Quick Analytics Tips
If you are like me when you think of analytics you think of boring stat crunching. It's kind of like the end of the month accounting in that I hate the idea of sitting down to do it and I feel a huge relief when it's done. Even though going over the analytics is important and can help improve conversions, it's dry and not very exciting. So, if you want to get it over with as quickly as possible here are some quick tips that you can do that will help you either increase your site's profits, or help you get more visitors.
1. Referring Keywords - Most likely you already know what the top keywords are that you should be working on, but what about some of the longer tail stuff? If you have a keyword that is showing up in your reports that is 3 or more words long, most likely you won't have a lot of competitors for that term. How high do you rank for it? Can you create a new page specifically centered around that query, fire a few links to it, and get it to rank No. 1?
2. Site Search - Once visitors are on your site, what are they looking for? If a product or article is frequently sought using your site search, then maybe you should feature it more prominently on your homepage, newsletter, or any other way you look to upsell and cross-sell your products.
3. Intelligence Alerts - I use Google's Intelligence Alerts to inform me of any issues with my sites. If a site has a big drop in traffic one day, then I check to see if something is wrong. Maybe it was hacked, maybe my robots.txt or .htaccess is not allowing the spiders to index my sites, or maybe it's just a low traffic day. Still, I need to know what's going on without having to check myself each and every day.
If you just put into place these three analytics tips then you should be well on your way to increasing your site's overall performance.