Did you know that you can use web analytics to track different SEO and internet marketing practices? You bet your sweet giraffe you can! Here are five really great ways to track your efforts as an optimizer.

5. Event Tracking. This is a method you can use where, by adding a small snippet of code to select areas of your site, you can very specifically track visitor clicks on certain areas of your site. This is especially handy with things like Calls-To-Action that go to your social media pages (buttons to your Twitter profile, for example). This is also handy in doing things like experimenting with the location of certain links or buttons on a page, to see if they get more clicks. Although you should definitely read Google Code’s guide on Event Tracking, implementing the Event Tracking code is not as difficult as they make it sound.  Simply add this code:

onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Category', 'Action', 'Label');"

Within the code of whatever you want to track. For images, this is within the <img> tag, for links this is within the <a> tag. Swap out the “Category, Action, Label” tags with your own custom tags. One example might be, “Twitter” for Category, “Follow” for Action, and “SideNav” for Label. You will start to see hits on these spots in the “Content” section of Google Analytics, under the “Event Tracking” report!

4. Custom URLs. Custom URLs using Google’s URL Builder are a great way to track external content, or content that you send off into the world with a link back to your client’s site. This can be anything from a Press Release, to a Linkbait Article, to a banner ad on an external website.

It won’t track how many views a page gets, but it will track how many times the URL that you create is clicked, and it will add specific labels so that you know where the clicks came from. Our Account Managers wrote a great blog post outlining how to use the Google URL Builder to this purpose.

Once the URL has been set up, you will start to see hits come in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, in the “Campaigns” report.

3. Search Engines Report. The value of this report to an optimizer is so self-explanatory that I won’t even bother explaining it. It is also found in the “Traffic Sources” section. Check it out.

2. Referring Sites Report. This is a really simple report, found in the “Traffic Sources” section of Google Analytics, but it can have a treasure trove of information on your link building efforts! This report will show you all the non-search engine websites that send traffic to your site. If one of your link building sites is sending a lot of traffic, then you know it is a valuable resource. Conversely, if you’re spending money on a link resource that never sends you traffic, you might want to reconsider investing in that website…

1. Keywords Report. One use of the keywords report that you might not have considered is that if a keyword has a lot of visits but a really high bounce rate (the % of people who visit your site then leave without viewing any other pages) then it may be that you don’t have a good page for that keyword, or that the page isn’t well optimized. This can be extremely valuable for making sure that your website’s pages are really well targeted towards your chosen keywords. I usually like to complement the Keywords report with Google Insights for Search, to compare keyword popularity across all of Google.

For more information on analyzing data in Google Analytics, you can check out my other recent blog entry, “Quickly and Visually Interpret Data in Google Analytics.”

How do you use Google Analytics to measure your SEO practices? We’d love to hear it! Please feel free to share your knowledge in our comments.

I have been looking forward to getting back to blogging and it’s great to begin the new year with our new and improved site.
We have an exciting year ahead at Page 1 Solutions, we have set some big targets and the SEO team is gearing up towards achieving our goals for this year.

In our quest toward further refining our processes, our team is working on testing the different variables we use as part of our optimization. This will help get scientific data for our optimization techniques which will be useful in gaining even even more success for our clients. While the benefits of testing are obvious, there are some important points that we need to keep in mind as we work on the different tests we have set up.

It is important to define clear and measurable criteria for the tests and to detemine what kind of testing is best suited for the situation.

1. We should assess our goals and determine a reasonable number of scenarios to test in a relatively short time period.
2. We need to prioritize the elements to be tested and use appropriate testing tools.
3. It is vital to methodically track and evaluate results, to assess the results, carry out follow up tests if needed and to use the results to standardize processes.

Some of the different testing processes include A/B testing, split run testing, multivariate testing, and something I’ve recently heard about called called Taguchi testing.

• A/B Split Testing involves testing one element of a page against another to see which is more effective.
• Multiple Variable Testing or Multivariate Testing involves Testing more than one element at a time to test the
• Advanced Testing using statistics to determine the ideal configuration of elements using the smallest possible number of visitors.
• Advanced Testing and Automated Optimization using the Taguchi Method – The Taguchi Method was developed 50 years ago and is supposed to be the most powerful and successful testing method to create a significant improvement without creating a large load of work.

Designing a good test scenario requires time and preparation. Successful tests are those that can be completed in short periods of time yet yield greatest possible improvements in results. While the tests may not give us all the answers we need, they will surely help get us closer to achieving optimum results for our clients.