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Why Analytics Should Be a Large Part of Your SEO Plan in 2020

Why Analytics Should Be a Large Part of Your SEO Plan, Always Since Google Analytics has become popular in 2011, it has been an imperative tool for marketers and business owners to use as part of their SEO plan. As the years have gone by, Google Analytics has only gotten better. To paraphrase management guru…
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Why Analytics Should Be a Large Part of Your SEO Plan, Always

Since Google Analytics has become popular in 2011, it has been an imperative tool for marketers and business owners to use as part of their SEO plan. As the years have gone by, Google Analytics has only gotten better. To paraphrase management guru Peter Drucker, your business should be making data-driven decisions at all times, and for websites and content marketing, that means using analytics. Let’s look at each of the reasons why analytics should be a large part of your SEO plan in 2020 and what we suspect, will be every year to follow.

Analytics Can Save You Money on Marketing

When you analyse your data, you may realise who your most profitable customers are and be able to adjust the landing pages they visit to increase repeat sales. Analysing the data lets you identify marketing channels and demographics that aren’t worth the money, so you can stop wasting money on tactics and customer segments that aren’t worth the effort. You may find new key search terms that you could easily dominate at a lower cost than your current marketing plan. And by determining which marketing channels have the highest return on investment, you know where to devote time and resources even if you’re on a limited budget. You certainly won’t waste time and money creating content for search terms that don’t lead to conversions or promoting products to audiences that don’t care about it.

Low Cost Market Research

In some cases, web analytics identifies new niche markets of people using your product or service you could cultivate at relatively low cost because they already see you as a solution – you just have to get the word out to sell even more to that market. Conversely, significant searches about problems with your products indicate something you need to address before it grows into a major problem for your company. In both cases, website analytics give you an insight into the market without having to pay for customer surveys or focus groups.

Analytics Improves Conversion Rates

You can spend more money marketing your site with ads or trying to increase traffic, or you can invest in analytics to understand what little changes will improve conversion rates. Perhaps you need to analyse the traffic sources bringing in not just the most traffic but the most paying customers and shift your efforts to increasing the traffic that leads to the most revenue. Sometimes you need to gather more information. It is surprising how many companies aren’t even tracking open rates and click through rates, so they don’t know what is working and what isn’t. You need that information to be able to identify your strengths so you can build upon them and your weaknesses so you can correct them.

Maybe you need to be doing A/B testing with call to action buttons, improving conversion rates which will lead to more products sold or more sign-ups for your service. With analytics, you can identify the people who open a message but don’t click on the call to action – a group you can easily target to convert because they are already part way through the sales funnel. Thus collecting and analysing data can dramatically increase revenue and profit

Bad Positioning Kills SEO

If you put your content somewhere other than the ideal location and visitors quickly bounce off the site, search engines will consider it a bad match and downgrade your content. This will kill your page ranking. You have to look at the data and optimise your content’s position.

Summary

Web analytics are essential to properly positioning your content so that your SEO efforts aren’t otherwise wasted. Web analytics allow your marketing team to identify what works and what doesn’t and which channels are worth the cost versus those you should abandon. This makes web analytics an investment in your marketing efforts and lets you focus on lower cost efforts like improving the conversions of those already in the sales funnel.

Image courtesy of woorkup.com

James Owen, Co-Founder & Head Of Search

James has been involved in SEO and digital marketing projects since 2007. James has led many SEO projects for well-known brands in Travel, Gaming and Retail such as Jackpotjoy, Marriott, Intercontinental Hotels, Hotels.com, Expedia, Betway, Gumtree, 888, Ax Paris, Ebyuer, Ebay, Hotels combined, Smyths toys, love honey and Pearson to name a few. James has also been a speaker at SEO and digital marketing conferences and events such as Brighton SEO.

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