content to drive traffic to other pages

Your most popular pages and content can also be used to drive traffic to other important pages, for example, if you have a new (relevant) page. Then this can be linked to or on the other hand promoted on your existing page. You can do this, for example, if you want to boost an ebook, promote a white paper, or tout your "money making" page. As an example, this could be a page with all Affiliate links, a purchase process or a newsletter signup.

Always try to keep this relevant to the content of your most popular page, and link it in a user-friendly way. Artificially putting in lots of links to your other page or hiding behind an image can actually backfire and harm your existing popular content.

Capitalize on popular content and try to replicate it

The trick of course is to expand your most popular content, as it is often the case that a number of pages bring in a lot of traffic. But this is only a small percentage of your total content on your website. To achieve long-term results it is therefore wise to try to split your success as much as possible over multiple pages and content. After all, if your most popular page disappears, this can cause a total collapse of your monthly results. Analyzing your most popular content is therefore a good strategy to see what works and what people are looking for. So look at exactly how you built the content on this page, if you did anything different, what external and internal links point to this page and from what source the traffic is coming from. With a Social Media success of a particular content item can be very short-lived, from organic results from Google and other search engines it can often be longer-lasting.

Optimizing existing content and analyzing it can be a valuable strategy for any kind of website, whether you're working for your freelance portfolio. Your hobby blog or your multinational corporate website. With not only adding new content, but also optimizing it for new and existing content, you can rank better on every surface. So pay some attention to this on a periodic basis and revisit older content once in a while.