Analyzing the Data
- how many people are visiting your site
- where they are coming from
- what pages they are visiting
- how long they are staying on each page
- what page were they on when they left your site
- what keywords they used to find you
- what devices they are using when they view your site
- and so much more
The bad news is that you probably don’t know which tools are available or how to use them. The good news is that we do.
Google Analytics
Google analytics is the best tool out there for retrieving and analyzing user data… and it’s free. Once the tracking code is inserted into your website, Google begins tracking behavior. You will then be able to access this information by logging into your Google analytics account. But a word of caution. There is a ton of information and it takes some expertise to make sense of it all. Below is a screenshot of the overview report which shows how many users visited the site in the last thirty days.
That’s just one report. The screenshot below to the left shows you some of the other information available from Google analytics
Google Search Console
Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, the search console provides invaluable information that comes directly from Google. Here’s a screenshot:
The information provided here is especially important because it comes from Google’s experience in trying to crawl your site. Here you will see if Google encountered any difficulty crawling and indexing your pages. If they find any issues they will tell you what they are and how to fix them. Some of the information available here is whether any spam or malicious code has been detected on your site, how many of your site pages have been crawled and added to Google’s index, whether or not any content is being blocked or can’t be crawled. Additionally, if you’ve made any changes to your site, you can ask Google to crawl your site and add the new pages to its index. The site will be crawled and re-indexed almost immediately.
Some other tools that we use to determine the overall SEO health are: