SEO Basic Guideline Part 3: Analyze your Site

Analyze your site’s visitors with Google Analytics

Google Analytics 

 Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to your website.Google Analytics can help you find out how many visits your site gets from different sources of traffic, including:

• Direct (from bookmarks and address bar ‘type-ins’)

• Referrals (from other websites)

• Campaigns (for example, Google Analytics will track your email marketing)

• Search engines (including both paid and non-paid traffic)

Google Analytics gives a simple summary in a pie chart:

Paid search engine traffic should be studied and reported separately from non-paid (organic).

On the following page is a Google Analytics report showing organic search visits:

Use the above ‘keyword’ report to find out:

• how many organic search engine visits are from searches that contain your own brand name as part of the keywords

• how many do not contain your brand name

For Wordtracker websites, a user searching Google with Wordtracker is making a brand search. We would also say that someone searching for Keyword tool World Tracker was making a brand search, even though they’d spelt the company name name wrong!

This is important because it should be easy to get to number one on Google for searches containing your own brand’s name. So you shouldn’t need any SEO for that job. Also, the searcher must already know about Wordtracker’s existence.

Because your site would have got those own-brand visits anyway, non-own-brand visits (let’s just call them ‘non-brand’ visits) are a better measure of SEO success.

However, SEO is also interested in brand search reports because they give an indication of how established the site and its brand are with searchers. Sites without established brands will have to work a lot harder for success than those with.

Indeed, establishing that brand online is becoming a requirement for significant SEO success in most competitive markets.

To see a report of non-brand visits on Google Analytics (GA), use the advanced filter to Exclude keywords Containing your brand name. The following image shows this being done for two spellings of Wordtracker:

Conversely, to see a report showing brand keywords only, use Include rather than Exclude.

Response rates for different traffic sources

You should use Google Analytics to look for groups of visitors and types of keywords that your site gets results for. Then look to see what their different response rates are. Always look for success you might build on.

Start at the ‘All Traffic’ report. See image on left:

In Google Analytics you can set up goals that you would like your visitors to meet. And you can set up Ecommerce tracking, so you can see how much your site is selling.

On most Google Analytics reports, you have the option of choosing to see how the different sources of traffic shown perform for different set Goals or Ecommerce (assuming you have set it up).

It is your site so you will need to decide what response you want to get.

You’ll have to configure your response into your Google Analytics (GA) account where it will be called a Goal. If your site sells stuff then you should set up e-commerce tracking. If your site runs Google’s AdSense ads then you’ll want to measure AdSense response.

The image below shows the ecommerce conversion rates for some different traffic sources:

SEOs are mostly interested in organic (non-paid) search engine traffic’s conversion rates for different keywords, especially non-brand keywords.

Google Analytics can help here. The image on the following page shows an organic search non-brand keywords report with conversion rates:

The report above is useful but it’s only showing the conversion rates for 10 out of over 123,360 different keywords (see top right). This makes meaningful analysis difficult.

Wordtracker Strategizer can help you address this problem.

As we’ve explored, we must target keyword niches (groups of keywords). Wordtracker Strategizer imports your Google Analytics keywords reports and converts them from single keyword (exact match) reports to keyword niche reports.

In the next chapter, we’ll look at how sites that already have traffic can use Wordtracker Strategizer to find their most profitable keywords to target.

If you’ve got comments or questions, please let us know at