I just took over a site with 100k visits per month, where do I start?

[MichaelGregory]

A friend has been running a blog about mold (moldblogger.com), of all things, and I'm trying to get it up to spec. There are hundreds of articles of dubious quality, potentially thousands of links to who knows where (comments haven't been monitored closely).

Traffic is mostly Google organic, with less than 15% of visitors returning. Bounce rate is 80%+. As this is an ad supported website, the goal is to increase page views (more ad views). He has noticed that the more articles they post per month, the more overall views. Even though the new articles barely get traffic, it seems Google likes to see "new" content on the site, and bumps up the results for the top pages when there is a lot of activity.

Given a limited budget, where do I start? What's going to be the best return on time invested?

[DonnaDuncan]

Love Patrick's response. Refer to it often. Thank you!

[eLab_London]

This is a really good answer Patrick! Thanks for making it so structured!

[ClaytonJ]

Patrick is correct above.

With a limited budget and time you might also consider going to GA and studying customer behaviour.  Find out what pages customers like, and the stickiness & find out when and at what page the customers leaves the website.  There is a retail site in India called Jabong - comparable problem.  They have millions of hits a month except there BR was in excess of 90% when it started. Slowly work through it page by page, improving each page where customers drop off, until the conversion rate goes up.

Also by finding out what your customer is up to, by reviewing the pages that they like and do not like - you can identify trends. It may also assist in creating content.  I often find customers are drawn to 1 or articles consistently - perhaps expand on those articles. GWT's will also in identifing the pages / keyword process to focus on.

It is a great problem to have lots of traffic - now need to tweak away until you make them a satisfied customer. Platforms like unbound and optimizely may also be of assistance.  The good news is and it is gold - you are collecting lots of data - and with data you can make informed decisions on what to focus on in the value chain.

Let me know if need any more clarity on any point.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would start with:

• Running an audit
• Run a technical site audit
• Check traffic against Google's algorithms
• Running a backlink audit
• Running a content audit
• Check ranking history over time
• Run a competitor analysis

From there, you should be able to prioritize your work pretty easily and see where the easiest wins are. You'll also begin to see the landscape from the content standpoint and be able to help out in developing an editorial calendar as well.

You should also check out Moz's blog for some great categorized content that can help immensely. I would also make sure you get a routine going from a weekly, monthly, quarterly, 6 month, and yearly standpoint so you have a system in place.

Hope this helps! Good luck!