Don’t Spend So Much Time Looking At Stats

Productivity is a big issue for busy webmasters. How can we stay focused on what is really worth working on (expanding our web presences) and not get bogged down by what I consider to be the fun stuff?

I call stat checking and analysis fun, because it is. Doing so allows you to see information that shows you how well your efforts are (or aren’t) working.

Do you log into Google Analytics every day? Do you spend a good chunk of time each day looking at various accounts and reports to see how your sites are positioned in the SERPs and how much traffic you are getting?

You might be spending too much time doing that, if that is the case.

Your time is probably better spent working on adding more content to your sites and making sure that they are getting proper exposure on the web.

I’ve found it’s best to look at web traffic and SEO positioning stats about once a week. This gives me a good chance to see where things are compared to one week ago. Looking at these types of stats on a daily basis, it sometimes looks like things aren’t going anywhere since the numbers usually don’t make big jumps from day to day.

Let’s clear up why I even look at those stats in the first place. I like to see if a site is getting any traffic, and I like to see what that traffic is doing. This helps me figure out who my visitors are and how to better cater to them. I also like to see where my sites are positioned in the SERPs for target keywords. This helps me to figure out which target keywords need more work.

Those two things don’t need to be done every day, it’s a waste of time. What I really need to do every day is add more content to the sites and attempt to build more links to the sites. That’s basically what it boils down to. And staying focused on those two efforts are what makes looking at the stats on the weekends a lot more interesting.