Analytics tools and how I use them
Welcome back!
To be perfectly honest when I started Colours Magazine I didn’t know much about Analytics tools and SEO for monitoring site traffic and increasing the exposure of the site. In the past two months however I have been trying to learn as much as I can about using various Analytical tools and different techniques for SEO. I am using this post to share what I have learned and how it has helped me in the hopes that perhaps others can benefit from it.
This is a very wide topic and I simply can’t hope to cover it in depth in just one post, so I am going to cover one small topic each time.
Let us start at the very beginning, something that everyone who has ever written a blogpost or published online recently has come across, keywords. Many people would think of keywords as the words that you would type in a Search Engine like Google which will generate relating search results and hope that their website will be one of them as the keywords will cover the subject area their website deals in .
One thing that perhaps many don’t realise and certainly I didn’t with regards to Colours Magazine, was the fact that the search terms I think people should be using to search for my website are entirely different from what they are actually searching for.
For instance, take the example of Colours Magazine, an online magazine dealing in photograpy. Photography itself is a very wide and generic term, how do we know what keywords people are actually searching for and how then to leverage that trafic for our benefit. I am going to illustrate my point further with the help of three free and extremely useful tools by good old Gooogle.
Google has a tool called, Google Insight for Search. What does it do:
It analyzes the Google Search data and finds out how many searches have been done for the terms that you would have entered.
For example, take the word ‘photography’, and let’s see what data google insight produces:
Click on the picture to see a larger version with more detail
There is a lot of data here and all of it is relevant. However I am only going to discuss two things. The bottom two red boxes. Remember that we searched for ‘Photography’. So the bottom left red box shows the current top searches related to photography, the bottom right red box shows the upcoming or breaking ‘hot’ search terms related to photography. This gives you an immediate idea of what people are searching for and how or what sort of keywords you might want to include.
Another similar tool is called Google Trends. It lets you chart search information data for a particular category over a period of time to see how the popularity of a search term has evolved over time.
Of course every one is aware of Google Analytics, so perhaps I don’t need to go in much detail. One thing that I would like to mention is the Website Optimizer tool. Website Optimizer let’s you run experiments between two versions of the same page to see which one works better. So you can use a set of keywords for one page and another similar one for another page and chart user behaviour against them both to find out what works best for your audience.
For instance, when Colours Magazine was first launched, I had a page called ‘The Gallery‘ which just had photos. I wasn’t sure how many people were going to that page or what was their behaviour when they got to that page. Using Website Optimizer I tested two different versions of the website with different ways of presenting the same content. In one version I had photos on a seperate page called Gallery and in another version the same photos were placed towards the bottom of the homepage.
The data I got told me that the Gallery page wasn’t really serving it’s purpose, people weren’t spending the amount of time on it as I thought they would, where as the alternate version towards the bottom of the homepage was getting a lot more attention and hence this led me to a better visitor oriented design.
These are just some of the tools that I use, and as I explore them further I am learning how can I better leverage them for my needs. Hopefully in the soon I shall discuss more about this subject, in the mean while why not leave a comment and share how you use Keywords and Analytics tools, which is your favourite and how have you benefited from it?
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