Google Analytics is a powerful reporting tool that lets you know everything that’s happening with your website. If you feel like you need to improve your website and the experience it gives customers, it’s the best place to start.
Analytics is used by more than 27 million sites across the globe and that number is steadily increasing. However, not many people know how to take full advantage of Analytics and all it can do for a website’s SEO and traffic growth. It’s basically a digital roadmap of all the things you’re doing right and wrong.
The platform may be a bit overwhelming at first, but with enough practice and playing around with it, you’ll soon learn the metrics you should track to boost your SEO. If you’re trying to increase your website’s traffic with Google Analytics, here’s how you can get started.
Evaluate traffic acquisition
Do you know where your traffic is coming from? Is it mostly from other websites’ backlinks? Organic search through Google? A link connected to your author bio? From a guest post?
If you aren’t aware of what’s driving traffic to your website — and what isn’t — then you’ll never be able to make the necessary adjustments to create conversions and push consumers down the funnel.
Analytics lets you see which social channels are navigating users to your website the most so that you can spend more time optimizing a strategy for those platforms. This will increase your acquisition rate as well as your social following for visitors who are interested in your brand and its products.
Knowing which sites backlink to your content is extremely valuable to your growth strategy because it can help you generate more backlinks to your site and build links to get better ranked by Google. If you receive backlinks from authoritative sites, Google will favor you even more.
Once you know who’s linking to your website content, you can personally email them asking if they could include your post in their newsletter or weekly roundup. Or you could insert a backlink in your blog post that leads to their content so that you can promote each other’s content.
Optimize for mobile
With more than 4.5 billion mobile users all over the globe, you’d better make sure your site is properly optimized for mobile and other devices. If someone tries to navigate through your site’s content and has a difficult time doing so, you’re in trouble.
When viewing statistics in Google Analytics, pay close attention to content with high bounce rates and how much time users spent there until they exited. The bounce rate is the percentage of users that abandoned a web page after one view. You want to reduce your bounce rate, so if yours is high, take a good look at what’s not working and what’s getting abandoned. Compare it to content that’s doing well and see where the difference is.
According to a Google study, 53 percent of mobile users abandon a web page that takes longer than three seconds to load. So you’ll need to test your website for speed and efficiency with a tool like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Always A/B test elements of your website for the best user experience so that you know what makes traffic soar. When you know what works, you’ll be able to update your website with changes that bring positive results and customer satisfaction.
Analyze landing page reports
In Analytics, your landing page is the first page that’s viewed in a session and typically the link you’d provide users with if you wanted to backlink to your own content. Is your landing page at the quality it should be? Is it doing a good job of building a relationship with the consumer, gaining their trust, and creating conversions?
If the answer is no, you need a new strategy.
Google Analytics lets you analyze which web pages are most popular, how many sessions there are, bounce rate, how much time was spent on each page, and more. Google favors high engagement so it’s important to track engagement levels your audience has with your website. What content resonated with them most? What did they spend the most time on? What did they spend the least amount of time on?
When you analyze further, you’ll likely notice a pattern between content that’s doing well and content that’s failing to impress viewers. Figure out why users are spending time on certain pages and exiting out of others. Eliminate what isn’t working and put more focus towards what is.
Wrapping it up
There are tons of metrics you can track through Google Analytics to help your website’s traffic increase. It’s important to know what to look for. A good place to start is to look at an overview of where your traffic is already coming from, who’s consuming it, and for how long. Making sure your website is optimized for mobile users is also key to converting consumers, especially those at the top of the funnel. With enough evaluation and research of what metrics you should pay attention to, your website will gain traffic like no other.
