I’ve recently had the chance to do a little informal research on the following question:  What are the specific topics people explore once they’ve gone to an Alexander Technique website and had a little taste of what the Technique has to offer?

A few weeks ago, I created a new site, Alexander Technique Express, to provide a quick and mobile friendly version of my main page, The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique.  Most of the visitors to this new site get there because they used their smartphone to go to the Complete Guide and were automatically re-directed to the new site.

As you can see below, on this new site, I present a relatively small number of categories to choose from.  Before reading any further, take a look at the choices and write down what you think are the relative number of visits for each one.

Now compare your numbers to these statistics:

For every 100 people who got past the home page and clicked on General Info, 89 clicked on Posture, 63 on Pain, 23 on Breathing, 20 on Music, 18 on Performers, 18 on Fitness/Sports and 5 on Links.

And…42 people clicked on Find a Teacher!

Bear in mind as well that some visitors clicked on more than one category.

(60 people clicked on Support/Contact – but this number is misleading because visitors from all my websites are now directed to this page.)

These results are biased towards people on the go – people who surf the web with smartphones.  This is an important, and rapidly growing demographic. At present they account for about a third of all visitors who initially go to the Complete Guide – up from about 20 percent a year ago.

And they about to become the mainstream. Most internet observers predict that smartphone searches will account for more than half of all searches in another year or so and before long most web searches will be done from smartphones.

Did their choices surprise you?  They did me a little.

I knew Posture was a hot topic but I was surprised that it out performed Pain. I had greater hopes for Musicians but was happy that Breathing performed as well as it did.  I was heartened by the high proportion of visitors who actually wanted to find an Alexander Technique teacher.

How did these numbers compare to your estimates?  Can you see some ways to use this information in the positioning of your website and other promotional materials? What other categories do you think would be good to add to the site?*

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* One category I considered, and eventually dropped for the time being was “Stress” – mainly because it’s everywhere in the Alexander world.  I also considered “Self Improvement” but couldn’t find the right material to flesh it out.  I also suspect that it would not be a popular one.

Image courtesy of rakratchada torsap / FreeDigitalPhotos.net