Random NYSkiBlog Stuff That You Might Not Care About

[Harvey]

I'm going to share things about NYSB here, occasionally. It's a topic that interests me.

 

[Harvey]

Never in my life would I think to follow lake effect.

I actually read this wrong.

Not "I never thought I'd bother following lake effect."

But "I never even thought of following lake effect before."

I've spent a lot time time studying the country lined radar map (all over this site) and matching it with my own version of Google Maps, which has every ski area in NY marked out.

The NY Ski Directory has a handy vert numbers and after a while you can look at the radar and plan NY strategy. See the bottom of this page:

The Central New York Ski Area Directory

Central NY ski areas get solid snowfall from lake-effect off Lake Ontario.

nyskiblog.com

It all started with an SEO effort. I wanted to rank for "new york annual snowfall" (google it) and I wrote this with the help of NWS:

New York State Annual Snowfall Data

The climate of New York is marked by abundant snowfall.

nyskiblog.com

SEO brag: That page gets a lot of traffic, biggest day was back in December before the first big storm over 500 visits in a day. Normal mid-winter day about 50 visits from google:

Total site doing about 1000-1700 visits a day. This is WAY up from last year which was more like 700-1200 a day. I suspect VT travel restrictions has something to do with this.

More than you wanted to know? ?

 

[Harvey]

Blue line is this year, orange line is last year.

Interesting (to me) to see the effect of the pandemic on NYSB traffic. You can see how the shutdown last season drove traffic down (vs 2019) last March and April. (That blip in May was a link someone posting a link on FB to James Bearpen article, drove 800 visits.)

Then starting around December 1 2020 traffic really went higher. Since that time visits (sessions) and visitors (users) are up dramatically. My theory is that with VT closed many people who normally skied there were looking at options in NY.

 

[Campgottagopee]

Nice
Good idea
I like random tidbits of info

 

[MarzNC]

Then starting around December 1 2020 traffic really went through roof. Since that time visits (sessions) and visitors (users) are up dramatically. My theory is that with VT closed many people who normally skied there were looking at options in NY.

Switching over to Xenforo 2.x is probably a factor too. At least for visitors who found NYSkiBlog for the first time this season.

 

[Harvey]

Switching over to Xenforo 2.x is probably a factor too. At least for visitors who found NYSkiBlog for the first time this season.

It's both, but more organic than forum.

Over the last three months Google traffic up 150%, forum traffic up 50%.

Be interesting to see if higher levels hold next year. I think if next season is "normal" there would be some kind of drop.

 

[Harvey]

When you go to google (on Chrome) does your phone show you news? Yesterday and today for the first time I saw NYSB content in my news feed. I'm sure they are feeding it to me because they know I am interested in skiing and NY. But still this little item drove over 1000 visits in two days. Yesterday we did 2600 visits, 2rd highest total ever.

 

[Tjf1967]

I got something in my google news feed the other day from your blog. I was like whoa Harv is getting up there. This place is going build you new house.

 

[Harvey]

Interesting (to me) how direct the cause and effect seems to be. I give google credit.

This year we are writing more on Central and even Western NY. Kind of a commitment we made.

The content seems like it is already attracting new skiers from those regions, both Blog Subscribers and Forum Members.

We really need a western NY writer. @Robert especially has been amazing, but he needs help in the West.

I friended a guy on fb who's home mountain is Buffalo Ski Club. They had a SICK powder day last week.

I'm looking for someone to help with this writeup:

Buffalo Ski Club Trail Map, Vertical, Stats and Profile

Our profile of the ski club in Colden, NY.

nyskiblog.com

 

[Harvey]

I got something in my google news feed the other day from your blog. I was like whoa Harv is getting up there. This place is going build you new house.

Thanks for telling me. It confirms what I suspected.

The weird thing is that this traffic is right from google, but google analytics doesn't know how to handle it. It comes up mostly incognito and unrecognizable by google analytics. It shows in the total but when you drill down on it you learn almost nothing.

But one thing I did learn: the traffic it was almost all from NY state (bots would probably come from SE Asia). I found one clue, followed it up on google, and figured out where the traffic was coming from. This is the unidentified traffic to my gore piece. The fact that the average session was 50 seconds mean that a solid portion of the 766 visitors likely read the whole thing. If 100 more people read the whole thing, I'm pumped.

Today it's looking like the Song piece by @Brownski has been picked up.