Improve Your Website Traffic With Google Analytics

When it comes to Google Analytics, many of us utilize it to see how many site visitors we have and where they’re coming from. In all honesty, most business owners have Google Analytics but never look at it unless we send them a report. But most websites have Analytics (including all the websites we design and all our SEO clients) and it can actually be a great tool for improving your website’s traffic!
Thinking outside the box, Google Analytics is a great way to find obscure keywords which your site is already ranking for. When you go into the “Traffic Sources” tab and then “Organic Keywords”, you’ll see a full list of keywords people searched for on Google to find your website. On the top of the list will be your major keywords — the main keywords you rank for, such as “Chicago SEO for small business” — but if you take the time to look further down the list, you’ll find thousands of keywords you already rank for that a select few people are searching.  Some of these keywords will be a little odd and might not make sense, but others will be perfect for your business and will describe the type of people you’re hoping to attract to your website.  Here’s a quick screen shot from last month’s Google Analytics report for our website:

Some of these keywords will be a little odd, but others will make perfect sense, such as “where people click in Google” or “where should the majority of your website traffic come from?”.  When I search for these keywords, I already find my website on page 1 of search engine results which is GREAT, but chances are if I was number 1 for these keywords I could get quite a bit more traffic from them.
So in this case, it makes sense to do a little on page optimization and some off page link building to that page to try and rank higher in search results which in turn will drive more traffic to your website.  The great thing is that very few businesses and SEO companies use this strategy — which means many of these long tail keywords will be pretty easy to rank for.  In fact, in most cases we can do some basic on page optimization and build just a few links and achieve top 3 or even #1 rankings for that key phrase.
Now I know you’re thinking this might not sound very powerful — who cares about these keywords that only 1 or 2 people are searching for — but in reality if we do this for enough keywords, the improvement can be incredible — driving literally hundreds of new visitors to your site every single day.  I’ve seen it work first hand for our clients and even for our own website, and in many cases we can get much more traffic from these long tail keywords at a lower cost than trying to go after 2-3 highly competitive keyword that every other business in your niche is trying to rank for.
So while I would never replace an entire SEO campaign with this type of strategy, it certainly is a great way to get some pretty quick SEO results and to take advantage of the obscure long tail keywords being searched in your industry.