There’s so much information in your Google Analytics account that can help you understand your business and market what you do better. I want to share two important things that can give you the marketing help you need to make your website do more work for you and the right clients find your business. It’s not enough to put a site up and leave it there. You need to look at what it’s doing for you to make sure it’s
Before I get started, if you don’t have Google Analytics on your site, contact your web developer or website company and ask them to put the code into your site so you can access this great data. It shouldn’t take them long at all and it’s worth every penny it costs you (if they even charge you).
The first report to pay attention to is the referring sites section, under traffic sources in the dashboard. This report shares with you other web sites that are linking to your site and referring traffic to your site. You may have a local business who is sending you traffic that you didn’t even realize. Maybe you are running a co-marketing promotion or have a display in their location. Checking out the referring sites section of Google Analytics is one way to see how these marketing activities are paying off for your small business. You can find great potential marketing partners by checking out your referring sites report, too. Be sure when you do a co-marketing promotion that the business you’re working with includes a link to your site on their blog or somewhere on their site as this helps your Search Engine ranking. You should do the same on your website for any partners you are working with.
The second report I like is the keyword report. This helps you see what words people are using to find your business when they search for you using Google. So instead of just typing in your business name (because maybe they have never heard of you), they may type in ‘camera stores Waco, Texas’ or ‘Top Asian restaurants in San Franscisco’. There may be keywords people are using to find your business that you wouldn’t have thought of. You can make your business easier to find on the web by optimizing your website for these keywords. That means including these words and phrases in the titles of your webpages, in your meta tags, keywords for pages, using them frequently in blog posts and in copy on your website pages.