Web Analytics Basics

The cycle continues throughout the lifespan of our website. The goal is to see the web page at the first position on search results for the target keywords and to maintain this position once it’s achieved.  

Web analytics

Web analytics is the process of measuring and analyzing data related to users’ behavior on our website. It involves collecting and measuring data generated by the use of our website and deriving insights from the data that can help us optimize the user experience on our website.

Data such as page views, visitors, bounce rate, and more form the basis of tracking the success of SEO on a website. There is a huge list of metrics we can track to measure our site’s performance.

As a beginner, however, tracking several different metrics can be overwhelming. Instead, to start off, we can define the goals most important to our business and track a limited number of metrics most relevant to those goals. As our business progresses, we can always set new goals and tracks other metrics.

Why is web analytics important to business?

Web analytics is crucial to our website’s success. Improving our site’s performance in search results requires gearing up our website’s SEO strategy. To improve our SEO strategy, we need to identify areas that need improvement, and for that we need data.

For instance, the time on page metric will show us how long users stay on a particular page. If, let’s say, users are spending five seconds on average on a 1500-words article, it’s likely that the content is not engaging or useful enough to keep the visitors on the page.

There are many tools available that can measure not only the time on page, but several other useful metrics related to users’ interaction with our website. Making sense of all this data will point out areas that need adjustments. Following these insights to make the necessary changes will ultimately improve our site’s SEO.

Web analytics can help our business in a number of ways. Here are some ideas on how it can be useful:

• It can help us customize the site’s content to the requirements of regular visitors.

• Track the revenue our business is generating from specific types of customers or individual customers.

• Monitor the sources of website traffic to generate strategies that can maximize traffic from these sources, including search engines, social media, and other sites.

• Identify poor-performing and best-performing pages and adjust our content strategy to improve traffic and conversions.

• Identify top-performing and under-performing product and services to adjust our strategies accordingly and maximize ROIs.

• Identify the geographical regions where most of our customers are located and optimize our pages for their interest.

• Identify problems on our websites to resolve them timely and maintain the best user experience.

These were only some examples of how we can put web analytics to use. However, the list isn’t exhaustive. There are endless insights we can pull out from the data generated by user activity on our websites and numerous ways to use these insights.

The ultimate goal of web analytics is to visualize how our website is performing and figure out what adjustments in our site’s SEO can further improve its performance.

The tracking cycle

The website’s SEO is designed, implemented, tracked, and improved in a cycle. The process primarily involves the following steps:

Set goals

One of the most important parts of achieving our business’s online success is identifying the goals. The most basic goal of any SEO strategy is to improve search result rankings. Besides that, we may want to focus on customer satisfaction, brand awareness, or conversions. Different businesses can have different goals, depending on their age, their current position in the market, and their budget. Make sure we are clear about our business’s long and short-term objectives so they can align with our SEO goals.

Create a strategy

Next, design an SEO strategy that aligns with our business and website goals identified in the first step. This planning phase will define the keywords we will target, content planning, on-page optimizations, and link-building techniques we will focus on.

Execute the strategy

Once we have the strategy, it’s time to put it to action. Create pages, populate them with content, implement all the important on-page and technical optimizations, and generate backlinks.

Identify KPIs to focus on

There are a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that collectively establish how well a website is performing. The goals we are trying to achieve with our SEO strategy, as identified in the first step will also tell us which metrics we need to focus on. There is tons of data associated with our website. We might not be interested in all of it. If our website is new, for example, we may be interested in unique visitors, user sessions, and bounce rates.

Collect data

Once we know which website analytics metrics align with our business model and SEO goals, we need to collect the data. Thankfully, tools make it very easy for us to do so. All-in-one SEO tools, including Semrush and Moz, offer many different metrics to track our website’s performance. Besides these, Google Analytics is a popular tool webmasters often use to track rankings.

Analyze

Compare the data with the goals. Is our SEO strategy going in the direction we want it to? Is it creating results? When judging our SEO strategy’s lucrativeness, we should keep in mind that we might not see immediate results in most cases. If our website is new, it will take some time before the SEO implementations start showing results.

The speed of the outcome also depends on how frequently the website is crawled. Authoritative websites, especially those that post content frequently, are crawled more often. Consequently, any SEO efforts that they make on their website will come into effect much faster than sites that are crawled less often.

Improve the strategy

Assessing our progress gives us invaluable insights to modify our existing strategy and improve our performance. If a technique we implemented did not create the anticipated results, it’s time to call it off and work on Plan B. If a technique that we implemented on-site or off-site for a page is producing good results, it’s time to replicate it for multiple pages. In any case, adjust the strategy, and give it some time to work before collecting data, analyzing, and restrategizing.

Keeping the cycle going will gradually improve our site’s ranking in search results and materialize our greater business goals.

Test your knowledge

Drag and drop the blocks on the right to fill the missing spaces on the left to complete the steps of SEO optimization process. One of the blocks may be left unused.

Choose the most suitable answer for each of the following questions.