FOUR THINGS YOU DID NOT KNOW GOOGLE ANALYTICS CAN DO FOR YOU
What do you use your analytics profile for? To check traffic, query volume, referral sources, Adwords campaigns or to find top pages and content? Many SEO’s primarily use analytics to track this information. But the deal here is, how many of us use this information, or let us say how many use analytics to amplify their SEO strategies?
In a blogpost by Getstat, you will come across four very important question that may have been missed while planning your SEO campaigns and startegies. In the following post, you will learn about these four things about your analytics profile, you surely did not know about (or probably did not notice).
Firstly, find out the top 10% of your traffic driving keywords
As all of us know, the bottom right corner of your analytics profile shows the total number of traffic driving organic keywords. For instance, say your website has 35,682 keywords driving organic traffic. So, in order to analyse the top 10% of these keywords, we need to export 3,568 keywords.
By default, Google Analytics will only import 500 rows at a time. But you can make it simple. Just add “&limit=x” to the end of the URL, wherein x is equal to the number of rows to be imported. The value of x for us here is 3,568 though the value can be extended upto 50,000.
After importing rows, you need to put together same keywords in a group. This can be done with the help of CSV file in Excel or simply using the Excel function date -> Subtotals. The results will put same keywords in a cluster. It will look something like below:
- Keyword 1a 10
- Keyword 1b 25
- Keyword 1 Total 35
- Keyword 2a 15
- Keyword 2b 30
- Keyword 2 Total 45
You can also individually filter for each set of keyword permutations, by using wildcards with a custom filter in Excel 2010.
- Select your column header row (usually A)
- Click Data > Filter
- Click the Dropdown Arrow
- Go to Text Filters > Equals
- In the equals text field type your first keyword filter like this *keyword*
- Click ‘OK’
In the last step, you can make a new sheet in Excel with the filtered list of permutations for furthur analysis of the keywords to see which permutations of your head and body keywords are successfully penetrating.
Secondly, consider brand leveraging to Drive Non-Branded Search.
According to the blogpost , the author emphasizes “are there holes in your industry or vertical where your brand could come to represent the product? In essence branding your products to become closely-related and eventually “synonymous with your brand” .
A couple of examples mentioned are:
- Google is used in place of search engine (even if the person is referring to an alternate search engine, i.e. “Google [insert keyword]”)
- Lager is now used to refer to Yuengling
- Colgate for Toothpaste
- Xerox for copier
- Pampers for diapers
- SPAM for canned meat
- Folgers for instant coffee
- Kickstarter for Crowdfunding
- Post-It’s for sticky notes
- Band-Aids for adhesive medical strips
And so on…
One of the best ways to drive sales is to use a term (that has a high market positioning) synonymous with your brand name. This “branding” will help you position and penetrate your product in the market.
Thirdly, find out who are the top referral sources.
As we all know, this referral method is one of the most successful traffic sources to date. One doesn’t have to do much to get this traffic. Just ask your readers to share it will others for which they will be rewarded. But what we need to understand is, where is so much traffic coming from? Is majority of your traffic is based on relationships or is it purely based on close contextual relevancy? Let us look at each of them separately:
Scenario 1: If majority of your referral traffic is based on relationships, what can you do to gain more traffic? In this case, you can either do a series of guest posts on topics that is in accordance with the existing content of the blog or you can also do a series of conversation posts, wherein you can cover a particular topic in 3-5 posts. After this you can respond to each other via posts hosted on your respective websites. Alos, you can sponsor a section of their website in exchange for branding and link to drive traffic.
Scenario 2: The same blogpost also says, if the majority of your referral traffic comes content that is similar in your and the referring website, it would be much appreciated if “you write a thoughtful and comprehensive introduction email and be sure to include both relevant signaling stats for both your website and the recipient’s website.”
The blogpost also goes on to add “metrics like indexed links, domain authority, social shares, and any other search engine or social signaling metrics that make sense given the nature of the content. This shows that you are not only are knowledgeable of the opportunity, but that you have taken the time to research the recipients website and you are not just another link-builder web spammer.”
Lastly, are your campaigns converting enough? Where are they failing to convert and why?
Take a look at your SEO campaign performane and and try and answer the following two questions.
Firstly, search is driving sales but not subscription. Why are you only getting one subscription for every 10 purchases? What can be the actual reasons?
- No compelling content
- Nothing benefiting or interesting for subscribers
- No call to action
- Process to long to subscribe i.e. too many required fields, to may screens, clicks, etc.
Secondly, do you see that a certain segment of your campaign is converting but not the others? What can be the potential causes? Finding answers to the following questions may solve the problem.
- Is the pricing too high in comparison as compared to that of your competitiors?
- Are your features and benefits compelling and interesting enough?
- Are you offering any additional offering like money back guarantee or free support?
Thirdly, how is the “search-experience” of your product for the visitors? Are you showing and explaining your product comprehensively even on a non-branded channel? Are you providing the same sales experience to your website visitors as telephone, email, and referral sales?
In a nutshell
These questions will surely make your grey cells work (a little more). This will help you to use analytics to channelize your campaigns in a better and fruitful way by “identifying oppurtunities and weakness within your SEO.”
Do let us know how you plan to make use of of these strategies to enhance and amplify your SEO campaigns.
