You only have to do a little research around Google analytics (GA) to realise there are true fans, there are those who sceptical and those who sit on the fence. We use Google analytics, we send our clients a monthly report through GA, the simplicity of the dashboard interface allows them to monitor how their SEO campaign is working.

For those who have no desire to jump into the murky depths of the true capabilities of GA, lets look at the basics of what they can highlight for your website:

1. Traffic Sources overview: Without analytics (doesn’t have to be GA) you wont know how visitors use your site, or come to find your site. If you look at your dashboard you will notice a pie chart in the bottom left hand corner. This will tell you:

# The percentage of people who found your site through search engines (higher the better if you have an orgainic SEO campaign)

# The percentage of direct traffic you receive e.g people who have typed in your URL.

# Referring sites is when a visitor clicks on a link to your site from another site.

2. Content Overview: You can monitor the most visited pages, the time spent on those pages. Which means you can focus your highest converting keyphrases around these pages.

3. Keyword tracking: you may find over time your carefully selected keywords might not be the most appropriate, or that you are missing out on a little golden nugget you had not initially thought off.

4. Track and improve your conversions. A website is there to promote your business, by tracking your conversions you can build upon what works. Monitor market/seasonal trends.

5. Bounce Rate: You will see how long visitors spend on your site (bouce rate), this indicates that visitors are not finding what they are looking for and are clicking away instantly. It is well worth taking the opportunity to re-think your content, design or products.

Google analytics can provide you with an extensive never ending amount of useful information about your websites performance. This blog literally scratches the surface, well it doesn’t really even do that, but I hope it at least gives you an understanding of what is on the surface.

The sceptics don’t like that Google being the “super power” it is, has the ability to see how visitors from all search engines find and use your site. Meaning should they want to, they can undermine all your SEO efforts, in all fairness SEO is constantly evolving and nothing is set in stone. Google’s aim is to bring the searcher the most relevant results to a query, should google wish the change the game, SEO consultants are going to have to up theirs.

Written by Danii Ingram, Content Writer for Creare; specialists in SEO and Web Design.