Web Analytics, SEO, and Website Design

The author of the SEO Training Blog was recently at a business network meeting in the UK where he spoke to many small and medium-sized business owners that had websites. He notes: "I was struck by two things. Firstly, the proportion of the business owners that were either in the process of redesigning their website or were of the belief that they needed a redesign. In many cases these website owners were prepared to pay anything from £3,000 to £30,000 for a new website design.

"The second thing that struck me was that most of these business owners had arrived at a conclusion that their website didn’t work without access to or study of any objective data. Generally this data is referred to as web analytics. The business oweners were relying purely on sales feedback or a gut feel that things weren’t working.

"At the simplest level you cannot tell why your website isn’t working if you haven’t analysed its performance. Once you have access to the data you can work out whether the problem is one of traffic, that is unique visitors, or conversion, that is the proportion of visitors that carry out some form of positive action once they visit your website.

"Google Analytics and Statcounter are just two free/low cost analytics programmes that can yield a massive amount of high quality information about your website performance. In both cases, these analytics programmes should yield the information that forms the basis of an SEO programme.

"How many visitors, where they come from and how they behave on your website are the three key pieces of information that web analytics provides. Once you have this information you can decide what to do with your SEO programme. To decide to redesign website and incur further costs without this information is foolhardy."

We concur with these conclusions wholeheartedly. For free Web Analytics, you might also consider getclicky.com. Another compelling voice in favor of the above, plus Website designs that are effective rather than merely glitzy, is Amy Africa. Check her out, as well.