All website owners who take their SEO seriously have some sort of Web analytics script running on their sites to monitor performance. One of the most feature-rich is StatCounter. This free yet powerful service can provide a ton of valuable data that you can use to refine your SEO strategies.
While it’s impossible to describe every feature here, I will highlight some of the most useful ones. First, let’s consider what you need to know to improve your website SEO. You’ll want answers to questions such as:
- Which keywords is my site ranking for?
- Which pages are the most popular?
- How long do visitors stay on my site?
- Who links to my site?
- Where do my visitors come from?
Useful SEO Tools in StatCounter
Now here are some of the features in StatCounter that can help you gather the information you need. Assuming you have created a free account and have set up a project (your website), click your project’s name and look on the menu on the left for a list of statistics.
Keyword Analysis and Recent Keyword Activity
These two types of data show the keywords visitors used to find your site. “Keyword Analysis” tallies the total number of visits and the percentage of visits that arrive by way of which keywords. To see visitor activity for a specific keyword, click the magnifying glass next to it.
In “Recent Keyword Activity,” you will see the latest keyword searches made, the search engine used, the page on your site that was found and your ranking for that keyword.
How to Use This Data: Knowing what keywords you rank for is extremely important. Use the results to refine your page titles, headings and meta data. For example, you might try changing a page title to your top keyword. Also, you can use these keywords as ideas for new content.
Popular Pages
This section displays your pages by number of visits. Your most visited page appears at the top. Recorded visits are for a limited period only (anywhere from a few hours to a few days, depending on the amount of traffic you receive– the more traffic, the shorter the period covered). If you want longer coverage, you need to upgrade to a premium StatCounter account. Anyway, this data is important because it tells you which are your “winning” and “losing” page.
How to Use This Data: You can promote your most popular pages even further, or you can try to balance things and get attention to other pages. At some point though, you might want to get rid of your weakest pages. If you get no backlinks, visits or revenue through them, it shouldn’t cause any issues if you deleted them. Just do it gradually. Don’t delete lots of pages at once.
Visit Length and Visitor Paths
“Visit Length” shows you what your average bounce rate is. The lower your bounce rate (that is, the smaller the green slice in the pie in StatCounter), the better. It means visitors stay longer on your site. A bounce rate of about 50% or less is good. 80% or higher is dangerously high. In addition to the bounce rate, you want to look up “Visitor Paths” to find out the navigation path people take through your site. After finding your site, how many pages do they look at? How do they go from one page to another?
How to Use This Data: If you know you have a high bounce rate and visitor paths are short, you need to work on your site design to improve user engagement. This is easier said than done because some niches just have a higher bounce rate on average than others. Things like internal links, multimedia and proper formatting may help.
These are just some of the things you can do with an analytics tool like StatCounter. Remember, SEO is a continuous effort and such a tool will prove to be a big help.
Article contributed by Blog Lady. Visit bloglady.net for more Internet marketing and SEO tips, Facebook login help, WordPress tutorials and more.
excellent ideas to improve analytic.
I prefer using Google Analytics which is the better one and also provides detail information. Thanks for sharing this post Blog Lady 🙂
Thanks blog lady. This is a great tool indeed and the one I use to analyze my sites and track where I am from an SEO perspective. I think it is the best tool out there.
This is a good alternative to the big G’s analytics. I’m always paranoid its going to negatively affect my SEO. Thanks for the tip!
Google Analytics works by having a small piece of code installed in your web page. This way, when anybody access your web page, this code is invoked and it tels Google all the details about your visitor.
I’ve already read this kind of tips before, but the huge difference I’ve noticed in your article is that you are also offering some solutions for every type of problem… This is really important for me and I will look forward to find more post like this one
I think that the most important is a useful content and fresh articles!
Useful content and fresh articles are the best way!
Till date i have been using Google analytics and doing my daya monitoring with that only ..but trying hitstats can be a goo option ..let’s see and go with your tips and hope i can get some more good seo practice..
Social Med Club is growing super fast though and I think it will dominate soon.
Driving traffic into a website can be done by Internet advertisement campaigns too. But the advantage of SEO over such campaigns is that such ads may cost you money, time and energy again and again. So it is very essential that web designers understand the vast opportunities of search engine optimization and incorporate such design parameters so as to make the site highly visible..
Excellent post – One thing that I’ve found helpful when it comes to statcounter is that it offers real-time tracking, so you can view the statistics in real time and not have to wait a day before accessing the data.
Thanks for sharing the post.
First of all a blogger have to add attractive post so that visitor does not feel bore and they will come again and again . So update your blog regularly and build natural link for seo advantage. Thank you
This is a good alternative to the big G’s analytics. I’m always paranoid its going to negatively affect my SEO. Thanks for the tip!
statcounter is a wonderful visitor analyzing tool. I am using statcounter from last 3 years and founds it very friendly.
Thanks for the article. I am attempting to start up a proofreading website myself but I didn’t realise how much SEO was required. This is very helpful.
Excellent article and me too use for my several websites for past 4years very useful to know…I have not yet used Google Analytics..I am planning to use the same after reading comments from this article..Does both in same website does it affects loading time or installing both will work or not?