Website Analytics

Giving search engines the proper access to analyze your website is the only way to utilize data that provides information that can be used to fix/prevent issues that arise on your website. Search Engines have a long check list of things that need to be done and even missing one item from that list can be the difference between ranking and not ranking. If you want to benefit from the millions of potential searches done a day, then you need to follow every single rule that a search engines consider to be important.

Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools (i.e. Google Search Console) is hands down thee most important  and helpful tool that a search engine can provide to you. If you haven’t setup Google Webmaster tools for your website, then you’re already very far behind. This tool is what a search engine will use to get the proper access and visibility for your website. This is where a sitemap.xml can be submitted to the search engine, which in turn allows that search engine to quickly & efficiently crawl your entire website and report any issues or important information. This will also display the back links that are pointing to your website, which can be very useful to both manage your SEO link branding campaign as well as finding issues that may be negatively affecting your website from an outside source (i.e black hat SEO tactics, see Offsite Content Marketing for more info). If anything goes wrong or any form of issues arise from you website… it’ll be reported by Webmaster Tools…good or bad.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a data collection tool that tracks all varying types of traffic (direct, referral, and organic) that are coming to your website. This tool will display each individual traffic source and how that user responded once entering your website, i.e are they leaving, going into other pages, contact us, stalling and etc..

Although this tool is an extremely useful tool for website owners to look at growth and success…it is also a tool for the search engine to both improve or reduce your ranking based on how a specific traffic source responds to your website.  For example, let’s say a page is getting 100 organic traffic sources a day, but the bounce rate (a percentage of a specific traffic source that came to a page and immediately left before x amount of time had passed) was 80%. This tells a Search Engine that 8/10 people that clicked on this website immediately left, which in turn likely means ‘this wasn’t what they were looking for.’ If 80% of the user’s that do a search click on your website and leave than the Search Engine is going to assume the website isn’t providing ‘quality’ or ‘useful’ information for this organic search. Because, had the website provided useful  or engaging information to the user than they wouldn’t have left immediately to find another website.