Google Analytics and SEO for your website
Google Analytics helps you understand a user’s experience on your website. By using this information, you can make changes to your website that will help your website rank higher in search engines and thereby help you gain more qualified website traffic. Google Analytics not only gives you information about the number of visitors to your website, but it also gives a lot of useful information about your website including: individual spends on the website, pages visited in the website, where a person left your website, bounce rate, and much more.
Google Analytics and how it helps with SEO
The question here is how does Google Analytics help with my SEO? Here are some of the ways in which Google analytics can help your SEO campaign:
- Visits: This is the most basic of all of the information you are given. Visits tells you how many visitors to your website you had in a one month period. You can then compare this with past months to see if your traffic is increasing. You will be able to identify trends and if there are seasonal spikes to your website. In turn, this will help you refine your marketing efforts to coincide with period when visitors to your site are the mximum.
- Top referring keywords: This lists the relevant keywords that brought visitors to your website. Based on this information, you can see where your website ranks for these keywords. In turn, you can make changes that will help your website rank higher for the keyword. The end result is that you can tweak your SEO campaign to rank higher for keywords that are bringing visitors to your website. Many times, you will find that there are keywords people are using, that you have not optimized for.
- Referrers: This is another important metric as it gives you an insight about the source of the traffic to your website. If a website is referring visitors to your site, then it tells you the kind of websites you should be present on, which sites the visitors to your site are likely to visit and this can help you refine your link building strategy.
- Click Path: This helps to judge how user friendly your site design is, how people navigate your site and where they are most likely to exit your site. This helps you refine your website navigation and maximize conversions on your website.
- Bounce Rate: This shows how many visitors left your website and which pages they left the site from. This helps you analyze what could be causing people to leave your site and you can accordingly modify the content of your site.
There’s a lot more useful information and data that web analytics provides. The items listed above are the very basic. A proper tracking of your website traffic can provide you with a wealth of information that you can use to refine your SEO campaign and attract more traffic to your website.
Let’s see how Google Analytics helps you track the above details of your website. Google Analytics is a free solution from Google and it can provide you with data that helps you refine your SEO campaigns and attract more traffic. Here’s an example:
In the above image, you can see the details that Google analytics provides about a particular website. You can find that it mentions about number of visits, bounce rates, pageviews, etc. This is a top level view. You can explore details of each of the above metrics, decide refinements to your SEO campaigns and track the impact of the changes you make.
If you do not know the impact of your efforts, it becomes next to impossible to know if your efforts are working. Analyzing the information available through Google Analytics, you can take informed decisions and make changes to your SEO campaigns to drive more website traffic.
About the Author
Chip Curle is the owner of Charles Curle Design, a North Georgia web designer that develops and manages web sites and drives companies to the top of internet search engines through search engine optimization. His work has earned Chip 14 ADDY (American Advertising Federation) awards including 8 Gold, 4 Silver, and 2 Best of Show.
