Finding the most productive time of day for your website

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SEO Tips: Finding the most productive time of day for your website.

Knowing when your site is most active can be valuable for things like updating content or adding news.

And there is an easy way to find out using Google Analytics.

Every website has times of the day when it is more active than other times. Obviously this is most likely to be during the daylight hours, when most people are up and about, but even during these times, there will be certain periods when it is most active.

You need to know the best time to update content.

If you can find out exactly when the site has the most visitors, you can plan the best time to update your content, add special offers and so on, to get the most views.

Google Analytics offers a quick way to find this out.

There is a very quick way to find this information out using Google Analytics. First open your Google Analytics account and sign in.

Then from the links on the left side click the “Audience” link and then from the drop-down list choose “Overview”.

Take a look along to the right of the page and you’ll see four boxes called: “Hourly”, “Day”, “Week” and “Month”. By default it goes to Day.

See a graph of the visitor peaks and troughs every hour through the day.

Click on the “Hourly” box and you’ll see a graph running along the top of the page with peaks and troughs showing when the most people were on the site and when there were the least (usually at night).

To help make this easier to understand it may be worth choosing a shorter time period that the default rolling month. To do this click on the date drop-down in the top right, and choose the period you want.

Roll your mouse along the graph to get further information.

You can then roll your mouse along the graph to gain information about the exact number of visitors at each hour of the day.

A pattern may emerge of the best times to update

You may then see a patten emerge showing when the peak times for visitors are and the low points during the day. So say you find the peak time of the day is around 2pm after lunch, that might be a good point to update your content, or add further pages, as then the most people would see the updates.