Google Tools - A Small Business Guide

Google provides many tools that can be used to see how you are doing in search and your other online marketing efforts.

Let's dive into the tools and options you should keep your eye on.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is tracking software and should be customized after installation based on your goals and needs.

Setting Goals

What do you want to accomplish on your website? Goals help you track the things that matter.

Track the people that filled out a form on your website by setting a goal for the confirmation page.

Wait, you don't have a confirmation page? You need one.

Set a goal for your eCommerce checkout success page.

You can set a goal for just about anything you want to track. Google Tag Manager does offer more expensive tracking, but too many can slow down your website. Weight your options and keep the most important items to track in mind.

The key to goals is not only to see how many visitors converted in some way but the path they took to convert and where they came from. This information will allow you to recreate what works and change what isn't.

Site Visitors

Google Analytics gives us great information about our website's visitors. Turn on demographics and interests to enable this feature. You learn where they are, and their interests are allowing you to make decisions about your marketing efforts.

Regardless of what you are targeting your website will bring visitors from all over the world. Using filters to focus on just the visitors that are in your target areas whether it be by city, state, region, or country.

Keywords

You can also see the keywords that people use to find your business can enlighten you to what keywords are bringing traffic. Couple this with your goals and the quality of your conversions can allow you to make effective changes to your website to improve the quality of your website and the conversions it generates.

What sources are driving website visitors to your website?

Google Analytics gives us valuable information on what websites are sending us traffic. We can make better decisions on our advertising and focus on the things that help us accomplish our goals.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is defined as a number that is given based on the length of time a visitor is on a website and does not click through to another page on the website, closes the page, or clicks the back button. A high bounce rate is a bad thing.

Google does look at a website's bounce rate to help determine the relevance of the website based on what the user was searching for. This information helps the Googles algorithm deliver the best results to its users.

If you have a high bounce rate, you may want to look at your page and determine why visitors are not going further. If your traffic is coming from Google AdWords, expect a little higher bounce rate than what you receive from organic traffic.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console, previously known as Webmaster Tools, is how your website is doing in search. Just like Analytics, you should do a little setup when you first install it.

Target Country  Pick the country you are targeting. This helps Google decide what search engine to focus your efforts on.
Sitemaps This is the best way to submit your website to Google. A sitemap gives Google what it needs to index your website pages in the search engines.

Website security issues. If your website has issues more than likely Google will pick up on it before you do and notify you through Search Console. You can address and send reconsideration requests through the Search Console.

Page Errors  If your website has page errors it can affect the user experience. 404 and 503 errors will appear in Search Console allowing them to be corrected.

Tools can only be used if you know what they are. It isn't as important that you know how to use them, but what it looks like when something is wrong.

If you have questions about Google Analytics, Search Console, or an error you see we are here to help. Give us a call at (405) 753-4114 or request a quote.