One of the very first things we ask when discussing a new SEO campaign with a customer is "Can we see your site statistics". This is usually after we have been told how many thousands of hits they receive every day to their site. Very often the answer is "we don't have any", sometimes followed by "can't you tell us?". It's an interesting dilemma, we as the experts are expected to know a lot about the web, search engine optimization and how to make pages rank highly for specific keywords. We're expected to know this for every industry we deal with. Whether you sell a specialist widget or a commodity, as the experts we are supposed to be able to tell you about your market, your niche and how many people are searching for your stuff. This is the same with all marketing. If you go and ask your local marketing company to advertise your product in the most cost-effective way to the sort of customers who would want to buy it, the marketing executive is expected to be able to do this. They're being paid to know and so you would expect to be able to get an answer quickly. I'll let you into a secret. If your SEO or marketing company gives you an answer straight away, move on. There is absolutely no way a company can tell you all about your niche without doing at least some research, and this is why we ask for your analytics. We don't know anything about your business because you've only just called us up. Even if we've dealt with others in your industry, you are different and so we need to investigate why you're different. If your argument goes along the line of "We're the same as this company or that company" then you need to find yourself another business. Google Analytics should be the most important installation on your web site. You should have it running from day one and it should be collecting data. You can then give that data to your SEO company who can then tell you a little bit about your business. But why is it so special? Well, the analytics will tell you exactly who has visited your site, what they do there and how long they spent. It will also tell you two important pieces of very interesting information. It will tell you what keywords they used and where they came from. The keyword analysis is very important and it is here that we have been able to highlight the mistakes many people have been making. For example, I recently visited a company that were proud of their number one ranking for a particular keyword. I asked them how many sales they got from it and they just didn't know. I asked them how many visitors they got from it and they didn't know that either. However, they did have analytics installed, they just hadn't looked at them. And here's the rub: it's OK embarking on an SEO campaign and it's OK to throw a lot of money at it, but if you don't test and measure your campaign you are wasting your time. In the company above, they had spent money on promoting this particular set of keywords and the hadn't even bothered to see if they were effective. I looked at their analytics and not surprisingly nobody had ever visited their site using the keywords they had proudly pushed to number one on Google. Not only that, using the keyword analysis tool that Google provide, it would have been easy to have saved themselves a lot of money because it seems only a few people use those keywords anyway. Google Analytics is absolutely essential if you are going to ensure your SEO campaign is effective. Without it, your efforts are simply being wasted and you should consider spending your marketing budget elsewhere. In subsequent articles I will explain the various sections of Google Analytics in more detail.
Great article.. Google Analytics is a great and amazing tool for those on a shoestring or less for a budget.
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