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May 23rd, 2010 by Susie
There are many SEO tools which a company can use to measure the effectiveness and success of their website. The problem is that when you mention web analytics to anyone, they often cower away in fear, as the mere phrase can be daunting and is a step into the unknown. Unless you are a professional web design or search engine optimisation company, then the chances are that you are not totally familiar with web analytics.
There is a lot of choice when it comes to web analytics services and dependant upon the extent of knowledge you wish to know about how well your site is working, depends on the depth of service you choose. A really good place to start for SEO is with Google Analytics, if anybody knows website effectiveness it is a Google, and being a user friendly search engine, their system is fairly simple to understand and best of all it is free.
Once you have chosen to use Google Analytics, then you need to understand how to interpret the information it provides you with. Rather than look over the entire data all at once, focus on a few key points that are crucial in measuring your website effectiveness. These are easy to understand and also make it easy to identify where improvements need to be made.
One of the most important pieces of information you want to discover is number of visitors to your website. More importantly, to truly assess the effectiveness of your search engine optimisation campaign you want to know how many actual different people went to your site. Google analytics offers number of ‘unique visitors’ which means if the same person visits your site ten times, it knows to only count them as one unique visitor. This is very effective in measuring search engine success and keyword applicability, as if your quantity of unique visitors is low it means your links are not appearing as much as they should.
As well as knowing how many people are going to your website, it is also good to see where they have linked from. Google Analytics will tell you where those people came to your site from. This is good in determining which search engines are working well for you, and also shows you which backlinks are most successful for search engine optimization.
Web page popularity is also good to know. This basically gives you an indication as to how well each page within your website is operating, which are the most popular and which are perceived as having the best content. If a web page is working well and is one of your most frequent landing pages then consider adding other information on here and adding links to other pages. Any pages not working well maybe need some time spent optimising them.
Google Analytics will tell you how well your keywords are performing. You can identify what key words or phrases used to get to your site. This will then tell you how applicable and relevant your key phrases are, and enable you to tweak them or change them where necessary.
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Hi Susie, thanks for a good blog post. Another useful fact about Google Analytics is that you can work out which traffic you are getting to your site from natural search and which is from PPC.
Thanks
Sam