Whether you are doing the SEO for your small business website yourself, or outsourcing it to a Minneapolis SEO company, how do you know if those SEO efforts are actually paying off? You might be wasting your time or throwing money down a rat hole for all you know. Enter Google Analytics.
What Is Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a FREE service that Google offers website owners who are looking for detailed statistics about their website.
To use Google Analytics, you simply insert a few lines of code into your website. The plethora of detailed statistics that Google provides will show you your site’s strengths and weaknesses. With this vital information, you can improve your return on website investment, increase conversion rates, and use the Internet to its fullest to increase your sales and profits.
Some of the statistics you can analyze include identifying the keywords that potential customers searched for to find your website. Google Analytics includes numerous other statistics such as how many people view your website, what pages they visited, how long they browsed your website, and if they click away from your website the minute they landed on it (a metric called “bounce rate”).
Armed with statistics like that, you can see what areas of your website are performing well and which areas need improvement. Google Analytics makes it possible for you to measure your results. Without it, how will you know if the money you’re spending on SEO and other Internet Marketing services is paying off?
The Benefits of Using Google Analytics
Knowing the vital statistics about your website will allow you to see what’s working and what isn’t. Google Analytics provides innumerable parameters for you to utilize during your decision-making process. For instance, you can analyze how many visitors entered your site during specific time periods. You can dig deeper and find out where in the world your visitors are coming from.
Google Analytics gives quantifiable answers to tough business questions. You will understand whether your visitors found you via a search engine or whether they were referred by another website. It will provide answers to questions such as: “How long did my visitors browse my website and what specific pages did they visit (or not visit)?”
One of the greatest benefits of Google Analytics is to show you what keywords your website ranks for – and what keywords visitors use to find your site. Once you know this information, you can optimize your site for those keywords to improve your rankings and traffic. Let’s say you discover that a handful of people are finding your website searching for, “chiropractors in Minneapolis.” You can optimize a page on your website for that keyword phrase so that your site ranks higher for it, thus bringing in even more traffic.
So what is Google Analytics? It’s a free analytical tool, but more importantly, it’s a tool that will allow you to easily measure the strengths and weaknesses of your website – and whether or not your SEO efforts are paying off. Regardless of what analytics program you use, it’s imperative that you use something so that you can track and measure your website’s performance!
