The often overlooked and sometimes ignored aspect of an SEO strategy is your back end server stats and/or analytics. People are hitting your site now, and understanding the how, why, and what of your current viewers is the first step in seeking out new visitors and expanding on your current viewer base. Most hosts offer a statistics monitoring service that allows you to keep track of the basic visitor information. Google Analytics offers the most comprehensive statistics solution out there today, and it is completely free. The Analtics reports from Google Analytics will help you answer the following how, why, and what questions that will help you build your online marketing strategy.
How did they find you? Search engines, Linking from other sites, or did they type in your URL after seeing an advertisement in another medium. If they did arrive from a search engine, how did they find you? What were they searching for?. This will tell you where you could be spending more time and effort. If you want to increase direct traffic, then you need to increase traditional marketing. If you want to increase linked referrals, then you need to focus on networking and partnerships. And to increase your search engine traffic, you will need to increase your content focus to expand more into the issues and topics being searched for.
Why did they come to your site? What are the highest traffic pages and the most common searched keywords that you were found by. Try to get inside the head of your visitors. Comparing keywords to your content traffic will tell you if people are finding the content they are looking for, or if they are walking away disappointed.
What are visitors doing once they get to your site? The design and flow of your site can greatly effect how users navigate the site. Your analytics can tell you how long users are spending on specific pages and what links they are clicking on on those pages. It can even track file downloads. Understanding what visitors do on your site will help you in finessing your site design and navigation to allow for the most functional interface for your audience.
Analytics is the cornerstone to your online marketing strategy. You can sign up now for Google Analytics through your Google Account at http://www.google.com/analytics/
