If you’ve not used it before, bit.ly is a URL shortening service which is popular with Twitter.   Due to the 140 character limit in tweets, characters are a premium so services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, etc provide an easy way to shorten lengthy URLs.

So, you’re probably wondering what relevance this has to SEO?  Well after using bit.ly for a while, I’ve come to find that it has some rather useful statistics if you delve into it a little deeper.

What I’ve found is that by using Bit.ly you can get a partial insight into the traffic statistics of sites which you wouldn’t normally be able to analyse.

Let’s start off with a typical Bit.ly status screen, shown below:

What you can see here, are some example URLs which I’ve shortened, ready for posting on Twitter.  

Let's take a close look at the statistics – for example, the second URL is that of a previous post on SEOmoz:

Notice the “14 Out of 429” clicks?   That tells me that 14 people have clicked on the URL in my tweet. However, more importantly, the SEOMoz post has had 429 visitors via the bit.ly service.   So not only can you get statistics for your own bit.ly postings, you can also see the statistics for every bit.ly click!

OK, so this doesn’t give you an accurate view of how many people viewed the SEOmoz post altogether (though I’d love to see the statistics from SEOmoz!).  It does however give you a way to compare traffic to other SEOmoz posts.   By comparing the traffic you can see which articles are the most popular.

As an example, say you find a niche which you’d like to guest blog post in, but you’re not sure what the real hot topics are.    Using bit.ly you can quickly analyze traffic to popular articles related to your topic.

Now this is just scratching the surface, as bit.ly goes much further if you click the “Info” button for a specific URL.   This is where things really start to get interesting you can now see where and when the clicks are coming from:

The graph below gives an interesting view as to where the traffic is coming from.  You can filter this by day, week, month or total.   As you can see the majority of traffic for the SEOmoz post came from the USA:

I can see why Google have recently introduced their goo.gl shortening service.    They’ll be able to analyse a wealth of traffic stats for sites which don’t use Google Analytics, and more importantly they can also analyse traffic which doesn’t originate from Google web searches.

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on bit.ly if this post reaches the pages of SEOmoz as it’ll be interesting to compare the traffic to the previous post.