A Beginners Guide to SEO Google Analytics
If you are a business owner and currently have a website with access to Google Analytics, it can often be a little bit daunting with the sheer amount of information on there. Google Analytics can be a fantastic tool to reveal the patterns of the people searching your website. This post is just an outline of the basic points that you may want to look at to view the performance of the website or that your SEO consultant may give during an update.
Visits & Traffic Sources
This is accessed from the main page of your Analytics account, this is an aggregate from all sources to your website, including direct visits (people typing in your web address directly, or
a bookmarked page), referrals (a clicked linked from another website), and search traffic (containing both Adword traffic and Organic Traffic.
Organic Results
The organic search results are situated by the following flow TRAFFIC SOURCES—SEARCH—ORGANIC. Once you have followed these directions you should have the information in front of you. If you wanted to compare month on month, year on year, week on week, this can be changed in the top right of the screen. Using a comparative analysis is great to see how much traffic your organic key phrases are bringing, it also gives you a general idea of how improvements or areas that need working on.
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate of your website gives an understanding of engagement with a website. A generally healthy campaign would have a bounce rate of around 30-40%. The bounce rate generally measures if the users has searched other pages from your site, if a bounce rate was 90% for example this would indicate that most visitors visited your site and went straight back to the search results.
This can often be misrepresentative, for example blog posts, or blog features featuring “How To’s” that have generally gathered a lot of traffic due to the information value, can often not lead to interest in the services of the website. Alternatively people may have received all the information they require from the page they land on, such as a contact number and choose to contact your number directly.
Location
If you have an Ecommerce based company, or a services website channelling nationally, it’s often hard to judge where your customers are coming from, for online stores this is not really necessary, but for a UK wide company offering services it can be useful to see for staff and logistics management.
This can be accessed through the organic search results underneath the graph, follow, OTHER—VISITORS—TOWN/CITY. The results here are only an approximation based on your IP address, but none-the-less it still gives a great set of results.
Goal are a great tool if you wanted to keep track of a enquiries, or any particular page you wanted to keep an eye on this can be accessed through CONVERSIONS—GOALS. We use this with our clients to indicate the people going through to a contact page, this gives a general idea of the interest on your website as the intent to contact your company via email or telephone, as this often shows intent.
For a more refined idea of enquiries a goal can be set up on an enquiry button, this can log whether someone has filled in and submitted an enquiry from the contact page. This is a much better way of analysing conversions, as an email request or question can often lead into enquiries.
Google Analytics is a fantastic resource if used correctly and a very confusing one if not, this blog has outlined the essentials needed in judging the performance of your website. Please stay tuned for more features in the future discussing more advanced areas of Google Analytics.
