Learn more about your site through Web Analytics
You can learn a lot about how your site and how it’s performing in the search engines through web analytics. A web analytics tool gathers information on the visitors to your website. Here’s the way it works. A small piece of code is placed on your webpage which enables the web analytics programs to capture data from the website. This information is then reported to you in a user-friendly way so it’s easy to understand. There are several metrics reported back depending on what tool you’re using, but here are some of the most common:
Unique Visitors – this is the number of people who are visiting your site.
Page Views – the amount of times your pages are seen by a visitor.
Search Engine Referrals – the number of visitors who come to your site through the search engines.
Keywords – shows you the keywords that are referring visitors to your site from the search engines.
Referring Sites – Shows you where visitors are coming besides the search engines including industrial sites like ThomasNet, Process Register, Industrial Quick Search, and MacRae’s Blue Book.
Unique Visitors is obviously the most looked at metric, but you can find useful information if you dig deeper. The keyword information in particular comes in handy for discovering what keywords are actually driving traffic to your site. In future posts, I’ll dive deeper into how use web analytics. For now, make sure you’re using some type of web analytics on your site.