Keyword yourself to the top

Monitoring the keyword function in your Google Analytics can really help you to refine your websites search engine rankings.

As I touched upon in “Where does my traffic come from” you can utilise this information to refine your keyword list.

To refresh:

• Make a list of your ideal keywords for your business
• Cross reference this list with your analytics
• Which words appear?
• Which don’t?

Tip: I also put the keywords into Google to find where my website ranks

So now you have a list of keywords you need to improve on. You can invest in PPC campaigns which can be quite beneficial if you have a budget to do so. Yet there are some effective tips you can do yourself to help improve SEO that don’t cost a thing.

The Case study: After doing the keyword analysis and checking our Google rankings, I discovered that one of our core courses was not only non-existent in our keyword list, but it couldn’t be found on a 100 pages of Google!

My course of action:

Where does your website traffic come from?

An essential question you need to be able to answer when analysing your website is: where is your traffic coming from? Answering this will help you make more informed marketing, PR, social media and website design decisions.

Some factors you can track through website analytics to help you answer this are:

Discover how visitors navigate your website

Understanding your customers’ thought processes when on your website, takes you one step closer to refining the effectiveness of your site and your marketing strategy.

Every page is as important as the home page, meaning there are many ‘moments of truth’ on your website and it is hard to get it right for every customer. One valuable tool from Google Analytics helps you understand what your customers are looking for.

Discover your ineffective website pages

Surprisingly knowing how people exit your site is just as important as knowing where they came from.  By using website analytics you can discover if any pages on your site aren’t as effective as they should be. Visitors do have to exit your site at some point but if there are particular pages that have a bigger percentage of exits than others, take an objective look at that page to see why this may be.

How website analytics can help improve your business

Learning about how visitors use your website is a vital step in maximising its effectiveness and getting that essential return on investment, as well as generating new leads. An ineffective website not only damages your brand image but can lose crucial custom.

The great thing is that monitoring your website doesn’t have to be hard work or even cost you a thing! Over the last 6 months I have implement and monitored Google Analytics on our website and found that this free web analytics tool really does go beyond expectations.