So you’re working on a search engine marketing plan and you’re improving the traffic to your website. Whether you’re driving organic traffic through SEO or paid listings in Google or Yahoo, it’s critically important to study the traffic to your website to understand the full impact of your results. You just may learn something very valuable.
Using website analytics such as Google Analytics (there are many other good website statistics services available) you can measure the value of traffic from search engines and for different keywords.
For example, let’s say you are driving traffic for your most desirable keyword both organically and through paid listings. By studying the average time spent on your website for both organic and paid keyword rankings, you may find that organic traffic spends more time than paid traffic from your favorite keyword. If the difference of time spent is significant, that would imply that the visitors from paid searches for a given keyword are not as good as visitors from organic searches for the same keyword.
By studying your website analytics, you can discover such a valuable insight so you can take action. In this example you would want to consider revisions to the use of the paid keyword.
Studying your website analytics is similar to a report card. The great thing about it is that the analytics data is available 24/7 and it can be reviewed for any span of time. If you are actively implementing a search engine marketing plan, studying the website analytics data is an absolute must.
August 1st, 2007 at 6:08 pm
So true! This is the key to finding how to best optimize your site, and get the most out of your content!