Several people have asked me about how web analytics relates to WordPress SEO, so I wanted to explain this very important connection. I’ll start by pointing you back to the posts I previously wrote on blog traffic in advance of my Growing Blog Traffic teleseminar:
- Blog Traffic Terms Defined – Because Knowing What the Heck You’re Talking About is Always a Good Thing
- How to Measure Blog Traffic: Web Analytics
If you haven’t read those two posts, they’re a great primer on blog traffic terms and the basics of web analytics. When you’re done, come back here and I’ll discuss a few SEO-related blog traffic items.
Top Keywords
Your analytics tool should be able to show you a list of keywords people are using via search to end up on your blog. Just looking at the top keywords list is very revealing. We often think we’re targeting keywords, but if those words don’t appear in your top 10 keywords according to actual searches to your blog, then you’re not on target.
You may be surprised by what you see on this list, and it may be a good idea to strengthen existing content and create new content according what people are actually searching for to land them on your blog. For example, if an old post gets a lot of search traffic, add links in it to other posts you want to rank higher for (or at least get traffic to). Add new links to that older post in other posts, to make it even stronger.
Search Engine Referrals
Look and see how much traffic you’re getting from search engines. Chances are most of it comes from Google, but if your audience is older or less tech-savvy, you could get decent traffic from Yahoo or Microsoft. If you use Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources, then under that click Search Engines.
Google Webmaster Central
Google provides a nifty set of tools and information that every blogger should become familiar with, called Google Webmaster Central. Although there is info and links to other Google services, what you want are the Webmaster Tools. The Webmaster Tools require you to have a Google account.
Click on Diagnostics, then Content Analysis to take a look at several valuable data, such as whether or not Google sees duplicate or overly short meta description tags.
To see top search queries (in Google, naturally), click on Statistics, then Top search queries.
Analyzing the Analytics
You can (and should) look at SERPs (search engine results pages) to check your rankings for your main keywords, but you also want to keep an eye on the top 20 keywords by which people are actually making it to your site, because that’s the reality.
You’re going to make WordPress SEO decisions based on what you see in SERPs and what you see in your analytics.
I am always amazed by what terms people get to my blog and website.
It is really nice to see you covering this aspect of finding target keywords and how to analyse the results.
Although it is af course not only for WordPress SEO, but a must for any website that wants to ranked higher in Google.
@Hummerbie – Great point, yes utilizing analytics is not WordPress-specific, but the application of this information has to be translated into specific actions within a blog or website platform. Since there’s very little out there about this specifically for WordPress (and yet the number of WordPress bloggers is huge), I felt there was a strong need for step by step training on WordPress SEO. My training course is called SEO-Nomicon, and it will be available on the 7th at 4pm Eastern time.
Let me share a quick personal story about the importance of analytics and more broadly, webmaster tools.
On one of my much larger blogs, I was having a ton of problems with getting search traffic. After stressing endlessly over why, I used Google’s Webmaster Tools (a free service for webmasters). It said I had thousands of pages excluded by my robots.txt file.
So, I deleted it. My traffic shot up from 10,000 uniques per day to over 20,000 uniques per day in less than 2 weeks.
Mind you, people won’t experience this kind of growth, but the bottom line is… if I didn’t use analytics, I would have never fixed it.
After deleting my robots.txt file
@Derek – Thanks for sharing your story. It teaches an important lesson for everyone. I wouldn’t suggest deleting the entire robots file. You want one that does the right things, not the wrong things. SEO-Nomicon will explain how to do this with a simple plugin that requires no coding.
Some people get too obsessed with it though. That is usually the problem. You are wasting your time looking at the stuff. Now if you look at it 15 minutes every day then it isn’t so bad.
@Franklin – New bloggers invariably go through a phase where they can’t stop looking at their stats. It’s an important learning time, actually. Any more, I look at my stats every couple weeks or less, for about 20 minutes.
I think the best way to improve your analytics and SEO is to provide your visitors with quality informative content that they can use and learn from. I think this is the best SEO strategy of all.
Good article – people must use Google Analytics coupled with Webmaster Tools to further their optimisation efforts.
On the topic of WordPress SEO, if you haven’t already installed this plugin then I suggest you get the all in one SEO plugin for WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/