This is the fifth part in a series of six articles about SEO. Stay tuned to Schoolhouse Marketing for the full series on optimizing your marketing channels for the homeschooling market.
How do you know if the work you are putting in to optimize your site for search engines and those very special human visitors is really benefiting your bottom line? Unfortunately, you can’t know without looking into the data of where visitors are coming from, who those site visitors are, how long they are actually on your site, and many other traffic stats. Read on to learn the best practices of using Google Analytics for SEO.
Measuring your efforts is completely free in the very feature-packed free platform of Google Analytics. Setting up Google Analytics with your site should have been an important part of your website build. If that didn’t get done then, check out this guide from Crazy Egg that will give you the info you need for set-up and some other great reasons why you need to track your site stats.
If you just set up tracking, then you’ll have to wait a few days or weeks depending on your traffic volume. After which, it is time to figure out what all that data really means and how you can interpret it to actually improve your traffic and conversions. Knowing what that data really means is the key to making the changes to your website and ad campaigns to result in reaching the right target audience with the right message at the right time.
Here’s an example of using Analytics to assess the effectiveness of your online ads.
One of your ads on Facebook is generating traffic to your site. You can see that from the ad reporting from Facebook, and your Analytics account is showing the numbers to the landing page for that ad. With a basic view of your traffic stats, it seems like the ad is performing well, but when you look a bit deeper, you may find that while the ad is generating traffic, those visitors aren’t staying on the page for very long and not engaging with other pages on your site. It may be due to site speed, the content on the page may not be targeted well for the audience you’re engaging with the ad, or it could be a few other issues.
To get the inside scoop on interpreting Google Analytics data and using it to improve your SEO, this in depth article from Ahrefs will give you the straightforward guidance to help. The article begins with a bit about getting started with Analytics, but the real treasure in this article is the 7 actionable ways to use Google Analytics to track and improve SEO and the common mistakes you want to avoid.
Google Analytics does take a bit of getting used to and it can be overwhelming when you first start using it, but when you take the time to understand the sections and properly interpret what the data is saying, you’ll be in a much better position to be more efficient in your marketing overall.
Want a bit more direction on using Google Analytics for SEO?
Cognitive SEO offers step-by-step guidance on 8 different ways you can use the data to make more informed decisions to improve web pages and ad campaigns and also gives great information on how to use annotations and segments in the platform.
Receive the individual attention that will help you reach the segment of the homeschooling market that is right for your business by contacting us for personal help with your advertising needs.
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