Why should you get Google Analytics on your new website?

When you come to build a new website for your business, something you need to take into consideration is; how am I going to measure traffic to my website? And how can I use the data to improve its Google Ranking. A best way to do this is to set your website up with Google analytics.

Google Analytics is a Webmasters tool designed to monitor and collect data on your website, from the keywords people are using to search for and find your website, to which web browser they are using. It has clever tools such as the ability to show you how many views your website has had to the length of time people spend viewing it. You can even see how many people are finding you website but leaving it as soon as it loads.

In my opinion this is one of the most interesting tools I have been able to work with since I started here, It is fairly straightforward to use but I also know that there is a lot more for me to learn before I can call myself a ‘Google Master’ but now I can accept the title of ‘spy’ as this is how my girlfriend describes what I am doing when I am collecting from a websites analytics data.

So what can you do once you have had your site up and running for a month or two and have enough data to act on? In my first Blog I spoke about how I had been working on search engine optimisation (SEO) and how using it can help you rise through the rankings in Google’s results. Now together with Google Analytics I can see the SEO work I’ve been doing come into effect. I am able to see the keywords that people have been using to find a clients website I have been working on.

The results aren’t as positive as I was expecting, but this has shown me just how much competition is out there and how hard they are working. This means that I will need to do more in depth SEO on the website to find better keywords, ones that people are searching for locally and have a few number of websites optimised for that keyword.

Read my colleagues Blog on the effectiveness of SEO here

It has been very interesting working on a newly built website that has Google Analytics enabled, it has shown me how hard you have to work to get your website onto the first page of results and that it is an ongoing project. You can?t just set up your website, do some SEO and wait for your site to be number one. You need to go back regularly to check the keywords are working, check your data on Google analytics and put the work in to make your website the best one out there.

Keep reading my bi-weekly Blog to learn what new exciting skills I am learning.