SEO Analytics

Analysing every aspect of how users discover and interact with your website is key to achieving any kind of SEO success. To think that many companies don’t have some kind of analytics software tracking the movements of visitors to their website is absolutely mad.

On a fundamental level, if you don’t analyse the visitors you receive you’re missing out on key information about how people interact with your products and services, as well as insight towards valuable improvements in your overall marketing strategy.

Speaking from an SEO point of view, it’s absolutely fundamental that an analytics package has been installed on a website. And considering it doesn’t have to cost a penny (Google Analytics is free), there’s no excuse for not having one.

Once installed and tracking data, you can immediately get a picture of how users are finding their way to your site. You can also look at the different keywords that are bringing you visitors directly from the search engines, which is obviously important data when you’re working on SEO.

Important Metrics

Once you’ve got analytics software tracking data on your website, it can still be a tricky process to decipher all the information.

Here are some of the metrics you should be looking at to help reveal useful insights

1- Unique visitors – It’s quite simple, how many individual visitors are coming to your site? If that number is steadily increasing over time, which it should be with a sound SEO strategy, then it means you’re doing something right. On the flip side, if the number of visitors you’re getting is on the slide, you need to dig deeper to discover the problem.

2 -Top keywords – With any analytics software you can quickly discover the keywords that are driving traffic to your website from the search engines. As well as finding out how many visits the main keywords you’re targeting are bringing, it’s likely you’ll find lots of interesting keywords you wouldn’t have expected; all of which offer insights for new ideas and strategies.

3. Popular Landing Pages – This metric basically means the best performing pages on your website. In 99.9% of all cases, your homepage will be number 1. But you might well discover a great deal by looking at the other pages that appear towards the top of the list.

4. Bounce Rate – When somebody visits a page on your website and leaves without visiting any other page, that’s known as bouncing. So the bounce rate is the percentage of overall visitors to your site that bounce. A high bounce rate often suggests that you need to improve on the content you offer. However, this isn’t always the case as there are many reasons someone might only visit one page before leaving. But it’s still a good metric to analyse and can provide many useful insights.

5. Conversion Rates – This is something for the more advanced analytics user. You see, you can configure your analytics to measure how successful your website is at converting visitors into sales, sign-ups or whatever your final goal is. You can look at specific keywords that brought visitors to your website and see how successful they were at converting. This is of huge benefit, as you want to be attracting targeted visitors and not just high volumes of people that aren’t interested in what you’re selling.

6. Referring Sites – It’s always a good idea to look at the websites that are sending you visitors directly. As well as showing you which sites send you the most traffic, it can also highlights new links that your SEO efforts have generated.

7. Location – It’s always useful knowledge to know where the visitors to your website are from. And this data allows you to set up what is known as ‘geo-targeting’ whereby you have specialist marketing initiatives to convert visitors from specific locations.

Analytics & SEO

Of course there are many, many more interesting discoveries that can be made using the data gathered from analytics software. And for SEO purposes, it really is a goldmine if you know how to exploit it.

As the above metrics illustrate, analysing your website data really does hold the key to forming and improving a successful SEO strategy.

You should be checking this data daily to identify any improvements or setbacks. That way, you can quickly hone in on new success and act equally fast to fix potential problems.

You should also be on the lookout for trends, such as greater numbers of visitors on particular days or at different times. All of this information can be used to offer ideas not just for SEO but also about your target market in general.

Big Bang SEO Web Analytics

At Big Bang, we can help you organise all of the detailed information that analytics software generates, into concise and informative reports.

We use our expertise to identify all of the key metrics relating to your specific website and explain what they tell us in an easy to understand manner.

And when we perform SEO work for your site, we use our knowledge about analytics to provide you with hard data about the positive effect our work is having in your online endeavours.

We’re acutely aware that you need to know that the SEO your paying for is providing you with good value and a solid return on investment. And we never hide away from this responsibility.

So if you’re interested in Big Bang helping you use the data from website analytics to improve your search engine rankings, contact us today for more information.