Getting the Most Out of Your SEO Using Google Analytics

Are you Using Google Analytics to Track Your SEO Efforts?

Google analytics can help you understand important things about the who what where and when of your SEO/SEM efforts and it's free!!
 

1. How is your audience finding you?

Have you ever wondered how people are finding your website or blog? Does Facebook drive more visits than Pinterest? Some of your users are probably finding your site just through direct traffic, but knowing exactly how your users are arriving is powerful information! In many cases, users are arriving to your site after seeing your content on another site (social media, another blog, etc). These websites are called "referrals."

2. Where is your audience located?

Analytics allows you to see where the users who visit your site are located geographically (it will give you city/town data, but not their street address- not to worry!). Why does this report matter? Perhaps you are getting a huge number of visitors from Canada, but you don't offer shipping there. Knowing that you have an interested set of users in a specific geographic location might cause you to rethink your product distribution. Another way this report can be helpful is for bloggers trying to find the right time of day to schedule posts. Maybe you live in California and you've been scheduling your posts for 8am PST, but after using this analytics report, you realize that most of your visitors live on the east coast and respond well to posts during their commute (4:30am PST)? Knowing where your visitors are located can help you reach the people who are actively seeking your content!

3. Which content is getting viewed most often?

One of the things that I've found most interesting when looking at our analytics is the content that users spend time viewing. By clicking Behavior > Site Content > All Pages in your analytics account, you can see which pages on your site are getting the most views. Perhaps you're a fashion blogger and every now and then you do a post on recipes or entertaining. By checking out this report, you might learn that the entertaining related posts are getting viewed more than any others. Having that information might suggest that you should create more content in the entertaining vein. If you are an ecommerce site, perhaps you look at this report in analytics and realize that your "under $100" page is getting more views than any other page on your site, however, you only sell three products that fit the under $100 criteria. This could be an opportunity to carry more products in that price range.

4. Goals

What do you want users to do when they get to your site? If you have a website of any kind, there's no question that you desire your visitors to take some kind of action. Our greatest goal in terms of analytics is for users to go through the checkout process and place an order. So, one of the 'goals' we have set up in analytics is the moment a user reaches the "Thank Your For Your Order" confirmation page. Goals don't have to be ecommerce related, though. You could also create a goal for when people sign up for your mailing list, fill out a form on your site, or even reach a specific page within your site. Here's more information on how to setup goals for your analytics account

5. See who's on your site in Real Time!

Did you just send out a big email blast or share a fun post on social media? In analytics, you can see how users are responding to your content in real time! Simply click "Real Time" on the left hand navigation bar to see how many users are currently on your site, the traffic sources that referred them, which pages they're viewing, and more. This is one of my favorite features to take advantage of when we send out a big promotion or new product lunch. It allows us to monitor the success of campaigns and the pages on which users are spending the most time.

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