Omar Kattan - search in a nutshell

Google Analytics is by far the most robust free site side analytics program out there.  Now owned by Google, Google Analytics started out its life as a small analytics company called Urchin.

Google Analytics is used by millions of sites (hobby as well as ecommerce) to measure the amount and quality of traffic to a website. 

Moreover, if configured properly, Google Analytics can also measure predefined KPIs and Goals such as purchases, downloads, subscriptions, thereby showing you which keywords convert to business.

Here are a few Google Analytics tips that I’ve gathered to help you get the most out of the package:

1. Use the filter at the bottom of the keywords list to include and exclude certain keywords.  For instance, you can exclude your own brand name thereby allowing you to see which generic keywords are driving traffic to your site.

2. Use the compare two dates/metrics at the top to be able to see trends across the same variable on two different dates.

3. Exclude your IP address so that your figures are not skewed

4. Configure site search measurement  in order to get valuable data on how users  search  within your site. 

5. Under “Content” use site overlay to see what links on you site are most popular.  This will give you a better idea of what content on your site is appealing to your users and  gives you the confidence to remove or  place “Nofollows” on non popular links.

The above are a few tips for using Google Analytics.  There are many more fantastic features including the ability to export and email reports as well as integrate with Adwords in order to measure the performance of your paid ads.

In a nutshell, if you haven’t used Google Analytics yet, you’re completely missing out on a fantastic free Analytics resource. 

How do you measure the success of your SEO activity?  What KPIs do you look at?  Do you know what KPIs are?  Key performance Indicators and here are a few I use:

SEO KPI 1:  Brand vs Non-Brand Traffic
The percentage of traffic coming from brand keywords versus the traffi coming from non-brand keywords.  Ideally you should aim to have at least 4o% of your traffic coming from non-branded keywords.

SEO KPI 2 – Search Index Saturation
How many pages of your site are indexed by the search engines versus how many pages you actually have. You should aim for at least a 3 to 1 ratio.

SEO KPI 3 – Percentage of Pages Attracting Traffic
How many of your site’s pages are actually attracting traffic?  You should aim to have at least 15-20% of your pages attracting traffic.

SEO KPI 4 – Keywords per Page
How many keywords is each of your pages attracting?  The more the better but you should aim for at least 2 to three keywords per page.

SEO KPI 5 – Unique visitors per keyword
How many unique visitors are each of your keywords attracting? The more the better and it depends on the industry you’re in but obviously you need to aim for the highest traffic/best converting  keywords.

Now that you have a few KPIs to examine, go and measure your SEO success.