Digital marketing has become increasingly important for business success. As more people gain access to digital devices, they are encountering new products and services more often through the internet. More than just the internet, they are discovering businesses with the help of search engines.
Google is the most prominent search engine and ranking highly in results can greatly improve your brand visibility. If you’re running a small business, you may fear that only larger businesses can afford to rank highly. However, a lot of SEO performance is based on technique rather than money.
To optimize your content and website for search engines, you need to understand the guidelines of the algorithms and how your content fulfills them. There are a lot of marketing tools available to do that, but one of the most prominent and free options comes from Google itself.
Google Analytics can give businesses key insights to improve their SEO performance and enhance their search engine rankings. To explain more about Google Analytics and how it can impact your SEO strategy, we have created this brief guide to cover the fundamentals.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a service provided by Google that provides statistics and basic tools for businesses to use for marketing purposes. By tracking key metrics of website performance, marketing teams and business owners can identify where they are succeeding and where they need to improve their SEO.
There are a lot of data points that Google Analytics can track, so let’s break them down why they are important for SEO.
Why is it important for SEO?
As stated earlier, the goal of SEO is to improve the ranking of your content in search results. Accomplishing this can get difficult if you approach it without data-driven insights. Some marketing professionals are used to using intuition when it comes to in-person deals. Meanwhile, digital marketing is dominated by things like keyword research. To thrive in SEO, you need reliable data.
Google Analytics provides valuable metrics regarding website performance that you can use to collect insight on your visitors. You can uncover the top sources of your website traffic such as where users are linking in from, what keywords they search for, and even what devices they use. You can also view reports regarding data such as purchases, time spent on web pages, and precise demographic information.
By collecting this data, businesses can determine patterns and trends among their user base. With this information, you can develop better strategies to attract your target audience and retain customers.
Important Metrics
There are some data points that stick out as being very important for an SEO marketing strategy. Let’s discuss the significance of a few.
Bounce Rate
This metric details how many customers come to your website and leave without visiting any other pages. This can be useful in a few different ways. You can see which of your web pages are not inciting further interest. You determine if it is difficult to navigate the rest of your site. The goal should be for a customer to land on your site and explore further. You want a lower bounce rate to show that you’re keeping customers interested.
Device Usage
As you might suspect, device usage shows how many of your visitors are accessing your site through different devices. Whether that be on mobile, desktop, or otherwise. This is useful for determining if you need to expand the accessibility of your site for other devices. You might not think you need a mobile design until you discover the number of mobile visitors.
Site Speed
This may seem a little out of place, but site speed is a big part of SEO. If your website does not load quickly, especially compared to other pages in similar search results, Google may lower your rank. This is because slow site speed is seen as disrupting usability for visitors.
Develop your Small Business SEO Strategy
All of this information highlights just a brief amount of the vast pool of information provided by Google Analytics. Even with all of this information and data, some businesses may still need more help creating a strong SEO strategy.
At Bauertech, our highly specialized team of digital marketers can provide your business with a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy to improve your rankings and attract more customers. Contact us for a free strategy session and get started on the path to increased web visibility.
