If you’re the owner of a website and your eyes glaze over after reading the title to this post, you have a big problem. If you don’t know what analytics are, if you’ve never seen an analytics report about your site(s), or if you don’t review your site’s analytics on a regular basis, you are setting yourself up for failure.
Reviewing the analytics for your site needs to be the basis for every SEO related decision you make. If you’re one of these Automotive Dealer Principals or Automotive Internet Managers who “listens to their gut”, you will lose. I guarantee it. When I was brand new to SEO and didn’t know any better and I didn’t know where to find the right answers, I listened to my gut. Since I was so new to the game, my gut was wrong alot.
Back to the question at hand. If you have your site hosted with a third party company, do they give you access to your server logs? Do they provide you with an analytics based report? In this report, are you the Dealer physically able to see which keywords your site is drawing traffic for, how many visitors you’ve received, how much time people spend on your site, which content is most popular, and most importantly, where your visitors are converting into leads? If you’re not getting this information, you need to have a “coming to Jesus” meeting with your provider.
There are a number of free and “for pay” analytics programs out there. I’ll be referencing Google Analytics because I’ve used it for 3 years now and think it works just fine. Granted, it’s not a perfect analytics solution, but it does a great job for the price.
So between now and my next post about Analytics, you need to do the following:
* setup Google Analytics
* review the Google Analytics Blog
* have the ability to review your server logs
