We all know that website analytics are important and we could all afford to check them more often than we do. However, simply checking your site analytics doesn’t do you any good. What do you actually do with that information? How do you use that data to make real improvements and adjustments?
To help answer those questions, we’ve put together this series, Analytics with Actions. Each week we’ll look at an important metric and give you simple steps you can take to improve those metrics! If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your site, you’ll want to do that first.
This Week’s Metric: Top Keywords
One of the most important metrics is Top Keywords. This shows you the keywords visitors are entering in search engines that lead them to your site. To view your top words in Google Analytics, go to ‘Traffic Sources’ > ‘Keywords’
If your top keywords all contain variations of your company name, then there is room for improvement. While you certainly want people searching your company name to find your site, you want people to find your site when they are looking for keywords that are related to the services or products that your company deals in, before they even know who you are.
To the right is an example of top keywords from our site. You will notice that our company name is prevalent in this list, but there is also a nice mix of relevant keywords that cover many of our services like web, social media & branding.
Usually when variations of your company name or url dominate the top keyword list, it is a sign of an unoptimized site. While onsite optimization involves many things, often the best place to start is your title tags.
What you can do today – Optimizing your title tags.
Title tags are one of the most important onsite ranking factors and tell visitors and search engines what that specific page is about. Titles should be unique and relevant to each page and include the keywords you want to rank for. That means you should avoid using similar titles site wide.
If you have a keyword list, try to make pages that specifically target each keyword or related group of keywords.
Where are title tags?
Titles are seen at the very top of your browser window and also in search results. They are used by search engines as the title of your page on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In the graphic to the left, you can see that I have circled the title of the current page that we are on and underlined the titles of pages on the SERP. Every web page should have a <title> tag within the <head> section of the HTML code. Depending on how your site is built and coded, there are a few different ways to update your title tags. If your site is straight HTML, you can simply find the <title>Title is here</title> code and update it on each page. If your site is built on WordPress, we recommend installing the All In One SEO plugin which will allow you to create unique titles for each page that are different from the page name. If you’re unsure how to update title tags on your site or are worried about messing things up, we can help.
Examples of bad title tags:
Welcome to our website
Your Biz – Home Page
Our Services
Examples of good title tags:
Your Biz – Widget Makers – Dallas, TX
Widget makers – Buy widgets in Dallas, TX
Widget company – Free widget guide
Taking it even further
Title tags are certainly the best place to start for onsite optimization and simple changes to your title tags can often result in major changes and improvements in your search rankings and traffic depending on the keywords you are targeting. However, there is much more that can be done and with more competitive keywords you’ll often need some help. At MODassic we offer a full range of SEO services and can help you find the most valuable keywords to target, optimize your site and help you drive traffic and conversions. We offer free site evaluations and strategy sessions so contact us today!
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