Google Analytics - One great tool for better SEO

The best place to start a search engine optimization program begins with a comprehensive review of your website analytics. For Strategic Domain, knowing the search terms that delivered visitors to your site and what information they were looking for are the hidden jewels for SEO among all the data points.

Reviewing information from services like Google Analytics can provide SEO insights about what keywords and which search engines bring visitors to your website.  It helps you understand the value of each keyword by how productive they are in generating traffic, achieving goals or generating acquisitions. You can use these words as the basis for development of related keyword phrases for content development, search engine optimization and paid keyword campaigns.

As part of your analysis, you need to determine what happened once these keywords have been used to reach your website. The largest driver of visits could also produce the highest bounce rates. The analytics should be reviewed for time on site, content that was viewed, and related pages or links that were accessed. These keywords can also help determine the need to have long tail keywords in your search engine optimization and marketing mix.

Just as important to search engine optimization is your internal site search. This provides clues to what people are searching for on your Web site. By reviewing these terms you can determine what keyword phrases to target and generate additional site visits. Equally important is learning if your visitors are finding the information they seek or is that content missing from your website.

This is a first step for SEO that is filled with valuable knowledge about your website and how it is interacting with search engine visitors. Strategic Domain’s search engine optimization blog will provide more in future posts about how website analytics are your best friend in helping to plan and understand search engine marketing.

To solve this problem, we brought the groups together on a monthly basis. Using our keyword research and mapping techniques, we were able to demonstrate the need for integration. As a result, recent content changes are delivering more traffic than before and top rankings are growing. The bottom line is that high value keyword phrases generate more traffic.

One of our healthcare clients decided to redesign their Web site. Their advertising agency wanted to reposition the product claim and eliminate the top traffic-driving keyword phrase for a disease category.  The advertising agency wanted a “consumer-friendly” term to be used.  Our keyword research indicated that the Web site would lose tens of thousand visitors per month by eliminating this keyword phrase plus lose top positions on search engine rankings. We put a full court press on the senior manager to review our findings and we stopped this change.

When facing the challenge of bringing separate client teams together for SEO, we demonstrate the power of using keyword research to create keyword-enriched copy that increase search engine rankings.  By creating a shared vision for the role of search engine optimization, SEO can be easily integrated into all online marketing strategies.