How To Use Analytics To Make Your Website Better

This post was inspired by some of the real SEO work they have done recently at a customer site. My hope is that this will give you all the webmasters that there is some inspiration on what you can learn from their own data to Google Analytics, and I hope that the use of making more money online.

History

Basically, the customer gave us three or four key words that they wanted their home page to rank for. They had some preconceived ideas about the keywords that matter, so that was all he really wanted, but I have convinced him to let me do a little research for keyword ideas and take a look at his analysis to see if I could not 't help improve what they already had.

What we found

We always look to a selection of key areas for clues about what is going on - these are the key points of interest for this particular customer:

From January to March (last 3 months)

• 87% of traffic went to other pages on the home page
• 80% of search traffic was more than 1000 different keywords
• There are 5 high traffic sites with above average rates of rebound

What this means

Ok, these figures are interesting, but what does that mean for the site? Well ...

The first thing you learn is that the homepage was not half as important as was thought. They had to focus on all these pages little to contribute in highly qualified traffic.

Second, it focuses on a few key words have no meaning, and well, maybe, but some keywords are very important too. Unfortunately, trying to optimize for 1,000 different words, is not very practical, but there is still much we can do about it.

Third - what is the point of trying to get more traffic to the home page when there are clear deficiencies in some important pages?

What we did

The first thing I suggested was that we started trying to improve the site before bringing more traffic to it. Think of it as fixing the holes in the bucket before turning the tap - it makes sense right?

Clearly, the optimization of a hundred different pages of a thousand different words is difficult. But we begin by suggesting some improvements and adjustments to the site in general.

Things like the structure and navigation are important - from the design of the sidebar to the drafting of the different categories. As proof instigated a separation of some minor adjustments to take effect throughout the site. The principal is simple: improve the site in general, easier to use and easy to navigate and you should reduce rebounds and retain more traffic.

We also took a close look at 5 pages weaker and what keywords are used to find them. We asked questions like "Is this content a good choice for people looking for these words?" And "What calls to action could be used to bring more visitors to the site?"

What happened

Well, we tried some adjustments to the navigation and find a combination that produced a decent reduction in the percentage of dropouts from these pages of the long tail. He also managed to improve the bounce rate of 5 pages of high traffic - in some cases by a decent margin - of which more in line with the average for the rest of the site. This means that the site is knowing how to keep more of their traffic.

Since then, we noticed an increase in long tail traffic to pages that are not directly optimization. Which makes sense really, if Google realizes that your pages are being well received by visitors, so why not reward him with a better rating?

Conclusion

Most people think SEO is not just scoring - but if your site is not the height that is losing traffic is done. Analytics is a powerful tool that everyone should be using to accompany their SEO efforts.

When you improve your site significantly, good things happen. To keep more of your traffic, converting more and more people linking to you and send signals to Google that you are investing in creating a better website. Combine this with a good SEO and you are a winner.