The Why, What and How of Web Analytics

The Why, What and How of Web Analytics

If your business has any kind of digital version, it must invest in Web Analytics, which includes SEO, analyzing better performing content, and SEO Analytics.

Web Analytics is an umbrella term word to describe the practice of tracking, measuring, and analyzing the performance of your digital products, primarily your website.

It includes not only measuring a website’s traffic, but also that of your social media channels, among other things. By doing so, you get to understand the marketing and sales plans or strategies are working and those that are not, helping you to make the necessary course corrections.

Web Analytics and SEO Analytics

The terms Web Analytics and SEO Analytics are sometimes used interchangeably, but there’s a fine line dividing the two.

Today, with the advent of website complimentary channels, so also stand-alone digital channels, Web Analytics has become a more all-encompassing term.

SEO Analytics though is limited to describing search engine optimization activity.

While SEO Analytics helps your business to ascend on the online search results’ pages, inputs obtained from Website Analytics can also be used to better the user experience for website visitors.

After all, you need to optimize your website to the fullest to help footfalls convert into buying customers, for which, understanding customer behavior is also the key.

Also, some social media channels such as Instagram and Snapchat are now being used successfully as stand-alone marketing platforms.

You really don’t need a full-fledged website or a very extensive online presence to be successful on these networks. Yet, you still need to record and measure the usage and actions of visitors.

Web Analytics

Web Analytics measures inputs from on-site and also from off-site data of various web products, including the website itself.

While both are versions of analytics technology, Web Analytics is not the same as Data Analytics. The latter offers businesses the wherewithal to improve customer experience and predict their next move.

For this, it uses the inputs provided by Web Analytics and SEO Analytics such as the bounce rate, visitor demographics, etc., along with many other inputs.

These data inflows are then used to create a detailed statistical profile of customers and their behavior. Data Analytics is used to constantly improve the customer’s experience.

Then you have Google Analytics, which many confuse for SEO Analytics because of Google’s popularity among search engines. However, it is just one of the many tools/software available for SEO Analytics.

In this post, we will look at not only at Web Analytics in detail, but also give you some tips on how to go about it.

Table of Contents

1. What Is Web Analytics?
2. Web Analytics Tools
3. What Is SEO Analytics?
4.  Difference Between Google And SEO Analytics?
5.  Benefits Of SEO Analytics
6. Questions Answered By SEO Analysis
7. How Data Analytics Can Improve SEO

What is Web Analytics?

Assisted by various tech tools, Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage.

For example, in order to run a successful website, you need to understand your audience. Web Analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data about your website visitors, including SEO data.

It helps you understand which of your marketing campaigns are effective. Which web pages are popular, which are not? Which content collateral is working and which is not?

Data obtained and thus analyzed can also be used to improve your website. It starts from the collection of data to its processing to developing KPIs for RoI. All of which can then be used for formulating your online strategy.

Web Analytics Tools

In order to carry out your Web Analytics, you need help by way of software. There are many tools out there to help you to track website traffic or measure conversions.

Here are some of the most popular tools for your web products:

Google Analytics: A free service offered by Google that draws up a detailed view of the visitor’s profile.

StatCounter: Businesses can use this one to measure the performance of a websites across channels.

MoPub: MoPub is a mobile advertising platform which also offers businesses the ability to track their mobile traffic and conversion rates.

For Instagram, you could use any of the following:

Sprout Social, Iconosquare, TapInfluencer and Bitly.

What is SEO Analytics?

Before we get into that, let’s first understand the basic definition of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines deploy robots to crawl the web so that they can index website pages. These are also called web spiders.

They run on algorithms, and analyze thousands of signals to determine which pages should appear in the search results for a given keyword query.

SEO Analytics helps SEO experts, content providers, website admins and business owners to collect, measure, analyze, and understand the influence of their online and offline SEO tactics.

What it does is help them identify and track areas where their SEO strategy can be bolstered.

SEO Analytics takes the guesswork out of your SEO efforts. One can use data to understand the effect your campaigns are having, and you can make actionable decisions that help you improve your campaigns.

This particular form of analytics can help businesses understand the behavior of their target audience and how they interact with their websites.

By understanding these things, you can make better decisions about how to improve your SEO and attract more visitors to your site.

Thus, you can save time and money by making more innovative and effective decisions sooner rather than continually experimenting to find something that works.

Google Analytics and SEO Analytics

Like we said before, Google Analytics and SEO Analysis are not one and the same. The former is a free service offered by Google Inc. that develops a detailed picture about the visitors to a website.

It monitors and gives insights into on-site user behavior. Some of the answers it provides is on how traffic behaves on your website, how engaged they are, what they click on, and how many leads (or sales) it generates.

SEO analysis, on the other hand, is the process of analyzing a website’s search engine optimization. It uses parameters such as organic search traffic, average time on page, bounce rate, site speed, and others to get an idea.

One step in it is to analyze your website’s Google Analytics data, which will help you learn about the keywords and phrases that are driving the primary traffic to your site. This information can then be used to improve your overall SEO strategy.

Why Measuring SEO Data is Important, and The Benefits of SEO Analytics

Simple: without data, it’s difficult to know whether your SEO efforts are paying off or not. There are a number of metrics you can use to measure SEO data, including traffic, conversion rates, and rankings.

Each can give you valuable insights. Traffic and conversion rates, for example, can tell you how well your site is performing in terms of attracting and converting visitors.

Rankings can tell you how well your site is vis-a-vis of search engine visibility. Monitoring this and other SEO data points allows you to get a clear picture of your SEO progress and find areas for improvements.

SEO analytics can help businesses track the progress of their SEO campaigns, measure the return on investment of their efforts, and understand how their SEO performance impacts their brand.

You need to first understand your incoming data in order to help your business to take informed decisions about SEO strategy and improve their ranking.

Questions that SEO Analysis can Answer

Here are some key questions that an SEO analysis can answer for you:

1. Which are my website’s popular pages?
2. Which keywords on my website draw the most traffic?
3. What is the average position of my website in SERPs?
4. What are the most popular times of day on my website?
5. Which content collaterals the users engage with the most?
6. Where do my best customers come from?
7. How is the competition different?

How Data Analytics Improves Your SEO Ranking

Data analytics is a powerful technology. It can be the foundation of your Web Analytics and can be utilized to improve your SEO and website ranking.

To help with their SEO, marketers today can use data analytics to boost their SEO efforts. It helps marketers see what previous strategies have worked.

Essentially, data analytics can also boost your SEO by helping you make more data-driven decisions.

It can help with:

Analyzing customer behavior: In order to be relevant to your users, which in turn drives your SEO metrics.

Improving the website user experience: A well-designed and easy-to-navigate website ranks higher than others.

Tracking and optimizing user behavior metrics: By understanding which keywords are most effective, you can optimize your website content. This is required to make it more visible to search engines.

Additionally, data analytics can help you identify which backlinks are most valuable, so you can focus your efforts on building relationships with high-quality websites.

Data analytics can help you track your progress over time, so you can adjust your SEO strategy as needed.

By using data analytics, you can ensure that your website is as visible as possible to potential customers.

To sum it up, Web Analytics plays an important role in any online business as it helps track, measure, and analyze the performance of your digital products, starting with your website.