Analytics toolsets have come along way since the early days of simply tracking the volumes of visitors to your site. These evolved toolsets can now track what visitors do once they get to the website and how your website caters to or meets their needs. Words like Conversion Rate, Landing Pages, Bounce Rate, etc are now as important, if not more so, than just measuring the number of visitors to the site. This need to understand in greater detail the degree to which a website meets its objectives has given rise to a whole new industry of Web Analytics toolsets.

There are many website analytics packages available on the market. This article isn’t about reviewing those. I will focus on how you can use the outputs of such tools to monitor and improve your SEO efforts. I will lean towards Google Analytics as a toolset as this has the lions share of market.

When first accessing Google’s Analytics tool and without customisation you are immediately presented with a summary page showing a whole host of information that can steer your SEO efforts. Your eyes are immediately drawn to the map of the world showing your visitors geographical location. We all love graphical and picture representations of data, it’s pleasing to the eye, especially when you’re tracking hits to your site. In addition to looking good, it serves an important purpose for your SEO efforts. This is called Geo targeting.

 

“Geotargeting” refers to using Analytics data to gain information about the geographical locations of visitors to your website.  This information is crucial in deciding whether to focus on a particular geographic location for maximising growth and whether it will be viable to increase advertising in areas where the company has less visiblity.

 

Geotargeting can also be used to decide if there is any value in translating your website to cater for foreign languages.  For instance, if research shows that a high number of visitors to your site are from China, it might provide fruitful to create a Chinese language version of the site to home in on this potential market. You will note that I use the words “create a Chinese language version of the site” and not use the phrase ‘translate your page’. Their are hundreds are translation software tools on the net, many free but even with the paid tools, the accuracy of language conversion is not 100%. If you are serious about targeting internationally, ensure your page is professionally translated. The equivalent of ‘Pigeon English ‘is not going to maximise on your opportunity.

 

Another important measurement that Analytics provides is Bounce Rate. “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”

 

The Bounce rate of a website can be used to measure the ‘Visit Quality’ of a visitor to your website.  If the Bounce rate for your site is high, this suggest that the landing page for the visitor is not relevant or compelling enough for the visitor to explore further.

 

To reduce the Bounce rate, ensure that your landing pages match what was promised on the links to those pages or from links from your web ads.  A high bounce rate will significantly reduce your conversion rate and if you are adopting a Pay Per Click programme, it will be costing you money.

 

Looking at your traffic sources is another important factor when planning your SEO. Understanding how visitors find your site, i.e. organic search, referring sites, Pay Per Click etc is essential when calculating marketing cost and effort in each of these areas. If your highest source of traffic is via PPC, then your efforts should be focussing on Organic search with the aim of reducing your PPC costs and improving free search traffic. If your site frequently refers visitors from partner sites than its essential that your partnership / linking agreements remain in place. You can then also start exploiting similar sites to these referring sites with the aim of increasing this source of traffic.

 

I have only touched on 2 elements of analytics and the list of benefits goes on. Off the shelf so to speak and without customisation you are offered whole host of data you can use to plan your SEO.  If you would like assistance in interpreting your analytics data or if you would like to take it to the next level, please contact us for a no obligation discussion