Jan 31 2011

Design your SEO Strategy with Google Analytics

Google Analytics has considered being one of the most powerful tools for tracking traffic coming in and getting out of the website, though Google Analytics is not only a traffic tracking tool but this can massively help you design your SEO strategies.

Google Analytics not only provides you the data of how many visitors are come in to your website per day, what is the bounce rate and what is the percentage in of new visitors to the website, but allows you to get the inside data of how a visitor behaves while visiting your business online.

You can design your SEO Strategy through Google Analytics:

Top Keywords:

Google Analytics allows the webmaster to see for which keyword the traffic is coming in to the website. If you recall, the first step of any SEO strategy for any business depends upon Keyword Research. Google analytics allow webmasters to collect the list of keywords for which the traffic is coming to their website and further you can optimize the website for the same keywords.

Traffic Source:

Traffic source tab tells you about how many visitors are coming directly to the website, how many are coming through search engine, and how many through other referral sites like social media and others, so it is easy for you to decide if you want to focus more on social media or you need to focus more on for example local yellow pages like yelp and others.

Top Exit Pages:

This is very important but commonly negligible option available in Google Analytics. I think this can be the great way you can analyze and fix the problems in the website. All you have to do is to see what the top exit pages of the website are and then go manually to those pages and analyze technically why most people leave the website through this page. There can be several reasons like improper navigation, CSS or content you can fix the problems and expect better conversions.

Top Content:

Top Content is the feature that tells the webmaster that what the top pages of the website are? This can really help you design your content strategy; you can manually see what those pages are and optimize them, add more content to those pages and make them more users friendly so that more users can interact with the website and website generate more leads for the business.

Map Overlay:

Local Search is getting more and more attention and missing this part will same as closing a door for the coming business. Map Overlay in Google Analytics tells you about where the traffic is coming from (location wise). This can help you to see what areas are going better and what areas you should focus for the future.

These are the top 5 areas where you can give a clear direction to your SEO Strategy for the next month. Digging more in to Google Analytics can bring more options that can enhance your SEO strategy.

Looking forward to hear your opinion!

Moosa Hemani is the Team Lead for SEO and working for a leading IT house. He works on the client side; develops and executes the SEO strategies for clients related to different industries like real estate, contracting, Restaurants and others.

7 Responses to “Design your SEO Strategy with Google Analytics”

  1. Larry Brewer says:
    January 31, 2011 at 1:58 pm

    Thnks for the tips, I use analytic to eliminate problems with my pages on a regular basis, but I had forgotten about the map.

    Moosa Hemani Reply:
    January 31st, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    My Pleasure Larry digging more in to GA will give you detailed insight of how your website is performing and how it can perform better :)

    Thanks for the kind comment.

  2. Leslie Strickland says:
    February 2, 2011 at 2:25 pm

    Moosa,

    I just moved my company over from Omniture (that beast) to Google Analytics. Believe it or not, I’m much happier with Google. The information is better sorted, giving me so many more details to compare in one place. The system is simpler and cleaner to use.

    One thing I would add to your post is the Goals function in Google Analytics. If you are trying to get subscribers or purchases you can set your goal page to record visits to the “Thank You” and/or “Confirmation” pages. With that, you can see from any kind of traffic who is completing goals. This goes for keywords as well. Sometimes we focus on the number of people coming from a keyword instead of on the number of final conversions.

    Thanks!
    Leslie

    Moosa Hemani Reply:
    February 2nd, 2011 at 3:25 pm

    That’s very true Leslie Google Analytics give a detailed data and its very clean and customizable. I tried to focus the point that people usually find useless but actually its more then just useful information.

    Google Analytics for me is not only a data but an action indicator that what i really have to plan for my website for the next month.

  3. Wasim Ismail says:
    February 3, 2011 at 10:42 am

    I think Google Analytics is one of the best reporting modules, as just besides checking how many visitors you have, you can do so much, from checking what keywords, pages, browsers, devices…etc and also like the map overview to see which areas your website is performing well, and which areas need improvement.

    Moosa Hemani Reply:
    February 7th, 2011 at 4:36 pm

    That’s very true Thanks for your comment Wasim..

  4. marketing no google BH says:
    February 16, 2011 at 10:38 pm

    Minha Origem e Do Brazil , Portuguese, Muito intessante este post.