Intro to Google Analytics

Does this sound familiar?

• “I’m not getting any leads.”
• “No one is calling me.”
• “No one shares or comments on my blog.”

When I’m contacted about our SEO services, one of the first questions I ask is, “Do you have any analytics installed on your site?” Quite often the answer is no.
How can you figure out what is working and what is not if you don’t have some form of analytics on your site? You simply can’t and we can’t make recommendations for SEO services. If you don’t have any installed, I advise you to install them and, after a few weeks, we can review them to determine your SEO strategy.

We recommend Google Analytics. It’s free and has a robust set of features. You can view a wide range of information including:

• Unique visits
• Pages per visit
• Traffic sources
• Keywords
• Time on site
• Bounce rate

There is so much more, but when you’re getting started, you just need to look at a few pieces of the pie until you get more familiar with Google Analytics. Take a look at these simple, basic terms:

• Unique visitors are the number of people who visited your site. They might visit multiple times and look at numerous pages, but they are only counted once.
• Pages per visit tells you the average number of pages each unique visitor views.
• Traffic sources simply tells you where the traffic is coming from.
• Search traffic includes visitors from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and numerous other search engines.
• Referral traffic includes sites that link to you or sites you have shared your content on, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.
• Keywords shows you the keywords your site visitors typed into a search engine to find your site. This is known as organic search.
• Direct traffic is from those who typed your web address in directly. This could be because they have it on a business card or bookmarked it from a previous visit.
• Time on site is the amount of time they spent on your site.
• Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who landed on your site and then left without visiting another page.

Obviously, this is a simple overview of Google Analytics, but without this basic information, it’s hard to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

If you really want to delve into learning more (which will only help you), Google has a great set of learning resources available, free of charge. Topics include:

• First Steps
• Fundamentals
• Interpreting Reports
• In-Depth Analysis

If you’re using WordPress, you can easily install the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin by Yoast. And if you want to monitor on the go, there are numerous apps available.

Contact us for all your SEO needs!