SEO and data analysis

January 24th, 2020

You’ve now had your website for a while and you’ve also spent quite a few hours working on your SEO, so everything should be going according to plan, right? But what if there’s still room for improvement? How will you know for sure if all your efforts produce the desired results?

Let’s jump back to the first article of this series to remind everyone that SEO is not a sprint but rather a marathon. When you come up with great content and work relentlessly on its promotion, you should also track and regularly analyze how real people interact with it. Only then will you be able to evaluate what works and what doesn’t and adjust your plan.

Study your visitors

You can use website statistics to gauge how well your site performs. Webnode offers simple stats, ideal for tracking the overall trend rather than the individual numbers. Is the graph going up? Then you’re probably on the right track and should continue with whatever you’re doing. If the graph seems to be stagnant, there’s space for improvement and experiments. Can you see a downward trend? We don’t need to explain what declining numbers mean.

If you’d like to take a closer look at the individual numbers, track all visits with Google Analytics. This free tool might help you pinpoint the reason behind those low numbers.

This useful information might include where your visitors come from, what kind of devices they’re using, at what times they’re most active and if the content you consider the best really performs that well. Then you’ll be able to update your website, social media and even paid advertisement around it. You might decide that a blog will bring you more traffic or to perform an A/B test with your ad campaigns. A simple update of title and description on a low performing page might quickly improve its click-through rate. Just don’t change more than one thing on a single page at the same time. Otherwise, you won’t be able to track if each individual experiment had any effect.

A few more tools for data analysis

Besides learning more about your visitors and monitoring your traffic, it’s also important to regularly check what Google thinks about your website and how well it’s ranking in the search results. For this, you can use Google Search Console. We’ve summed up the main benefits of this tool in our previous article on how to connect website with search engines.

Finally, because there’s no such thing as having too much data, there are tools for recording the behavior of your visitors. You can then watch where visitors point their mouse, what they click on or if they scroll all the way down to the footer. If you’d like to get these insights, install Smartlook on your Webnode website.

Analyze, adjust and analyze again

To put it simply, it’s better to analyze at least something than to do absolutely nothing. Even the simplest statistics can offer you some useful insights and influence the future content of your website. So, don’t forget to keep an eye on your visitors and Google.

  1. Introduction
  2. Basic principles and recommendations
  3. Where to begin? (content, target group, competitors, own domain)
  4. SEO settings in the Webnode website builder
  5. Links on your website
  6. Connecting to search engines
  7. SEO and social media
  8. Data Analysis (study your visitors)
  9. Mobile first indexing

What do you think, is it important to regularly track what’s happening with your website? Let us know in the comments below. Make sure to read this step-by-step SEO guide.