subject: Discover Great Reasons To Use Google Analytics [print this page] When you are constructing a site, one thing to do which is essential for building keywords, use Google Analytics on your website. It's definitely something you need to go study, it's just 101. The next thing you need to do is set up goal tracking. Most people don't set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. It's quite easy to do. You just put a little bit of code on whatever your conversion page is. Most internet marketing reviews will tell you to use this strategy or technique.
Basically you then get Analytics to be able to tell what keywords are driving traffic to your website and what keywords are converting. Once you know what keywords are converting, then you can do things like, ok maybe I go after the pay per click market because I know that keyword is going to convert for me and the more traffic I can get to my website with that keyword, the better.
When you use Google Analytics you can jump in the back end and can have a look at what keywords people are already using to find you. That's another way to continue to mine your own data. You want to try and identify quick and easy wins. I'm all about going for ones you are already getting some good traffic to, but it may not be in position number 1. It might only require you to build a few more back links to that and it'll push you up to number 1.
The difference in traffic between position number 3 or position number 5 and position number 1 is a factor of five or six. I don't know the precise statistics, but you'll get so much more traffic being number 1. If you're already getting traffic from a key phrase and it's not in position number 1 but it's on page number 1, I'd go after that keyword first. So that is why you want to use Google Analytics. Once you install Google Analytics, you can start to identify what keywords are driving traffic and where they're ranking. These are actually SEO basics that you need to understand early on.
With e commerce, here's a cool thing I did with Planet 13, an e commerce site. What I did, very early on I spoke to the Web guy and the search area is something we installed, and in the back end, when anyone types a search in, it's logging that keyword. So I know what keywords people are searching for on this site. It's not necessarily how they found the website, this is what they're searching once they're here.
This is gold for us, so much so that I thought I'd get even more tricky. I then started to take that data and feed it back to the site. What you'll have are top bands that automatically update based on what's hot.
If a band is touring, we are so on the cutting edge to know what's happening in the scene, based on what kids are searching for. People come to this website and some of these bands will pop up, like All Time Low, and Escape the Fate and you will say, why are they popping up now? You might not have realized, but they have just brought out a new album, they've just started touring, they've done whatever.
Feeding this information back into it, basically it takes all the data that is getting fed into the search bar, then it analyzes what is the most searched in the last month and then it feeds that into those top bands. Then you scroll down to Our Featured Products and it then picks six of the top featured bands and then chooses a random product from that keyword.
Basically, this is what's hot, this is what kids are looking for, and then we're feeding it back to them. That's just the idea of using your own data and then funneling it back in. For those of you who are doing e commerce, I just gave you an absolute nugget and you may not have even realized it. That was a big one for us.
Did we see sales from doing something like that? Because we're doing so much, we're throwing a lot against the wall, you see some people and they'll say, I just made this slight tweak on my page and look how much better I'm doing in the rankings. But if you're doing all these other things, there is no real way for you to isolate what's causing the increase. At the point in time that we were doing that, we were doing a whole lot of on page SEO, we were doing off page SEO, we were adding new products, there were so many different factors there. It would be too hard for me to isolate. Often it is best that you start by studying some SEO training DVDs.
That said though, just by understanding our market, there is so much value in that. All of these you can find out when you use Google Analytics today.
