One of the reasons that a lot of companies never get around to even looking into their search engine optimisation is that they don’t really know where to start. They’re often not too sure where to begin in looking at what often appears to be a pretty huge and overwhelming task.
In today’s video I’m going to show you a really simple technique that will give you a bird’s eye view, an overview, of how your website is doing in terms of the volume and quality of traffic that you’re getting from search engines (otherwise known as Google) over time. Best of all: the whole thing will take you precisely 90 seconds.
You have 90 seconds. This could prove to be time very well spent:
So we log in to our Google Analytics account. From here, I want to select the segment to the built-in non-paid search. That’s basically organic traffic. Click on Apply.
I’m then going to apply the date range, so simply make it a year earlier, change from 2012 to 2013. We’re then looking at 13 months. I’m then going to get rid of some of the fluctuations by changing to a week view. And I’m going to drag this little slider to higher precision, to get as much accurate data as possible. I’m then going to compare to the average visit duration.
What we see over time, for this particular site, is that we can see a decrease in organic traffic that then starts to pick up about the beginning of August. When it picks up, we can see that the average time spent is up slightly, which is a good basic indicator of quality.
Here’s a nice little bonus tip for users of Chrome: If I right-click and duplicate that tab, I can then simply close down the non-paid search segment. By default, that goes to all visits and I can then really easily compare the general trends that we’re seeing here with the trend that we’re seeing for the search engine traffic. In less than ninety seconds, with plenty of breathing room, we’ve got a good indicator of what’s going on with our search-engine traffic, both in terms of how much traffic and the quality of that.
