Google analytics is the most popular application that performs web analytics in the world. The application is used by about 61% of the leading one million sites according to Alexa rankings. Despite this, most people who run SEO companies do not tap the full potential of Google analytics. In fact, studies show that up to 80% of persons who use ecommerce sites do not apply the application correctly. Getting details on page views, getting statistics on daily traffic and their sources is a basic way of utilizing Google analytics. If you are an SEO company seeking to improve you’re your client’s marketing campaign or traffic strategy, here are several ways you can optimize Google analytics:
- Use Landing Page and SEO Query Reports
Identifying loopholes and ways to attract traffic is one of the reasons why you track analytics on your site. Google analytics can provide you with reports on landing pages and SEO queries when you integrate it to a webmaster tools account. With this, you will get access to the leading SEO queries on your site that get the highest number of impressions on the search engine. With this information, you can see how keywords rank as well as know the impressions and clicks on your website. You will also be able to sort keyword list based on number of impressions. This will help you improve traffic to your website.
- Use Referral Reports
Traffic to your site falls within three broad categories namely referral, search and direct traffic. Referral traffic is generally sent your way from other sites. A referral report shows you the top sites that send traffic to your website. Traffic to your site could come from niche and community forums such as Reddit, Triberr and Quora. To tap of such sites to increase traffic to your site, invest time responding to discussion threads, creating value for readers by helping them with your answers. At the same time, find relevant opportunities to share your own content.
Also, you’ll get referrals from websites and blogs. If you generate traffic form such platforms, your focus should be on building relationships with owners of those platforms and exploring cross-promotional opportunities. Consider linking back to the blogs and sites in your content and commenting regularly on their posts as well as offering to contribute to guest post on such blogs. Other referrals could come from social media platforms so identify social networks that send high traffic to your site. As such, increase the frequency of your posting and replicate the posts that seem to be successful to attract more traffic. Develop customized messages or landing pages for various referral sources to improve conversion rate of referral traffic.
- Use Keyword Reports
The use of keyword report generated by Google analytics can help you use the right keywords in the content you develop to increase website traffic. The report shows you the keywords that visitors to your blog use. With this information, you can use those keywords as alternative tags on the images you add to your site. You can also include the keywords in page and image titles as well as in descriptions. For higher traffic, include keywords that drive traffic to your site in your blog content often and also use them as anchor texts in internal site links in a natural way.
- Use Content Reports
People who read your website or blog do so because of the content they find there. If the content helps them find answers, solve problems or add value to them in any other way, your visitors will keep visiting the site. It is therefore critical to know the kind of content that drives traffic to your site. The content overview report generated by Google analytics helps with this and you can use it to identify high performing content and the trends. Check for posts that generate high traffic and locate what needs to be improved to enhance its comprehensiveness. Also, generate new content to complement posts that drive content to increase reader engagement.
- Use Flow Reports from Users
A key reason for driving traffic to any site is to convert them to subscribers or leads. The rate at which you convert your traffic to one of these is more critical than the traffic itself. To ensure a high conversion rate, flow reports from users generated by Google analytics can enable you identify loopholes in your conversion rates and identify traffic for different conversion pages. It also enables you to analyze the drop off point for the average user so as to create a funnel for conversion. Once you identify the weak link in the conversion funnel you may conduct surveys on drop off points so you know why users leave your site. With this knowledge, you can set up tests that help address the objections such users have. You can also identify additional drop off points in the funnel conversion then repeat the process for better improvements.