If your business has a website it was almost certainly designed to give you leads and sell your services or products.
Google created free tools to help you manage your website and help improve its performance in the search engines.
The main two are Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
Simply set up a free Google account and you can then get to these useful tools from the one place.
Firstly, add Analytics. To do this you must verify that you are the owner of the site – to do this you add some code to your site. Once Google sees the code in place it will give you access to the data.
The code allows the search engine to collect lots of useful information such as how many people visit your site, waht days give you the most visits, what content is the most popular and more.
You can generate reports whenever you want to and you can compare how well your website is doing compared to the previous month or find out what your year on year improvement is. This allows you to see if your online business is moving in the right direction.
You can also see the words that people typed in to the search engines to get to your site, e.g. if you are a web design company you might see a trend for local search terms such as web design Salisbury or web design Wiltshire rather than more generic ones. This can highlight areas to work on. If, for example, lots of people are coming to your site for a certain product, you can work even harder to promote that product and attract even more people to your site – it’s obviously working for you. If on the other hand you expect lots of people to find your site for a product, but when you check out the data you find out that they are not, it can prompt you to do something about it – either promote the product more or funnel attention to a better performing product.
One of the great things about Analytics is that it tells you how many conversions you are getting. A conversion is simply an action that you deem valuable, such as completing an online sale (reaching the thank-you page following a purchase) or downloading a PDF. It allows you to see the number of people starting off the purchase process and where they drop out of the sales funnel. This can tell you how effective your website is and pinpoint where you could make changes.
If you have the Analytics code on your website, you can use it to activate Webmaster Tools. This tool allows you see how Google sees your website. It can flag up any problem that the spiders have in crawling your site. It also flags any issues with your site such as duplicate or missing meta tags. The meta tags help tell Google what a page is about and so it pays to be alerted when there are issues.
If you have gone to the effort to get your website designed and created in the first place, it doesn’t make sense to just leave it and blindly hope that it is doing the right things for you.
Of course there are other tools that will provide similar data, but Google provides these tools for free, they work well and they are industry standard so it makes sense to at least consider using them.
.jpg)
