Website Analysis for Business Intelligence – an Example
This is a real-life example to illustrate what I'm talking about when I describe how to take your SEO and web search data to the next level, by analyzing it for its significance in terms of your business and incorporating it into business planning and operations.
Web Traffic Data
Your web traffic data includes valuable information about your business, including your prospects, your customers, and your changing world.
For example: Who is actually coming to your site? How are they finding you? What are they looking for? What do they think of your product and your services? Are they who you expected?
The data can tell you a lot, but you have to slog your way up a learning curve to appreciate its significance to your business.
Hopefully this example will help you and your organization to take your web traffic data beyond optimization for search engine page ranking, and start using it for business intelligence, planning, development, operations, and growth.
This Does Not Take a Lot of Time
Although it took me a long time to write this example, and will take you some time to read it, in reality the steps described below can literally be done in just a few minutes, once every week or two.
Our Example: www.Flameskimmers.com
For this example, we are going to use our own www.Flameskimmers.com website.
Flameskimmers is devoted to the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, which Don and I love. The website is owned and operated by Circuit Riders, so I can use it as an example without compromising any client information. We created Flameskimmers.com as a test site where our software developers can implement new work, and where we can display some of our photographs and articles, set up our own SEO campaigns, etc.
The site also includes a small online store, where we sell products from Canyon Country Publications, and the painter, Serena Supplee "Artist on the Colorado Plateau". (Be sure to check out Serena's 2011 Calendars!) Our vendors are friends of ours from Moab, and we also use the store as an ecommerce test bed and development training example.
Envisioning Information
For technical background information, see Understanding SEO Basics
Although it's possible to read the server logs directly, it's a lot easier to use a visualization tool to review your website's visitor traffic data. Most hosts provide an Analytics package, and there are also several commercial analytics software applications available. You can also sign up for a Google Analytics account for free.
How Google Analytics Works
When you sign up for a Google Analytics account, you are given a small segment of code, which is a script that must be placed onto every page of your website that you want to track using the Google Analytics interface. That script collects the visitor information for that page, and sends it back to your Google Analytics account.
Google Analytics is a fabulous set of tools, but not without some drawbacks. The most glaring issue is that Google is not transparent about the data or their calculations. There is also a 24-hour lag. If you need moment-by-moment traffic data, see your website administrator.
Google Analytics Dashboard for Flameskimmers.com
The following figure shows the Google Analytics Dashboard for Flameskimmers.com. Click to view the screenshot image at full size:
Fig. 1 – Google Analytics
Dashboard. Click to View Full Size.
In the following sections, we'll take a quick look at this Dashboard example and see what it can tell us about our visitors at a glance. We'll start in the upper-left corner and work our way down through the report.
Google Analytics Dashboard Review
First, the links in the boxes in the upper-left corner will open up more views, links to detailed reports, and additional reporting tools. We'll look at some of these in a bit.
Export and Email
Across the top we see an Export and an Email button, and the Advanced Segments dropdown menu. I selected All Visits for this example. Note that I also selected a date range of two months: from Aug 17, 2010 - Oct 17, 2010. You can click in the date range box to open the Calendar tool to change the date range; the default is 1 month. I wanted to include enough data in this example for it to be meaningful.
The Export or Email buttons open a dialog box will open that will allow me to export the data, including in tab-delimited format, or email a copy of the data to myself or another person. These alone are incredibly powerful tools, especially the Export feature. This allows me to export the data set that I'm reviewing in the Analytics interface, and open it in a normal data visualization tool, such as Excel, for analysis, charting, reports, presentations, etc.
Visits Graph
The blue graph is a visual display of the site Visits during the selected timeframe. (Be sure to look up the definitions in the online Help provided by Google.) Note the astonishing jump in early October. We'll come back to that also. The Graph by icons located immediately below the date range allow me to change the view from Day to Week to Month.
Site Usage
The data in this section tells me how many visitors came to the site, how many pages they viewed, and breaks down the average number of pages per visit. The Bounce Rate is important: the Bounce Rate is defined by Google as "the percentage of single-page visits, or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page."
In other words, the Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who left your site from the same page they came into; they left without looking around. A 60.04 percent Bounce Rate is pretty high, but I know the reasons for it and it's been improving for several weeks, as I can see from the small graph next to the number.
The Avg. Time on Site is given in hh:mm:ss. (Hours : Minutes : Seconds) The percentage of new visits is fairly high; but we need to convince more of them to stay longer and look around the site.
Visitors Overview and Map Overlay
The Visitors Overview report provides much more detailed visitor information, including languages, plus technical information such as network location, browser, operating system, and more. I quickly review these, and if I see something interesting I'll dive in deeper.
The Map Overlay shows me at a glance what countries our visitors are coming from. I see that most of them are from the United States, but when I look at the detailed report, I see that we had visitors from nearly two dozen countries all over the world.
What really surprises me about this report is that none of our visitors were from Germany or China. I know from personal experience that there are a lot of German and Chinese tourists visiting Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and nearby Moab Utah, so why don't we have any visitors from those countries coming to our website? I don't know the answer, and that's something I'll have address with some additional research and new content.
Traffic Sources Overview
The pie chart shows us the percentages of visitors who are coming to our site by clicking on a link on another website (i.e., "Referring Site"). These referring site links are extremely important in a web page's overall ranking in Google's search results. This number is weighted heavily in Google's calculation of the overall worth of your site against your keywords and phrases.
This number, in a nutshell, was Google's primary differentiator, or insight, into the problem of searching for meaningful information on the rapidly growing Web. They reasoned that if someone puts a link to your website on a page on their site, it indicates that they think your site offers some value. If the keywords used on the link match the language on your page, it reinforces your page's value for those search terms even more.
Content Overview
Plain and simple: this report tells me what my most popular pages are. In this example, our most popular content is the online store page (/gallery-ccp/index.php) for Canyon Country Publications. We're the only online retailer carrying the complete CCP series of popular guidebooks, natural histories, and maps of the region.
As you can see, just quickly glancing through this Dashboard gives me a ton of information of value to my business.
Viewing Detailed Reports
Fig. 2, below, shows the Traffic Sources Overview report.
Fig. 2
– Traffic Sources Overview. Click to view full size.
I've expanded the Traffic Sources link in the upper-left corner, so you can see all of the detailed reports that are available.
Top Traffic Sources
The spectacular jump in visitor traffic that occurred on October 3 was the direct result of a link that Don put into a post on the ufocon.blogspot.com blog, to an article that he wrote about the Roswell UFO incident from July, 1947.
This is a dramatic example of the power of social networking and high-traffic blogs to drive traffic to a web page.
Under the Top Traffic Sources section you can see that the second biggest source of referral traffic to Flameskimmers.com during this period came from ufocon.blogspot.com.
Keywords
The next report I opened is the Keywords report. In all of the technobabble and confusion about Search Engine Optimization, there is probably nothing more misunderstood than keywords.
A discussion about how to select yoor keywords and phrases is beyond the scope of this article, but I hope this will get you thinking in terms of what the user is looking for.
The next 2 images shows the detail window from the Keywords report. Click to view full size.
Fig. 3
– Keywords Report Detail
This report detail shows us the top keywords and key phrases that brought visitors into the Flameskimmers.com website during the 2 month period we're looking at.
Fig. 4
– Keywords Report Plus Landing Pages Report Detail
Fig. 4 shows the same report, but it includes an additional detail: it now shows which page the user landed on when they clicked on the link in the search results. I did this by selecting "Landing Page" from the dropdown menu of secondary fields.
As you can see, according to the Keywords report the top search keywords and phrases that are bringing people into the website are:
"colorado high desert"
"flameskimmers.com"
"high desert colorado"
"canyon country publications"
and versions of "colorado plateau"
Problem Spotted: One of the things I note is that the people looking for information on the Colorado Plateau are all landing on the same page, strata.php, and they're not happy with it. (It's all about the geological strata of the region.) Each visitor has left the site instantly from that page, even though it probably contains at least some of the information they're looking for. Frankly, I'm a little surprised because there's a ton of information on that page. But theory is trumped by field research, and I need to address the problem.
I'd like to get a higher search page ranking for "Colorado Plateau", and the Keywords report is telling me that my landing page for that phrase needs work first. Pinpointing website trouble spots this way helps me save time and energy by taking the guesswork out of prioritizing my limited website update resources. I may create two or three versions of the same page, with different layouts and headings and content edits, and use Google's page comparison tools to run experiments and see which version would be better for a higher ranking.
In the meantime, my next step is to take a closer look at the volume and competition for my keywords.
Keyword Tool
Of all the analytics tools available from Google, I think my favorite is the Keyword Tool, shown below in Figures 5 and 6.
The purpose of this tool is to allow you to experiment with different keywords and phrases. The tool will generate a list of terms related to your search word or phrase. It includes the keywords' search volumes for the past month and the past year, plus their estimated average "charge per click" price to help you decide if you want to set up the keyword as a paid adword.
The information available with this tool is staggering. It's based on Google's search data set, and it provides a snapshot of both global and local trends.
Some people check their horoscope before making decisions; I check the Keywords Tool.
You should too. Do you need to pick a business name? A website name? A new product name? Are you writing a marketing brochure or catalog product descriptions? Are you writing for your blog or website? Are you researching a new potential customer sector for your products or services? Are you curious about your competitor's keywords? For example, you'd like to know approximately how much they're paying for their "Sponsored" links? Look here.
Come to this tool first and do some research on the language. Then, go to Google and your other searech engine(s) of choice, and enter the keyword phrase in the search box. This is a critical step to your research, and it can't be automated! Always always always look up the keyword language in the browser, to see what kinds of websites occupy that language space in the search results. I usually look at the top 100 hits; after that it doesn't matter.
I also use Google Trends for primary research, but I like the Keyword Tool because it includes the CPC rate information. It also generates results for keywords with much smaller search volume than the Trends tool will handle.
Compare the Search Results for the Two Keywords
Open and compare the full size versions of the following figures. (Click to view full size.)
Fig. 5 –
Find Keywords Results for "Colorado High
Desert"
Fig. 6 –
Find Keywords Results for "High Desert
Colorado"
Both of these keyword searches contained the same words but in different order, and that produced very different results in the list of keyword suggestions. If I had added "flameskimmers.com" to the Website field, that would have produced still another set of results. Play around with this interface, and think about the data. I also strongly recommend that you download the results if they're useful to you, because they change over time.
Keyword Field Descriptions
The fields in my display include:
- Competition. This graph image shows how many advertisers are bidding on this keyword, relative to all keywords throughout Google.
- Global Monthly Searches. Approximate number of searches for this keyword globally in the past month.
- Local Monthly Searches. Approximate number of searches for this keyword locally (i.e., in the United States) in the past month.
- Local Search Trends. This bar graph image shows the past 12 months worth of searches for the keyword. I love this graph! It tells me at a single glance whether the keyword is increasing or decreasing in popularity over the past year, which is a good indicator of social trends. I can spot trends while they're still forming, before they go mainstream.
- Estimated Avg. CPC. This is the average price for a page 1 placement with a paid adword campaign set up on the keyword. In other words, if you set up a paid campaign for the keyword, this is how much money you're going to pay each time your sponsored ad link is clicked. The price can range from $0.05, UP. I was looking at some terms earlier today that cost over $15 per click. Ouch! Organic SEO is the way to go, but paid adwords have their place, as long as you know exactly what you're doing. I find the CPC price information interesting primarily as another data point to judge the relative strengh and popularity of a keyword.
There are more fields you can add by clicking on the Columns button and selecting them from the list.
Review of Suggested Keywords
Instead of systematically reviewing every single feature and data point in these 2 search results, I'm just going to talk my way through them, and note what the data are telling me.
First, let's take a look at Fig. 5, "colorado high desert".
The keyword phrase, "colorado high desert", had less than 10 searches last month, and according to the Local Search Trends graph, it never gets more than 10 searches in any month. Flameskimmers.com has page 1 position 1 ranking for the phrase, which was easy to achieve because the volume is so low.
Isn't it interesting that "colorado river pictures" and "pictures of the colorado river" have the same number of searches and similar annual search patterns, but the CPC price for one is almost 10 times higher than the other?
An Example of How to Use This Intelligence for Business Growth:
You're a Western landscape photographer, and you need to get a high ranking in the search results for your website selling your prints of the Colorado River. You see this data, and you begin using both keywords in your site content. (You might also play around with words based on "photo" or "photograph" and see if any of the suggested keywords have higher traffic volume.) You decide to give your keyword a boost to try to increase traffic, and you set up a paid adword on the nickel $0.05 keyword: "pictures of the colorado river". Your CPC money will go further, and the search results are almost identical to the more expensive keyword.
Another Example of How to Use This Intelligence for Business Growth:
You've bought an online store, which includes an expensive SEO Marketing Agency paid adword campaign. You get the monthly report and realize they're charging you a flat fee of $1 per click. They've set up your account with about 100 keywords, only 10 of which are related to your store theme and merchandise. You decide to review the data for yourself, to see approximately how much money the marketing agency is paying to Google for your sponsored links. All you have to do is sign up for a Google Analytics account to access the Keyword Tool. You don't have to do anything to your website files. You research the keywords and realize that most of them are only costing the marketing agency a nickel per click. They're making a $.90 profit off of you every time someone clicks on your Sponsored Links in Google's search results.
We've seen this scam more than once: the online marketing agency sets up an unsuspecting website client with a bunch of scattershot $0.05 and $0.10 keywords. They charge the client a flat rate of $1.00 per click or whatever they can get away with, as their fee. (Who knows what they're doing with the rest of your analytics data, which they're gathering from your site using their embedded script.) The client gets top page ranking for the words, so they're happy for awhile (they don't realize that none of these visitors are converting to sales), and the marketing agency folks start planning their next winter vacation in Cozumel...
Suggested Keywords Review – Continued
At any rate, continuing on with my review, I also note the difference between the search volume for "colorado plateau map" and "map of the colorado plateau". 320 versus 36 is a significant difference, but the CPC price is the same. If I were looking for the best keywords to put on the product page for my Colorado Plateau map, I would use the phrase "Colorado Plateau map". I don't have to guess, I can come here and look it up. I would communicate that intelligence back to my SEO team and my website content team so they reinforce the term within the source code.
Next, let's take a look at the Find Keywords results for "high desert colorado", in Figure 6 above.
The first thing I notice is that this keyword phrase, with 37 results, occupies a much more robust language space than "colorado high desert", which only had 7 results.
Looking through the keywords in this list, I'm surprised to see several having to do with food. It's a clue that there is a site, or a group of sites where the language, "high desert colorado", is being used in conjunction with food. As an SME reviewing my data, I know from experience that Colorado is home to a small industry of gourmet, organic, tasty trail munchies, and I wonder if that's what I'm seeing in the keywords that Google is suggesting here.
I scan the other keywords in the list, looking at the directionality of the Local Search Trends graphs, and the CPC cost figures. Now I'm ready to compare my keywords in the browser.
Search for the Keywords in Google, etc.
If you don't do this you're only getting a fraction of the benefit of this research. Remember, the point of this exercise is to review the data and analyze it in terms of what it means for our business. Getting our site up high in the search results for our keywords (i.e., "search engine optimization") is important, but that's not our main focus right now. We want to see what our potential customers are looking for, what language they're using to find it, and what results do those searches produce.
You can only automate so much. At some point a human being with subject matter expertise needs to review the data and think about it.
Fig. 7
– Google Search Results (Top 4)
Business Analysis Results & Action Items
As the result of the business analysis I've done for this example, I discovered the following:
A Possible Business Opportunity
As you can see in Figure 7 above, Flameskimmers.com has Page 1, Position 1 for the term "high desert colorado". Position 2 is HighDesertFoods.com, specializing in organic foods and produce. I've never heard of them before, but this may be a real business opportunity! I will be taking a look at their website, to see if I want to consider contacting these people to discuss carrying their products on the Flameskimmers.com online store.
Expected Visitors Were Absent
I also discovered that I am not getting visitors I expected: we had no visits from Germany or China. So we'll have to address that somehow.
Information-Rich Page Is Bouncing Visitors
I was also surprised to discover that the page about the rock strata of the Colorado Plateau, strata.php, is not doing well. People looking for the information it contains are leaving it as soon as they enter. I'll have to fix that as well. Do I need to add links to each layer at the top? Do I need to add images? Maybe I need to move the strata diagram to its own page? I can create another version of strata.php with these change, and use Google Analytics to test its effectiveness.
Conclusion
See how easy that was?
Although it's possible to spend a great deal of time doing this sort of research and analysis, I find that doing a quick review such as I've described here about once every week or two is enough for sites I'm familiar with. This level of review normally takes me less than 30 minutes.
So when I hear people say things like, "I don't have time to review all those numbers," I think what they really mean is that they don't have time for the learning curve.
Hopefully, this example demonstrates how easy it can be, and how much value there is to gain for your business by becoming familiar with your website visitor traffic.
If you have any questions, please let me know!
– Mary Ecsedy, 11/23/2010, Pittsburgh, PA
More Information About Website Analytics for Business
- Understanding SEO Basics,
by Mary Ecsedy
Provides an overview of Search Engine Optimization, including a Basic SEO Checklist. - What's a "bot"?, by Mary
Ecsedy
aka "spiders", "crawlers", etc. - Introduction to
Search Engine Optimization ("SEO") – Carnegie
Mellon University Lecture Notes, by Mary Ecsedy
This is Mary's SEO presentation from her SEO lecture on 10/12/2009 at Carnegie Mellon University.
