Small, unnecessarily formal change… right?

If you Googled me prior to the change, the top result would have been a cheesy interview I gave to an entrepreneurial website seven years ago. Our blog was buried half-way down the page.

Why? Because on a site full of information about Rachel and I, only a single page had the phrase 100% of people use when looking for me online — my full name.

By simply changing the name of our wedding blog I created forty pages of content with “Greg Baugues” and “Rachel Lazelle” in the title, establishing our blog as the definitive source for information about us and boosting it to top of search results for our names.

What shows up when people Google you?

Through the web development company I work for, I have access to analytics reports for a number of web properties including some that receive hundred-of-thousands of visits per month.  None of these however, have captured my attention as much as the 300 visits received by the wedding blog I launched three weeks ago.  The numbers just mean more when you can put a name on each of the visitors.

Let’s take a look:

This overview tells us that 207 unique visitors have visited our blog.  In actuality, the real number is a bit lower — if I visit the site from my laptop and then visit it again from my iPhone, analytics has no way of knowing it was me both times.  But for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that one absolute unique visitor means one person.

What do they do when they get here?  On average, a visitor reads 2.8 pages in two minutes and 27 seconds.  However, 49% of the time a visitor will land on our site and bounce right off of it, only looking at one page during their visit.

These 207 people accounted for a total of 308 visits.  We can see that 67% of visits are new visits.  Another way of looking at this is to say that 33% of the visits are return visits.  This stat is of particular interest as it tells us how many people found the site interesting enough to come back for a second, third and fourth time.  We can break this down even further through the visitor loyalty report:

Who are these people and where do they come from?  Unsurprisingly, most of our visitors come from Illinois, New York (Rachel’s home state) and Indiana (my home state):

However, we were surprised to have garnered visits from 28 states:

Rachel has a brother in Alaska and my parents were vacationing in Hawaii when we launched the site so we knocked out the two most difficult ones right from the start.  For no reason other than my own vanity, I have a goal of getting visits from all 50 states by the time we’re married (without doing something like purchasing geo-targeted adwords… though it has crossed my mind).

We were even more surprised by our international visits.  We had to scratch our heads to figure out who we knew in in the UK, Australia and Japan:

We realized that our lone visitor from Japan must be Hizuru Yamamura, an exchange student Rachel met while studying abroad in Germany after highschool.  Rachel hasn’t seen Hizuru since 2002.

Hizuru visited the site once and read eight pages in five minutes.

But that was not our first encounter.  Our first encounter was in an email chain earlier that week.  Dan Hanson, the trip organizer, sent an email to the five of us who had volunteered to cook for the 40 people coming on the trip.

I had been living with Rene for three years and was comfortable in the kitchen, though I had never cooked for 40 people.  I did what we do at Table XI and asked a bunch of questions.

Emails are traded.  Possible menu items, including chili are discussed.

And then I receive the first of what will be thousands of emails from Rachel Lazelle.

More emails are traded over the next few days.  We decide we don’t have enough crock pots for chili. Wednesday night I pick Rene’s brain until 4am and he comes up with the killer idea of pulled pork sandwiches.  I can’t wait to suggest it to the group.

Unfortunately, I open my computer in the morning to find the menu has already been decided.

I take a shot and offer an alternative…

… and I am promptly shot down.  (no hard feelings Zhenya!)

Dejected, I tell Rene the news.

But wait!  Who’s this coming to my side?

Energized by the support of this unknown woman, I bounce back…

And then I receive the first of what will be thousands of words of encouragement from Rachel Lazelle:

And now we have a blog.

Rachel and I have been blessed with a ton of friends and family who care deeply about us. Believe it or not, this is part of the reason we have chosen to do an extremely small wedding. We don’t want to rank our friends or attach monetary value to the importance of their relationship.

And we’d love to celebrate our marriage with all of you. We’d just like to do it in a venue where you’re not keeping us from starting our honeymoon.

We started this blog because we wanted a way to keep everyone informed and involved in this process.

Also, I’m kind of a nerd.