Apr 02 2013
Search engine optimization requires some serious research before and after you launch an effort. Among the most important tools you have for crafting an intelligent search engine optimization campaign are the statistics that are gathered by your analytics tools. Understanding the statistics, and what they actually mean about your site, can help you to tailor your search engine optimization efforts in a way that makes them more useful and more productive.
Unique Visitors
This is the number that most people who are undertaking a search engine optimization effort really tend to concentrate on. This is simply the number of visitors who come to your site over a given period. In just about every case, more is better. This number only reveals part of what’s going on with your site, however. It will tell you how many people are finding your site and, to some degree, it will let you know whether your search engine optimization efforts have been successful overall. What they do when they’re at your site, however, is an important thing to know about your visitors.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is a very important number where search engine optimization is concerned. Your unique visitors give you the raw number of visitors who came to your site. A certain percentage of those visitors are going to arrive at your site and realize that it is not at all what they were looking for. In such cases, these visitors are going to bounce. This means that they come to your site and they leave immediately. If you see a rapid increase in the amount of traffic you’re getting but an accompanying increase in the amount of bounces from your site, it rather indicates that people are able to find you on search engines but that you’re not getting indexed for the right things. This may mean adjusting your search engine optimization strategy to give a more accurate idea of what your site is about to the search engines.
Content
Good analytics tools will let you know which pages are the most popular ones at your site. This is vital information. Most of the time, your homepage is going to rank very highly in this measurement, simply because it’s the page that people are going to arrive at first. You want to look at what other content people are looking at on your site. For example, if you recently added a series of videos that give technical support information on whatever product you happen to sell, but nobody is watching them, it should let you know that those videos aren’t something that people find particularly useful. While it may be worth them to keep them available on the site, you may want to save money by not producing any more, since they’re not garnering much interest.
Sources
You’ll get information from your analytics tool that will tell you where your visitors are coming from. This is great intelligence on how well your search engine optimization efforts are working in other nations. Be aware, however, that some people will use a VPN to connect to the Internet, and this means that you can’t really tell where they’re coming from. These numbers can be useful, but if you see anomalies, such as you’re suddenly getting a particular visitor coming from a nation that you don’t even target in your search engine optimization efforts, it may simply mean that they’re on a VPN server from that nation and they’re located somewhere else.
If you can work to refine your search engine optimization efforts using the empirical evidence provided by your statistics and analytics program, you go a lot farther improving how well your site does relative to your competition.
