Can I ask you some questions? (That was one, but it doesn’t count)
- Aside from your homepage, what page on your site brings in the most traffic?
- What keyword or keyword phrase brought the most visitors to your site last month? This month? Yesterday?
- How much of your traffic comes from a mobile device?
- What state, or part of your state brings in the most traffic?
- How many pages Google has in their index for your site?
- What websites send you the most traffic?
Although you may not know the answers to some of these questions off the top of your head, by the end of this post I hope you understand that the answers to these questions and thousands of other questions are available to you for the amazing, low, low price of… wait for it… FREE!
With Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools configured for your site, you can have this information readily available whenever you want it. You can even setup dashboards and automated reports to generate to you so you do not have to go looking for it to remember you probably should be paying attention to this data.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics not only lets you measure sales and conversions, but also gives you fresh insights into how visitors use your site, how they arrived on your site, and how you can keep them coming back.Even if you are not sure you want to pay attention to this stuff yet, you should go ahead and get these tools setup for your site so they can start collecting data. It is easier to ignore data you collected and decided you did not need than to try to recreate data that you ignored from the beginning.
What is Google Webmaster Tools?
Get the data, tools, and diagnostics for a healthy, Google-friendly site. Check your site’s health for potential issues that Google has detected. Understand your search traffic and learn how users are finding your site. Make optimizations to help Google better understand and represent your site.
This video does a good job of providing an introduction:
In addition, since these tools are available from Google free of charge, there is really no reason why you would not be using them. Support documentation is easy to understand, but if you would like some additional guidance, feel free to contact me if you have some questions I can probably help you with.
I have talked to a couple of business owners who have said they did not want to worry about Google and use any of their tools. I can understand their desires, but they are not interested in business if they are going to ignore Google. Do I wish there were another 400lb gorilla in the search room? Yes! For now, Google is the Dungeon Master and we are just characters in their game. Take advantage of the tools they provide to make your life a little easier to see into their world and go after all those people who use Google every day. They are probably looking for something you can provide.
