Google Analytics is probably one of the most powerful tools in a search engine marketers arsenal. You can use real world, traffic-driving keyword reports to see exactly how someone is finding you for a specific page on your website, how long they’re staying there and if they leave your site after viewing the page or explore other pages in your site. When performing analytic reporting correctly, you can learn how to maximize and increase conversions for your website. See below for helpful tips from the Big Red SEO team.
Real Life Example of How Tracking Works Offline
Years ago, I read an article about a business owner that handed out free peanuts when customers entered the store and encouraged them to just toss the shells on the ground. It sounded like the business owner was out of his mind and was simply creating extra work for his employees, but there was a method to his madness! At various points in the day, the owner took pictures of the floor and how many peanuts had gathered, attempting to find where the high traffic areas were in his store. The experiment was to find out what people did when they went into the store, where they spent the most time, and if they were searching for particular products. After reviewing the analysis, the store placed the hot selling products in lower traffic areas in order to drive traffic to the corners of the store, in an attempt to influence other purchases along the way. In our view, this was a genius plan! Not only was he able to find out the most popular items, but he was able to restructure his store in order to provide the “non-selling” products an area to shine. Typically, shoppers are creatures of habit. They know where the items are and how to get there. Putting the products in an alternative location breaks that habit and offers them the opportunity to browse something new.
Break the Habits in Your Website – Your Visitors Will Thank You
The same can be done on your website, although handing out peanuts through the monitor is going to be a little tough! Basically, you want to create a heat map of where people go on your site, how they found your site, and what pages they visit. By using certain keywords, you will end up driving traffic to specific articles. Oftentimes, when people have content or articles on their site, the keywords that they thought they were going after are not what people used to access the site! Learn more by reading our article “Keyword Density – Optimize for Business Success, Not for Search Engines!”
Try Google Analytics Yourself
So, let’s use Google Analytics to help find out what words people are using to access pages, and if there are words being used that could possibly be expanded upon in order to drive more traffic, or if the new keywords deserve an article on their own in order to drive more traffic. We’ll break this down into a couple of quick and easy steps. The below information already assumes that you have a Google account, have configured Google Analytics for your site, and already have some traffic going to your site.
- Log into Google Analytics and click on your website in the list
- On the left side, click the Content tab
- Now click on the Top Content subcategory of Content
- Select one of the pages on the bottom right for your website to analyze
- On the bottom right you’ll see Landing Page Optimization, click Entrance Keywords
The page that shows up will have a list of the keywords used by people to find that specific page on your site. Have a browse through the list and see if there are any keywords that other people are using that you may not have thought about and really should include in the page/article or possibly create a new page with that keyword in mind.
These are part of the steps that Big Red SEO, an Omaha SEO Company, takes in order to help find out niche marketing ideas, produce trending reports and help drive traffic to a website. It’s always nice to get number one rankings on Google and Bing, but if those rankings are not using targeted keywords and using traffic-producing keywords, then the ranking is meaningless. Check out our article “KEI, Another Acronym Within SEO” to learn why it is important to research the most effective and valuable keywords to use. When you generate keywords like this from your website, you’re using real information from real people and not just fishing in the dark.
Do you have questions regarding how to measure your SEO metrics? If so, contact our Big Red SEO team at (402) 522-6468. We have a niche of teaching our clients (in simple terms) what search engine optimization is and how when the metrics are measured correctly you can see results quickly.