There may still be some small businesses that aren’t using your Google Analytics data, but if there is, the best advice you can take is to start using it right away. If you want to be able to better optimize your website, better understand your visitors, and convert more visitors into paying customers, then Analytics data is one of your most effective weapons.
One of the key data items to review is the bounce rate. There has been a lot of discussion since the Google Panda update about whether or not bounce rate is a ranking signal, and if not, whether it should be. But regardless of how Google views bounce rate in terms of search engine optimization, as a small business owner you need to take it seriously.
The Bounce Rate together with the Time Spent on Page, is the indicator that shows you if visitors find what they are looking for on your website. Shown as a percentage of visitors who didn’t look through your website more than the landing page they landed on. So if you get 500 visitors a day and your bounce rate is 60%, then you’re only grabbing the attention of 200 of those visitors. Many small businesses like to know what a realistic bounce rate is, but it varies wildly depending on the market sector and the keywords used to drive traffic to a site. General keywords will always result in a higher bounce rate than highly specific 3-4 word keywords, so it’s very hard to generalize, but as a very rough guide, you should aim for no more than 50% – 60%
Google’s own definition of bounce rate is:
“Bounce rate is the percentage of single page views, or visits where the person left your site from the entry (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate typically indicates that the site’s entry pages are not relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages are, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert. You can minimize bounce rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad you run. Landing pages must provide the information and services that are promised in the ad text.”
It’s pretty obvious that if visitors don’t stay long on your site or only visit one page, then you’re not offering them what they want or they can’t find it easily. Either way, there is room for improvement. This is where a small business search engine optimization campaign begins to become intertwined with marketing and it can be hard to see where SEO ends and marketing begins. (This, of course, is why we see the term search engine marketing more and more.)
The focus should be on creating a site that a visitor wants to stay on for a while and browse and then search further within the site. This goes back to the value of good content and Google’s focus on a good user experience; This is the best way to keep people on your site, which will keep Google happy but will also be good for your business. What this means in practice is that every page on a site should ideally be a high-quality page with good content. This has the added benefit of ensuring that all your internal links point to high-quality pages, preventing good-quality pages internally linked to low-quality pages from losing some of their value as a result.
But back to the valuable Analytics data: Bounce rate is shown as an average for the entire site, but also as a percentage per keyword for each web page. By reviewing all of this data, you can identify very high bounce rates that are dragging the site average down, and also very low bounce rates, which indicate a high level of customer satisfaction.
But there’s more to Google Analytics than just bounce rate, time spent on site, and number of pages viewed. It can also be used to detect long-tail keywords that are targeting visitors you didn’t know you had. Keywords can be viewed on individual pages in order of popularity. If visitors land on a low-quality page via a particular keyword, there is an opportunity to change that page to make it more attractive to that visitor. For example, if a high percentage of visitors land on general information pages via long-tail keywords, but you want them to buy a product, or at least sign up for your contact details, add links to the general information pages. information that will take the visitor to the registration page or product pages. Show them that your site has more than just information.
You can also view the page click patterns of your visitors. This is a great way to visually show which links are most popular and can help redesign a page layout to better effect.
So if you’re involved in a small business SEO campaign, take a good look at your Google Analytics regularly and use this data in your search engine optimization efforts. If you don’t, you’re wasting a great opportunity.
