SEOenthusiast

Today’s article is a guest post from Kevin Lenton. Kevin works with companies to build and maintain their online relationships with clients, as well as prepare content geared at high conversion rates. In his spare time he enjoys playing the harmonica – an activity he’s been involved in since the age of 12.

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Most are well aware of the power and benefits of installing Google Analytics to find out who is coming to a website. Many are even aware that you can see exactly what keywords are being searched for to find that website. There are not many out there however, who are aware of the fact that you can use that data to skyrocket your traffic numbers.

If you follow the steps in this guide, you will see a significant traffic boost. The beauty of this strategy is that it is often limitless (depending on how big the market is for any given website). This is also a strategy that works no matter how much traffic you are currently getting. The only requirement is that your website is getting some sort of traffic from search engines. It works best if you are getting 35+ visitors per day via search engines. The more traffic you currently get, the easier this technique will be to implement.

There are dozens of different options for bringing a website live these days. If you are serious about your website/blog and increasing the traffic, you have to prepare for achieving that goal. If you are on a low grade hosting plan, be aware of the consequences associated with going that route. You do not need anything extreme, but a simple plan from a good web hosting provider will suffice. That way, you do not have to worry about your site going down or some sort of security issue arising. The traffic is not going to skyrocket over night, but it is better to switch hosting servers when your site is getting less traffic versus more. There is always that risk of a small downtime when you change servers.

The idea behind this strategy, is that you will be analyzing your current traffic data, to figure out new pages that should be added to your website and/or blog. There is a lot that can be seen from looking into this data. Sure, it is nice to be able to see the keywords that people are searching for and how many visitors you are getting each day, but what good does that do if you are not utilizing the data you are looking at? Depending on the traffic level of your website, there may be dozens (or even thousands) of keyword phrases that are bringing traffic to your website. Many of these are long-tail keyword phrases.

Taking a look at the list of keywords in question, along with where you currently place for those keywords, will allow you to further target them. If you are ranking fairly well for many of these keywords on accident, imagine what you could do if you actually tried to rank for those same keywords?

The theory behind this strategy is simple. Your job is to find keyword phrases that you already rank for (on accident) that bring you traffic. The key is to find phrases for which you rank below #1. If you are already ranking #1 for the keyword, then there is no point in taking this strategy.

The first thing you must do is login to your Google Analytics account and access your keyword data.

Find your way to the dashboard of the website for which you are attempting this strategy.Click on Traffic Sources on the left hand side of the page.This will expand and give you more options. Click on Keywords.On the bottom right hand corner, you will see an option that says Show Rows. Choose the option to show 500 rows.

You should now have a large list of keyword phrases from which to choose. From there, you can scan through and see what keywords are bringing traffic to your website. Additionally, you will be able to see how many visitors have come from each specific keyword phrase. You want to find a keyword phrase that looks like it is bringing in a few visitors and also was not something you were targeting on purpose.

As an example, notice above a list of keywords from a website. The keyword that was chosen was olay return policy.

This keyword brought decent traffic as is.This keyword was not something targeted to rank for.The current ranking is not #1 (it is #5).We do not have a current page revolving around this keyword.

Notice above, that the circled result is where we are currently ranking. Also notice that the page really has nothing to do with olay return policy. If we build a page all about olay return policy, we could easily rank #1 for this keyword phrase.

In the example, the page that currently ranks is an Oil of Olay Skin Care Review page. An option would be to build an additional page added on to this review called Oil of Olay Return Policy. Optimize the page around the keyword phrase olay return policy, and it should rank #1 fairly easy. This is what could be called a low hanging fruit.

According to available click distribution data, there is a significant difference between the 1st and 5th listed ranking results on Google. While approximately 45.46% searchers click on the 1st result when searching for something in Google, only 5.00% click on the 5th result. While this is just a study based on a lot of different variables, and there are far too many involved to get an accurate number, there is still going to be a lot more action from the first result versus the fifth.

In theory, if you were to go off the above study, then olay return policy could yield approximately 73-75 visitors per month if our page ranked #1 instead of #5, where it currently brings in 8 visitors per month. It is likely that the number would be much lower, however there would still be a significant increase in traffic. The numbers above would tell us that traffic could potentially increase more then 900%, at least in traffic from that specific keyword. If you were to rinse and repeat this process with 10 keywords in total, all similar to the example described above, then the numbers would quickly add up.

It is not possible to calculate an exact rate of traffic by analyzing your current traffic. In the example, the percentage of clicks may perhaps be significantly higher than normal, because the results listed above #5 are all irrelevant and do not give the user what they are looking for. They may even notice that right away within the results, and skip straight down to #5. Who knows what the variables could be with your website, but they are worth looking at. Really take your time with your keyword data to figure out the perfect keywords to target.

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A big thanks goes out to Kevin for writing a fantastic guest post!

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Google analytics is probably the single most comprehensive tool that any webmaster can use to monitor the ongoing success of their site. The fact that it is free does not detract from its overall value. But it is still only a tool; the value comes with the person that knows how to use it. To most people the graphs, charts and figures will give a basic idea of how well your site is doing. What these figures don’t do is tell you where you could improve, what’s working on your site and what isn’t. To find these answers you have to know how to interpret the data.

Where to find the answers?

Bounce rate: The best place for many of us to start is with your site’s bounce rate, it’s the easiest element to understand and is often the easiest to rectify. To start, list your landing pages with the highest bounce rate, once this is done put together a list of the keywords that were used to get to these pages. Do the keywords used correspond with what is on the page? Did the searcher find what they wanted on this page; was it clear for them to see?

The keywords used and what the searcher finds on the corresponding landing page is often the highest cause of bounce rate, redesigning these landing pages to focus directly on what the searcher in looking for can have an immediate effect on your site. Other factors that may cause your landing pages to have a high bounce rate is a slow and clunky load time, over cluttered pages, poor navigation away from your landing page, or an unnatural progression away from these pages.

Goal, conversions and funnels: Analytics makes it easy to track your goals and conversion. If you’re not currently tracking these then you are essentially blind as to how well your site is doing. What is important about these elements of Google analytics is not necessarily the completion of the gold, but the steps and pages that led to the conversion. By reviewing the click paths of any converted customer you can get a much better idea of what convinced them to take the action you wanted them to. Was there something special about the content they consumed or were you running a special campaigns that may have led to this conversion? You will find the answers in Google analytics you just need to follow their click path backwards.

Segments: Looking at the raw data can be a daunting task, aside from the fact that you could be looking at hundreds of different keywords from searches all over the world. It will also be extremely hard to try and discern any useful and actionable data. To overcome this Google introduced segmentation which will allow you to break your traffic down by segments based on your requirements. If you want to review the search trends of the traffic coming from a specific country it will take two minutes to get a clear picture of this data by creating a new segment.

Site search: Basically site search will tell you what people search for on your site, but once you start to look at the data you will realize that it does so much more than just this, it gives you a clear idea of what your traffic really wanted from your site and what they wanted to find, the question should now be where they able to find it? Looking at the search refinement column and % if it sites exits after searching will tell you straight away if your site really provided them with the answers they were looking for.

Once you start to track your sites with Google analytics the amount of user data that will build up can help you make decisions that will have a positive effect on the future success of your site. Analytics can help you with your content strategy, competitor research, landing pages and the overall conversions of your site.

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