Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular website statistics and analytics application used by almost every other webmaster; 60% of the top million websites use it.
However, most use it lightly, and don’t use GA to it’s potential. Some studies have shown that 8 out of 10 of ecommerce webmasters are using GA in a non-optimal manner. Simply viewing daily/hourly traffic statistics, page views, and identifying sources of traffic is only a very basic way of using GA.
As a webmaster, you can utilize GA in a more advanced manner to derive useful insights that you can use to fine tune your marketing campaigns and traffic strategy.
In this post, we will discuss a few ways to use the information generated by GA to fine tune your SEO, improve your website’s content structure, and thereby generate increased traffic.
A) Keyword Reports
You can increase your website’s traffic by using the most relevant keywords within your content; you can use the keyword report in GA.
To view this report, click on “Traffic Source Keyword Report” within GA. This is where you can locate the top keywords that are bringing traffic to your website or blog. We suggest you focus on just the top ten keywords, those bringing in the most traffic. These are the keywords that your website ranks well in Google.
The objective is to improve the click-through rate, CTR, for these keywords. To improve the CTR keywords:
· Use these high traffic keywords in your page title and description. Keep your page titles about 55 characters, and meta descriptions less than 156 characters.
· Create more blog content using your high traffic keywords.
· Use these keywords in the titles of the images on your website.
· Use these keywords as alternate tags in the images on your website.
· Make these keywords a part of the anchor text of your internal website links.
· Understand the ways in which people are searching for high impression keywords, then create content that is useful for those people.
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B) Referral Reports:
Divide your website traffic into 3 categories: referral traffic, organic search traffic, and direct traffic.
Use the “Traffic Source Referral Report” to maximize your referral traffic by identifying the top websites which are sending your site traffic. .
Your site referrals fall in one or more of the following categories. Here is what you can do with each kind:
l Blogs & Websites: If a particular blog is brining you lots of traffic, the focus on fostering a friendship with the owner and explore more cross promotional opportunities. Link back to such blogs in your content, and regularly comment on their posts. Also, try contributing a few guest posts to such blogs.
l Communities and Niche Forums: To maximize your traffic from communities and forums like Quora, Triberr, Reddit and other niche specific groups, you should spend more time replying to different discussion threads. Try helping people with your answers and focus on creating value. At the same time, share your own content wherever relevant.
l Social Media: Identify the social network that sends the most traffic your way. Identify the post structure that is working the best for you. Increase your posting frequency and replicate your successful posts for more traffic and engagement.
To improve the conversion rate of your referral traffic, you can create specific landing pages or customized messages for different referral sources. You can use tools like Hello Bar to do this.
C) Improve Blog Engagement Using the Content Overview Report
People visit your blog or website because of its’ content. If your content resolves their problems, answers their questions and helps them in any way, they’ll keep returning for more.
So it’s important to identify the content that is actually attracting the highest traffic. For this you can use the Content Overview Report in Google Analytics. Use it to find out your top performing content and identify trends from it.
Have a good look at the posts that are attracting the highest traffic. Identify any improvement areas and try to make them more comprehensive. At the same time, create new blog content that complements your popular content.
This will help you increase your reader engagement and the average user time on site.
For more information on SEO practices, visit our SEO page.
