SEO Training for Beginners – Part Three

. Repeat for each page you want to track.In short, you will have understood, if you are not used to it, forget it and contact someone competent. Everyone has their own domain 😉

Check your stats

Once you activate your account and enter the code on your site, wait 24 hours before you can start using the tool. After this time, go to your Google Analytics page and you should find something like this below.

The home page gives you an overview of the audience on your site. At first glance we notice the curve of visits to our site. The date field at the top right allows you to choose the period during which you want to analyze your statistics.

Over time, you’ll notice audience spikes that could be due to an article that’s particularly popular or covers a topic that’s current at the time, a link on social media, or a link from another popular website. Instead, watch out for free falls. They can reveal problems with your web host’s server.

SEO takes time. It doesn’t just take a few weeks, it takes months before you feel significant long-term effects. A link from an authoritative site can, however, speed things up by increasing your Pagerank.

Below the curve you will find the encrypted data. THE » users » represent the number of unique visits, meaning that even if a person visits your site several times during the day, it is only counted once. THE sessions represent the number of visitors, without worrying about duplicates.

So you have the name of the pages displayed and the number of pages per session they are good indicators of the mechanisms you have put in place on your site to increase the number of visits. In the capture above, it is relatively weak. Some actions should be planned to attract visitors to other pages of the site by highlighting the contents. So you have the average duration of sessions, the bounce rate and the new sessions which represent the share of new readers (which is necessarily high when a site is born).

As a reminder, the bounce rate corresponds to a visitor’s action on your site. If the tendency of your visitors is to launch a page and immediately abandon it, the bounce rate will be high and this is a bad sign. The bounce rate is expressed as a percentage.

What can cause this is a site too slow to load For example. The bored user ends up giving up and moving on to another site. To avoid this, make sure your site loads quickly, that there is nothing that interferes with the user experience (music or video that plays directly, etc.), and generate a call to action : links to other articles, subscribing to a newsletter, etc., so that your visitors don’t just read one page, but navigate to a larger part of your site rather than abandoning it once they’ve read the article.

However, this bounce rate is rarely less than 50% and for a blog it is normal for it to reach 70%, or even a little more. People search on Google, find your article that answers their question, and leave the site. You will have to worry more if you run an online store. In this case it is good to retain the visitor and potential customer by making them visit more pages of articles and possibly provoking the act of purchasing.

Finally, always on this home page, you will be able to know the geographical origin (countries and cities) of your visitors, their browser (Safari, Chrome, Mozilla, etc.), the operating system, etc. This data is important. Knowing your visitors’ operating systems will give you, for example, an idea of ​​what devices they are using. Computers, tablets, cell phones, etc. In this case, you will benefit from having a theme that adapts to any device resolution. This technology is called Responsive design. Also pay attention to the screen resolutions of the devices your users use.

The acquisition

Acquisition is how people land on your website. To get there, in the menu, choose “Acquisition” then “Presentation”.

Through this table you can view the main traffic sources for your website. Social corresponds to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc.), Organic searchin the natural search of search engines, DirectThese are users who arrive at your site by directly typing your site address into their browser’s address bar or via a shortcut or bookmark. Postponementthese are links from other websites that point to yours. We know how important they are.

We realize how social networks allow us to capture a significant portion of traffic and to what extent they are complementary to search engines.

This data is interesting, but we can go to the menu “All the traffic” where you can view in detail the different channels that attract visitors to your site. Inside this table you can also find the sites that have created links to yours, you can possibly thank them in return.

Keywords

“Keywords” menu, then “Natural Results”.

For over a year, Google has hidden most of the keywords that bring traffic to our site. Where did this decision come from? On the one hand, when we are connected to Google with our account, the URL is secure (https). Therefore Google claims that it cannot provide us with these keywords as the sessions are secure. Certainly. It’s also a great way to encourage webmasters to turn to paid AdWords campaigns.

In fact, here’s what it looks like:

We see that more than 91% of the keywords typed into Google by my visitors are hidden from me. They appear under the heading (not provided). So it is and we have to learn to compose differently from now on.

Analyze the behavior of your visitors

Menu “Behavior”, then “Overview”.

First you will be able to view the most visited pages on your site. This gives you a more precise idea of ​​what your audience is looking for but also recipes to implement to improve your future articles. We know, for example, that titles like “10 tips for being more efficient at work”, “5 essential things blah blah blah” work quite well. Titles that serve as questions like “How to solve this problem” are also often a source of success. Search engine users are increasingly typing direct questions into the search engine, rather than strings of keywords as was the case a few years ago. Try to write articles that answer your target’s questions.

Optimize your site

We have already said it: a slow site will hurt you. To your SEO first of all since Google pays attention to it, but the harshest penalty will be that of your readers who will probably abandon the visit and never come back to visit you again.

That said, it’s possible that your site is fast and that a particular page penalizes you, due to an overly large image or a looping script. You can check it in the section “Behavior”, “Site Speed” then “Loading Time”.