We’ve come to the last in our series of improving your search engine rank. I have covered the basics of keyword research, website architecture, on-site optimization and off-site optimization. This week I’ll be explaining how to actually track your efforts so you can see results.
Step 5: Analytics (Measuring your results)
After you have made your website live the first thing you should to do is install Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics (or a similar program). I like Google Analytics for a few reasons. First, it’s completely free and second, you can gather a ton a data on the traffic to your website.
When you log into Google Analytics you’ll see a graph showing the traffic for each day. This is great to get a brief overview of how much traffic your website is receiving, but doesn’t give you a ton of data as to where people are coming from or what they are viewing. Click on the tab called Visitors. You will then see much more detail about your viewers on the site including the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site and new visits. Each of these sections can be clicked on to get additional data.
The next section I will review is the Traffic Sources tab. This tab gives me a quick overview of where people are coming to my site from, whether it be search engines, direct traffic or referring sites. As with the visitors tab you can click on each of the sections to gather more detail about each site or search engine. If you drill down into a specific website you can see how many visits came to your site for a particular day.
Next you want to look at your Keywords tab. This tab will show you the list of keywords that people are using to find your website. Google has now implemented a new security feature where if someone is logged into their Google account and search, their search phrase will not be provided to you, you will see (not provided) as one of your keywords. You currently cannot gather any information from those phrases. This is where you can see if the keywords you have chosen for your website are working properly. As before, clicking on a keyword will give additional detail such as number of times someone found you for a specific phrase.
Finally I will review the Content tab. This section shows you the amount of traffic that each specific page on the site is driving. If you are using a landing page for an advertising campaign you can see from this section if your ads are working. You can also see if people are not following to a certain point on your site, such as a check-out page. If your customers are not flowing to where you want them you may need to revise your on-site content to help drive them to the correct locations.
As you can see Google Analytics can supply a ton of information about your website. Even just scratching the surface you can gather powerful information about your company’s website and find places to make improvements. Google Analytics has a great help section as well if you have additional questions on what you are looking at.
So to recap, you should always install some sort of traffic monitoring software on your website, personally I like Google Analytics for the amount of data you can gather for free. Review your stats on a consistent basis such as weekly or monthly. Remember that your traffic will go up and down on a variety of factors such as time of year, economy etc.
If you have additional questions feel free to email me at eric@mltgroup.com.
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