March 26th, 2010 by Susie

Web analytics is a broad field, but one element that’s fundamental to most applications is the tracking of traffic across the web and across individual sites. Being able to do this for a specific site helps you make search engine optimization efforts much more focused and effective, because we learn which subpages get traffic and which don’t. That knowledge is pure SEO gold.

It covers much more than just a number of hits. For every user that clicks on a link and enters a site, we can collect and analyse a wealth of data. It will tell us a lot of what we need to know to improve the SEO of that site.  First, we know where that user comes from. It could be a static inbound link from another site, a search engine results page, or their own bookmark for a regular visitor, for example. The user starts on the landing page and may spend some time there. Then they’ll either leave or move deeper into the site.

A key piece of SEO information is the bounce rate – so how many users land on a page then click straight back off. Search engines are thought to note this behaviour and it’s not good for rankings. The user obviously hasn’t found what they were looking for. Knowing the bounce rate is useful for us too. Either it needs to be minimised by improving the site or the landing page, or a high bounce rate tells us we need to refocus on different search keywords more relevant to what we have on offer. Great for the users too – which is a huge benefit of well implemented search engine optimisation.

Assuming the user doesn’t click straight off, they’ll go through the website, spending an amount of time on various pages. If there is a page where people tend to stop and spend a lot of time, we knowing they’re reading the content, which is great. That tells us we’ve got something good on that particular page. Either we pay more attention to that page because it’s important, or leave it as is and pat ourselves on the back.

But what about the content pages on the same level that don’t get so much time and attention. Those need some work. It could be they aren’t relevant or the content isn’t good enough. An analysis of the migration pattern across the website may reveal that a page just doesn’t have enough links from popular areas and users aren’t getting to it. Whatever the reason, we now have something to fix.

We can also track conversions like sales, for example. If a significant amount of users are reading a piece of text on one page and then moving on to buy a particular product, it’s obvious that the referring page is a winner. As with the pages that have greater residence times, this gives us an example of what’s working right and we can then go on to improve the poorer sections of the website.

Using this kind of tool gives us access to detailed information that we can use to improve the overall search engine optimisation of your site. There are a host of other web analytics and SEO tools available. We provide some simples one free SEO tools on this site. Have a go and see what you can find out.

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