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.

Google has built a $23 Billion dollar business by understanding what their users want or will want in the near future – think about the YouTube acquisition!

Google has built an important user franchise for their Google Maps, the ultimate “local search engine offering”. Every day, this terrific tool helps millions of searchers find local locations of restaurants, doctors, paint stores, building contractors and drug stores in their neighborhood. Google has the database that tells them a whole lot about what people want to find locally online.

Not surprising, there is data to support this fast-growing activity in Local Search. Nielsen (2009) reported that 72% of consumers are using search engines more often to find a local business or service. Compared to other options, only 16% said they were using Yellow Pages more. This speaks volumes about what is happening to the traditional Yellow Pages franchise.

Google and search engines in general are quickly becoming the default method that people use to search for local information and with a map to boot.

When you add in the increasing wave of mobile device usage, the trend becomes even clearer.

Marketers need to recognize this seismic shift, particularly if they market through a network of locations like stores and offices. Determining how to create Local Search programs, both in search engine optimization (SEO) or paid keyword programs (PPC), is now a critically important marketing tool and medium. Not acting on this shift, is a very big missed business opportunity. And, it may be an opportunity that competition is pursuing.

Having said that, one has to also pause and wonder whether Google is threatened by this move. I don’t think so.

The key to Google’s whopping 65% market share (and 70% by some estimates) is not the offering of free news. That’s a nice added benefit but not a driving force.

The driving force is Google’s extraordinary commitment to, and delivery of, a high quality user experience. They have spent years honing their speed and accuracy in delivering answers to a search engine user’s queries. At the moment, there is no one better doing this and that is why they hold their dominant share in spite of competitor innovation.

We still continue to place most of our client budgets on Google, but we also see roles for Bing and Yahoo in those buys. This could change in the future, but that decision will be primarily driven by further innovation of the search engine user experience.

One last note. There are some who speculate that Murdoch’s discussions with MS’ Bing are really a negotiating ploy to create fear in Google’s corporate suite, and thereby, move them to pay News Corp. a fee for their news feeds. Given Google’s devotion to the user experience as the ultimate driver of their business, I doubt the recent events will make them nervous.