SEO Blog

There’s no doubting the power of an analytics programme; it gives you all of the statistics you could ever need and helps you to identify where your site can be optimised.

This of course is the positive side of data, there is however a negative counter argument. Conversely, whilst the statistics may be useful, they may also blind you to wider problems of your website.

When your data is all moving in the right direction; your bounce rate is lowering, your receiving more visitors and perhaps the PageRank has improved, you may be lulled into complacency. Analytics programmes and other services such as Google Webmaster Tools are there to provide assistance, but can only do so in a flat data form. They aren’t substitutes for visitor opinion and your own human instincts.

Even a website that is succeeding can still do better. Simply accepting what you have because the numbers don’t lie could be losing you hundreds of targeted visitors each day. When things are going well there can be a temptation to sit back and enjoy the fruit of your labours; however this flies in the face of the most fundamental SEO rule, never stop optimising.

Your analytics will help you pinpoint where an issue has arisen that may be deterring visitors using your site, fantastic. The only issue with this is that you haven’t noticed this already yourself. You can become too reliant on the stats and forget about what it is that you’re supposed to be doing, which is managing a successful website.

First of all you need to understand the fundamentals, understand what your audience is looking for, get to grips with optimisation and make the site a place that people will want to visit. If you’re satisfied that it achieves all of these things then analytics or Webmaster Tools can tell you where issues, seen or unseen, may be occurring.

They are incredibly useful, don’t get me wrong, but it shouldn’t be treated like a crutch. You need to understand what your site requires to be able to fully understand the statistical data that analytics can provide. If you’ve made changes and the bounce rate increases, is that a cast iron guarantee that you need to revert or make further changes? Well, not necessarily. If, however, a bounce rate remains consistently high across a wide range of pages, take a look. See what your visitors see and weed out any issues that could be causing this ongoing problem.

How about PageRank, what if that shoots up or indeed down, should this be a major concern? A concern, maybe, but a major concern, certainly not. Even Google have largely discredited the influence that PageRank has on their ranking process, claiming that it is only one of 200 hundred things that are factored in.

There are so many things to consider when developing a website that the most important can sometimes be the one that suffers the most. Of course, when it comes to any website, the most important aspect is the content. If you’ve got page after page of error strewn and unhelpful pages, you need to take charge and make changes. No amount of SEO can save a website that is, at it’s very core, flawed.

Go beyond flat statistics and find out what makes your website tick, don’t become blinkered by the bottom line and incremental gains. When you are simply satisfied by progress, you no longer have the desire to improve.