A website can be more than just your window on the cyber world. It is your base of operations and can also be a source of rich information about your business. Use site stats to help you improve how you run your business.

What to Look For

There are lots of website stats for you to look at to improve your rankings with the search engines. Each one can tell you something useful about how your business is currently doing.

1. Page views – How many people look at each page of your website? You can check page views on a monthly basis to see what portion of your website is the most popular. Maybe certain pages are more popular at different times of the year due to seasonal product offerings. You can also learn what items are doing well and which ones are dragging down the bottom line.

2. Unique visitors – Your site may get many visitors each day but they could be the same person coming back more than once. Unique visitors are first time visitors to your site and not repeat ones. The more unique visits you get the more potential customers you are coming in contact with.

3. Links – These can be outgoing links. If someone clicks on your Digg icon to bookmark one of your articles or blog posts, you can find that out as long as you have the right software set up on each page of your site. Any ads you post can also be tracked to see who clicks them. Programs like Google AdWords will track those stats for you so you can get paid.

4. Sales – You can track how well your shopping cart does each month. See when sales do down or up and see how many people used the shopping cart but didn’t make the sale. Compare statistics to track product buying trends to predict future sales.

5. Keyword analysis – Each page can be dedicated to one or two keywords. By looking at page views you can analyze how well your keywords are working. Using a different page for different keywords also allows you to know which ones are underperforming for you so you can try a new tactic.

Google Analytics is a free program that you can use to measure these and other website stats. Having so much information at your fingertips can help you rise to the top of your business niche and stay there. 

Once a business has established a blog or website the representative responsible for its maintenance, will usually hear one question over and over again. Everyone from the CEO or owner to the receptionist wants to know how many visitors are coming in everyday? This question of how popular the blog is haunts every business, because how else can they know the value of the blog.

Learning to read the site’s stats can seem like a job unto itself, but one of the largest search engines has made it a little easier not only to read the stats, but improve on them as well. Google Analytics can show you who all are coming to your site and how to reach out and find even more potential visitors.

So, what is Google Analytics, anyway?

Google Analytics which is often abbreviated as GA, is a service offered for free by Google.  It generates very detailed statistics about how visitors are viewing a website. Google Analytics is actually geared and directed to marketers and not webmasters or the hobby web host.  This means that by using certain aspects of GA, like AdWords a business can review online marketing, which will show them whether an ad is performing well or not.

What can Google Analytics show the business about visitors?

The format of Google Analytics shows information in a dashboard type layout that is very easy for anyone to read and follow.  This is good news for the blog writer in that difficult analysis which could otherwise take days to compile is ready through Google, usually within 24 hours.  This gives the business a real plus in having very quick information about what is working and what is not gaining attention from visitors.

Pages that are performing poorly can easily be identified.  It also shows where visitors are coming from as ‘referrers’, which means knowing about another site, which held the visitor’s interest.  There is also information about the geographical position of the visitor.  This is data that should be collected and looked at carefully later.

A business might find it very useful to know that there are more visitors just outside of town or a few miles away than just down the block, for instance. There is also information on where the visitor went on the site and how long they stayed there.  This can be very useful since if you have a data rich, heavily contented area yet visitors are only spending a few seconds there you can discern they are not actually reading this material.

In the world of blogging a keyword is a valuable thing to know. The definition of a ‘keyword’ is a word or phrase that is entered into a search engine by a large number of Internet users.  If a blogger for a company is aware of these keywords, then these keywords can be added to the blog, and to the blog’s search tags, so that when visitors ask for these words the blog pops up.

Keywords have been a mystery to many bloggers, up until one of the largest search engines made the analysis of them much easier to grasp. Google Analytics has an easy to understand and follow mechanism for finding keywords and understanding their potential to drive more traffic to your site and keep visitors coming back.

How does a business find keywords?

One method of finding keywords is to purchase them.  The trick here though is that other than knowing the word that shows up in keywords searches, there’s no information. You don’t know if these words will really prove to be applicable to your business website or not. It is also impossible to know whether the traffic driven to your site, will truly be potential customers or if they are using these words for other purposes.  Are the searches that come about from the keyword truly valuable searches or are the visitor merely showing up for a few seconds and them moving on? The goal is after all to bring traffic in and have them access your site for repeat visits over time.

What are keywords in Google Analytics and how do they improve the blog?

What a blogger might feel they need is to have a tool that lets them see keywords as they are applicable to their site alone, and show them which keywords are the most commonly used. When you use Google Analytics you find a tool that readily shows you keyword searches relevant to the blog’s information for free.

On the Google Analytics page simply choose Keywords and find the words that people are using to find the blog site.  This information will be listed by name and show the hits in a numerical form showing the most clicks on to the lowest number clicked on.  This will show which words bring the most traffic to your site, meaning you will know these have already been used by people assessing your site.

Compare to site average visualization

At the top of right hand corner of the Google Analytics page you will find the compare to site average visualization icon. This will take you to a page where you can see a comparison chart of how the keywords are performing.

Maximize high obtaining keywords

The next part seems pretty natural, since the more clicks a keyword gets and the longer a visitor remains after clicking, means the higher obtaining a keyword it is.  If you maximize the high obtaining keyword you will drive more traffic to your site.