The COVID-19 pandemic has the world on pause, with most of the population in-home quarantine. People stuck at home are now turning to the internet to keep themselves busy; there’s no better time to drive traffic to your website. Take advantage of the quarantine traffic to promote your brand.
Analytics and SEO are two powerful tools business owners use to boost traffic to their website, in hopes of converting these visits into direct sales. They are both data-driven weapons that strengthen online marketing efforts, to drive organic traffic for free.
Analytics makes use of data taken from users’ behavior and demographics. Analyzing data can help optimize content that caters to the right audience. SEO employs keyword research and search intent; using them ensures that your posts are picked up by Google to be included in SERPs for your site’s increased visibility.
What is SEO analytics?
Analytics in SEO is used to track your website’s performance. SEO analytics, on the other hand, focuses on your site’s own SEO data to be assessed if your strategies were effective in driving traffic. This information can greatly improve your current and future campaigns because you’re essentially looking at data that indicate what you did right and what you can improve on.
Analytics and SEO are extremely important, in terms of online marketing, especially in augmenting your advertising campaigns. Below are 10 ways you can improve your site’s traffic which, in turn, can boost your business through analytics and SEO:
1. Invest in keyword research and search intent
An effective SEO strategy is founded on knowing what users search for and why they search for it. With this knowledge, you can optimize your content to answer your users’ problems.
You can do this by learning about the keywords users are likely to use to refer to your industry or to the products you offer. You can also follow this search intent guide to help you create content that satisfies your users’ intent by narrowing down the reasons why they have these concerns.
2. Create original and authoritative content
Knowing what keywords to use is the first step to creating high-ranking content. The second step is to learn how to create original and authoritative content using those keywords. Such keywords tend to rank better in SERPs because they provide relevant material to users, as opposed to duplicated junk content initially mass-produced online to trick search engines into ranking these pages higher.
Google, for example, has stepped up its game in making sure that SERPs are filled with content that is truly informative to the user. Original content also means new and unique takes on topics about your industry. It doesn’t always have to be material that is wholly different from other subjects covered before. “Authoritative” means providing accurate and knowledgeable information through your content using reliable sources.
3. Improve user experience through web design
User experience is also a factor that Google looks at when ranking pages. User experience is your users’ interaction with your website. Google employs RankBrain to measure how users move around your website. This is the combined power of analytics and SEO to boost a site’s traffic.
User experience is measured through behavior metrics which include bounce rate, the amount of new visits, and sessions. These all add to your page’s likelihood of being ranked higher in SERPs. For example, if Google sees that your users spend little time on your site and don’t visit, again, you’ll lose authority.
You can see how your site performs using Google Analytics. You can use that data to improve your user experience, to make sure your users stay on your site longer and invest in your content more.
4. Use power words in titles and in meta descriptions
Titles and meta descriptions are the first things that your users see in the SERPs; so they need to provide a summarized version of what the users want to see.
Using analytics and SEO, you can pinpoint keywords that rank well in SERPs. You can also use analytics data to determine what power words catch users’ attention better and use those words to rank higher and drive more traffic.
5. Learn from top-performing landing pages
Your website surely has pages that perform better than others. Although you try your best to make sure all your pages rank well for the SERPs, some of these posts fall short. For your page to perform better, identify and analyze your existing successful posts, i.e. those with a high rate of readership.
Use SEO analytics on that particular page to see what type of content or keywords drives traffic better and makes users stay longer on your site. This can help you build SEO-friendly pages that all have a fighting chance of ranking well on search engines.
6. Develop strategic web of internal linking
Using data analytics in SEO from your site, find what pages are visited more frequently and those need more visits. Through good use of internal link building, you can maximize the authority of your high-ranking pages to share throughout your site.
Setting up an internal linking strategy helps Google understand the structure of your site and the relevance of your posts to one another. If you strategically link authoritative pages to other posts on your site, you’ll have a better chance of these interlinked pages to be ranked higher in SERPs.
7. Beef up referral traffic
You can also use Google Analytics SEO data to find referral traffic and learn how this affects traffic driven to your site and its visit-to-lead conversion. Referral traffic refers to visits from links outside of SERPs. This pertains to backlinks to you from other sites or email links, social media posts, and guest blogs, to name a few.
Use referral traffic as a channel that offers an insight into other methods. Doing so will help attract users to your site. Increase your referral traffic to augment your existing SEO strategies, especially since these methods take time to produce results.
8. Track your ROI
Data analytics in SEO also helps in tracking what keywords you use lead to conversion, which gives you an idea of how much you’re earning through the use of keyword research and SEO as a whole.
You can get this data from your Google Analytics account. As part of your campaign monitoring, you should regularly check this information to make sure you’re not wasting time using keywords that don’t lead to conversions.
9. Make sure your pages are crawlable
All your SEO efforts will be in vain if search engines can’t even crawl your pages to index your posts. Before you rank on any SERP, search engines first unleash its bots or crawlers to scan your content. Not all sites are “crawl-able”. Ironically, you might even be blocking search engine blockers without your knowledge, to the detriment of your business.
Make sure that your website’s “crawlability” is up-to-date. This will help search engines determine what your posts are about, which can help your ranking. You can ensure the “crawlability” of your page in many different ways using analytics and SEO. The simplest ones are:
- Build a good internal linking strategy;
- Increase your site’s speed;
- Increase your pages’ word count in blogs; and
- Optimize your site for mobile devices
10. Regularly assess SEO strategies
Part of any good marketing strategy is a regular check-up of its performance. A lot of thought goes into an SEO strategy. This means that your team should be ready to backtrack all the steps you took in implementing your SEO project, to find out where your victories and failures originate.
Regular assessments of SEO strategies through the use of SEO analytics will surely help you in your future marketing campaigns. Proper data analysis will guide you on what to do and what not to do in driving traffic. Thoroughly understanding the ways how you attract users to your site will assist you in developing plans on how to convert these site visits into direct sales, thereby transforming your SEO efforts into actual profits.
Analytics and SEO are amazing ways to get your brand out there and have it experienced by your target audience. SEO analytics is the science of looking back at your implemented marketing plans and learning from them to improve future efforts. If used well and patiently, you will reap the benefits of conversion and sales.
About the Author: Kimberly Grimms is a futurist who spends most of my time monitoring social behavior in search of new consumer trends. She uses the information to create viral and useful content as part of the new media strategy.
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