Site search tracking: Google analytics reveals a wealth of information about how your site or blog is being indexed and searched. And if you have an online business, pursuing search traffic is a vital part of marketing.

So I decided to do a short series of posts on using Google analytics to help you attrack search traffic to your site or blog. This series will include three related topics:

I’ll cover the first of these topics in this post and the remaining ones in my next two posts.

Site Search Tracking: Google Analytics Reveals Which Pages Or Posts Aren’t Indexed

Monitoring your Google analytics can help you determine which pages of your blog or site are being searched. If they’re not being searched it’s because:

Google Hasn’t Indexed The Pages Or Posts

If Google hasn’t indexed some of your pages, it may be because you haven’t made it easy for the Google bots to find them. Either you don’t have a bot-friendly site map or you haven’t done a good job of internal linking.

For example, I had failed to do internal linking of my blog posts, and was getting almost no search traffic. I spent a day linking as many as logically fit with other posts and pages. Within a week, my search engine traffic tripled.

That was a couple of months ago, and my search engine traffic continues to grow. Still when I analyzed Google analytics for September, I discovered that a third of my posts are still not being searched. I have a bot-friendly site map so I have to look at the remaining two reasons to explain why those posts aren’t being searched.

No One Searches For The Keywords Or Phrases Used

Conducting keyword research is necessary for every post/page that you publish. If you don’t bother with keyword research, you run into one of two problems.

The first problem is that no one searches for the keywords or phrases that you used. If you don’t use well-researched keywords, it’s likely that your post/page will never appear in search results.

If you aren’t doing keyword research, you need to get a good keyword tool and start immediately. I like and use Nichebot. I used to use WordTracker, but Nichebot includes WordTracker, Google, and several other keyword tools.

It also enables you to do Latent Semantic Index (LSI) research for your keywords to assure that Google considers what you write relevant to the keyword phrase. Plus you can spy on your competitors with it. And you get it all for about what you’d pay for WordTracker. I’ve been pleased with and recommend Nichebot for doing keyword research.

You can read about some of my LSI results by clicking on the link above. And if you want to try Nichebot’s, 14 day trail for just $1, click Nichebot.

There’s Too Much Competition For Those Keywords Or Phrases

The second problem is that your competitors are doing a better job with the keywords than you are. If enough competitors have better onsite and off site SEO, your page/post will appear so far back in the search results that no one will find it.

This site is not about SEO, and I’m certainly not an SEO expert, but there are many blogs and sites that provide free SEO information. In fact, Google provides much helpful information that you can use to improve how well your blog/site competes for keywords.

Site Search Tracking: Google Analytics Reveals Which Pages Or Posts Aren’t Indexed – Conclusion

If Google analytics reveals that you have posts or pages that aren’t bringing you search traffic, investigate which one or combination of the three possible causes above is the culprit.

Then make changes to improve your search results for the posts or pages not presently getting any search traffic.

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Posted 10-03-08: Site Search Tracking: Google Analytics Reveals A Wealth of Information

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 5:54 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Marketing Research.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.