Introduction to Google Analytics for SEO

This page was originally written by Robert Morrison on 8 Nov 2007 as an article for Oyster Web.

As a Scottish web developer working in the Lothian area many of our clients are 'small to medium enterprises'. There are a wide variety of business types, of course, but they tend to have similar needs and expectations from their websites. As Internet usage in Scotland grows, Scottish companies are regarding corporate websites as increasingly important investments. And it is not only direct-to-consumer e-commerce websites that are generating income. Indeed, a relative return-on-investment can be estimated by simply monitoring how well (and of course how many) conversions (leads, not necessarily sales) your website is encouraging. This can be improved with targeted SEO and of course pay-per-click. How well your site is performing can be measured by Google Analytics, a web-based and free website analytics service.

Web Tracking Technology

Google Analytics allows you to track the Traffic to particular pages of your website. It works by using a cookie and a small piece of JavaScript on each of the pages that are to be tracked. When one of your visitors requests a page with that contains the Analytics code, a signal is sent to Google to tally another page visit. The cookie helps to determine (anonymously) who-did-what. Just for instance let’s say your site has two visitors simultaneously: User X and User Y.

1. User X instructs his or her browser to access your homepage. The browser requests the page and finds that it has some JavaScript (this is the Google code). The code instructs the browser to create a cookie and then send lots of useful data off to Google. This data will be crunched by Google’s Analytics service and the results will show information such as whether User X found your website via a search engine, a pay-per-click listing, another website or by typing the address in by hand.
2. User X navigates to the e-commerce area of the site; meanwhile User Y arrives at one of your news pages. The users then browse around the website until eventually they navigate away.
3. You (and Google) don’t know who User X and User Y are (personally) but you are able to see how they arrived at your site, what paths they took through the site and from which page they chose to leave the site.

Benefits of Website Analytics

To the Internet Marketer this can be very valuable information. We can see trends across the website: popular landing pages that could be capitalized on, pages that tend to ‘bounce’ users away that should be redeveloped, and which navigation paths through the site most often lead to conversions. As designers we can see which pages are working (in terms of actuating conversions) and which pages are underperforming. Of course a real strength of Analytics, and its original purpose, is to give detailed feedback on your Adwords pay-per-click campaigns. Being able to set the cost of the AdWords against the page-by-page Conversion Rate data is particularly helpful in managing the marketing budget effectively.

So, whether or not you choose to use pay-per-click to drive traffic to your site, you can see quite clearly how high your profile is and the related customer-pull your site has. Once users have landed you can see trends and behaviour patterns and that lends a lot of information about how your site structure and Content may be affecting your business performance.