Analytics is like having X Ray Vision
In this series of the ABCs of Inbound Marketing, I did have a hard time coming up with a phrase for X.
The best I’ve come up with his X-ray vision is provided by analytics (if you’ve got a better one, please share).
What I mean by this is there does not exist another form of marketing that is more easily measurable and that gives such quick (almost immediate) feedback.
There are two free tools provided by Google that give you a wealth of details.
Google Webmasters Tools
With this tool you can easily determine what phrases your site is ranking for and the average position per phrase. I find this information to be enormously valuable.
Google Webmasters Tools also reports any errors the Googlebots are seeing as well as give you details on what on your site is being indexed by Google.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics on the other hand tells you how many visitors are arriving from various sources (organic, direct, referral, etc), what specific pages they are reading, how long they’re staying on the site, and even where the traffic is coming from (California, Texas, New York, etc).
You can also define conversion goals and measure them. For example, setup correctly you can see how often your Contact Us page is loaded and also how often it is completed (would it surprise you to know that some people who start to fill it out do not finish)?
You also need to learn about link building…
SEO Needs Link Building