Websites are useful tools and help us drive a variety of results from driving sales, brand awareness, to helping existing customers, and streamlining processes. Regardless of how you might be utilizing your website today, the underlying data within the site can be extremally helpful in how you might augment your web strategy to best work for your business. There are an unlimited amount of tools you can utilize to find these breadcrumbs within your existing web properties, but we wanted to highlight a couple.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics, or GA4, as the latest version is called, is an extremely powerful, and free analytics tool that can be utilized by anyone. While some integrations, ecommerce for example, may be a little more technical at integration, for the most part, you can track what’s happening on your website with the simple install of a piece of code on all pages of your
site. Once installed, visitor data is tracked throughout all pages of the site. These visitors are anonymous, but when looked at collectively, you can start to see use patterns on your site. Which pages are the most common landing
pages, which pages are the most common paths from the home page, what actions are users taking on the site, how much time are they spending on the site?
Armed with knowing your users activity, you can utilize that data to make an infinite number of improvements to your site. You can identify bottlenecks in your user flow and optimize the user experience for your customers. You might find pages with very little interaction that could benefit from enhanced or more engaging content. You might identify areas of your
website that have higher activity than expected, which in turn might lead to those areas getting more attention. The amount of insights and what you might do with them are limitless.
Moz.com or Ahrefs.com
These two software companies both do similar functions. For a very reasonable price, they can greatly impact your ability to improve your search engine optimization, or SEO. While Google Analytics is more adapted towards reporting on your traffic and what its doing on your site, these tools show you how optimized your site is in order to gain more organic traffic. We utilize moz.com for most of our clients who are engaged with us in an ongoing basis. We use it to monitor site health, track keyword positions, and research opportunities for their businesses.
Ultimately, there are a wide variety of tools out there to provide insights on how to grow your digital presence. The tools above should be utilized by most companies who are interested in growing in digital. Analytics helps to report on what’s happening today, while the SEO tools show you what your potential in organic traffic is and what needs to happen to achieve that potential.