13 July 2010

Improve Seo With Google Analytics In Five Effortless Steps

By: Debbie A. Everson

Google Analytics analyzes the quantative and qualitative data of your website. This data can be used to obtain measurable and actionable insights. A continuous analysis of a website leads to a good online experience and increases conversions.

Google Analytics helps in enhancing the optimization process of your website. Listed below are the 5 metrics which can be used for the same.

1.Track Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors which exit the website after viewing one page. I.e. the percentage of visitors which didnt find the website interesting or informative. This can happen for three reasons:

a.Your landing web page doesnt promise the same information as it did in the search engine results page.
b.The content on your web page is incomplete or uninteresting.
c.Your web page contains more ads than content.

The content section of your Google Analytics lists all the web pages with high bounce rate. Examine each web page to find its weak point and improvise on it.

2.Identify Exit Rate: Exit rate measures the number of people who exit the website from a certain web page. Web pages with a high bounce rate are a part of pages with high exit rate. An important point to remember is that all the visitors exit the website at one point or other.

Many visitors browse through the length of the website and then exit the website from a random page. These web pages cannot be coined under pages with high exit rate. Our aim is to segregate the web pages with a consistently high exit rate. These web pages can then be worked upon to make them visitor friendly.

3.Analyze Traffic Sources: The three main sources of web traffic are:

a.Direct traffic
b.Traffic from referring sites
c.Traffic from search engines

If your website is well optimized, then the percentage of traffic from the search engines should be the highest. Google Analytics lists all the keywords which bring visitors to your website. You can analyze all the secondary keywords for which your website ranks in the search engines. You can improve the on page and off page optimization tactics to leverage the traffic from secondary keywords.

4.Create Goals and Track Funnels: Creating goals in Google Analytics is the best way to measure the visitor conversion. If you own an E Commerce website, creating goals and funnels will give you in depth details of visitor behavior.

You can see the pages a potential customer got deviated to while completing the goals. For an E Commerce website, you can see the point at which the visitor aborted his transaction. This data will help you improve and fix the leaking web pages.

5.Track Visitors Region: If your website caters to a specific region, you can track the visitors using the Map Overlay section. You can see the number of visits that came from the targeted region. Other metrics that you can track are the time spent on site, bounce rate and conversion rate from any region.

This data can help you improve the website for better visitor experience. Map overlay helps you understand the other regions which show a genuine interest in your website products. This data can be of great help for your future business endeavors.

All the above techniques aim at improving two aspects of SEO: on page optimization and content optimization. You can take a months data and work on the above metrics. Over a period of time you will notice a significant increase in the website traffic and conversion.
 

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