Web Stats, Analytics, and Keyword Analysis

Any website will provide content that will be targeted towards a certain demographic or possibly mixed demographics.  Whatever the case, it is important to really be able to target that demographic with the appropriate content for greater use of advertising.  The right keywords, when coupled with advertising through options such as Google AdSense can reel in large amounts of traffic as well as revenue by processing ads through Google.  Web statistics help to determine which keywords are being used to find a website through the search function as well which can help in determining which keywords should be analyzed for ranking better in the system.

The ability to track your progress on a daily or weekly basis allows you to change very quickly what is or isn’t working. An example would be if I was selling a cover for an iPhone that was solar powered. I didn’t know where to start on my keywords, and I didn’t have any way of tracking my progress. Two months in  I had 3-4 sales with about 30,000 hits to my site. That isn’t very good and it took me two months to figure it out.

What if I had a way of tracking on a daily basis the progress of my sales pitch, what was driving traffic to my site, the ability to use different sales pages to see which converted better, and a lot more?

That is what services like Google Analytics have done, no longer do you have to sit around waiting for months to see if your product launch was a success.

Instead, using Google Analytics I could set up three different sales pages with tracking information and test them against one another to see which converted best. I could track where my traffic was coming from and how long they were staying. I could see an overlay of where my users are clicking most often (maybe by putting the sales button in a closer proximity to this area could help?). The possibilities are truly endless on what you can do with this information. The information is truly power and power in this case is the ability to convert visitors into buyers of whatever it is you are selling.

What Google Analytics Does and How to Use It?

Understanding and utilizing Google Analytics is not difficult. The main objective is to understand what keywords should be used in context to content created so that more traffic and higher paying advertisements are served onto the website.  Ranking for direct keyword matches that are blunt and straightforward is possible, but when going against websites which have been established and have content that grabs the top ranking keywords it is more efficient to target lesser used keywords and phrases.  Not all internet users search and browse the web the same way, and using keyword analysis can help determine which keywords should be aimed for to catch the differential searches.

Visualizing data, trends and other important information could be done through analytics.  Google Analytics requires a webmaster to complete a linking of the website to Google’s database to keep accurate count of how people reach the website.  The count could vary wildly in part by several factors including how easily remembered the domain name is for direct visits, keyword searches for search engine traffic and link follow through to arrive at the website.  The process can provide an amazing amount of information which is useful towards fine tuning how people arrive at the website and what they can be targeted for with advertising.

Gaining Access to Google Analytics

Setting up services for Google Analytics does not take long.  The user of the service will need to create a Google account, log into Google Analytics and follow the simple process.  Google asks participants to create a unique file (instructions are provided by Google Analytics) that resides on the root of the domain hosting which could be indexed.  The webmaster must also provide a sitemap, which is a physical log of the pages on a website.  The sitemap can be generated with tools online or manually if the webmaster is skilled enough to work in XML for indexing and web crawling by major search engine technologies.  Google will then take 24 hours or more to index the site and links and will start to provide statistics based on when the technology started counting them.

The process usually takes less than 24 hours but can have delays due to processing errors and difficulties with server access.  Once complete, users of the service will be able to view statistics for the website(s) listed on the account and can track, research, improve on any aspect of the website.  Using additional services such as web stats to keep track of general traffic to the website as well as detailed statistics about unique visitors, length of duration of visit, host IP listing, browser being used to view the site, operating system of the user and more can help to ensure that the site is operational and accessible for everyone.  These statistics are invaluable to creating custom tailored websites to demographic group(s) which will be utilizing the website for its services, content or other resources.

Using Google’s Keyword Tools and Keyword Analysis

Once everything with Google Analytics is up and running, it is important to understand what drives visitors to the website and those of competitors as well.  Google Keyword Tool is part of AdWords, but is freely accessible by anyone, even if they do not have a Google account.  The tool asks for input of a keyword or phrase to determine the statistics of search volume for the keyword or phrase in a broad or exact wording match.  The tool can give detailed information about competition for the keyword or phrase as well as the amount of global monthly searches and the local monthly searches for a location that you could set.

Graphs of local search trends can be followed in through Google Insights for Search which could provide additional data to better understand how the keywords or phrases are searched.  Keyword analysis is possible through several different tools which are not Google centric as well.  Keyword analysis tools can pull information provided through a URL search which counts the amount of unique words, their frequency of use and density percentage relevant to the URL provided.  These tools can help to determine frequency of useless keywords for removal or rewriting to reach the optimum keyword density for major search engine indexing and statistical relevance.

This Lesson’s Action Steps

1. Learn to use and understand your website statistics.