Google tools for your website

I’m now eight blog posts in on optimisey.com and I figure it’s time for a summary/wrap-up piece to collate a few of the pieces I’ve done – and to test out the SEO goodness of having hub and spoke pages around a topic (more on that in a future blog post).

Check out the number of keyword rich, self-referencing links in this article. That’s deliberate. I’ll let you know how it affects traffic in a future blog post!

It’s no surprise to see I’ve written quite a lot about Google, the tools they make available for website owners and how to get the best out of them.

If you’re looking to get ahead of your competition, get some great data about your customers and turn it all into actionable tasks you can do to increase your website traffic – all with some free SEO tools – here we go:

Google Analytics: Views & Filters	Google Analytics: Goals & Content Groups
Google My Business: Set-up Guide	Google Search Console: Set-up Guide
Google Analytics: Segments

getting the best out of Google Analytics

Views and filters

Lots of sites have Google Analytics installed – which is to be encouraged. Best to have some form of analytics on your website if you care how it’s performing for you.

But way too many businesses and websites just have the ‘out of the box’ Google Analytics set-up.

With some minor tweaks and minimal effort you can really make your analytics sing – and sing some actionable insights that will really affect and inform your decision making.

My how-to-guide on Google Analytics walks you through simple, easy-to-follow steps such as how to add filters on Google Analytics and how to create a view in Google Analytics.

Once you’ve done that you can screen out yourself (and your colleagues) to stop you skewing your own web traffic; and then set-up Views to create your own data safety net as well as how to set-up separate Views for your sales team, boss or next door neighbour if you so wish.

Goals and content groups

The guide to Goals and Content Groups walks you through what are Goals in Google Analytics, why and how to set up Goals in Google Analytics as well as some advice on what goals to set up in Google Analytics and, importantly, which ones to avoid.

Audience segments

My guide to audience segments in Google Analytics walks through some basics of how to use these powerful, free tools in Google Analytics to break your audience up in to more manageable (and insightful) groups.

Using them you can answer questions like: how do my visitors on mobiles differ from those on desktop? Or how do customers I attract from my different social media channels compare to one another?

Now get some more traffic

Once you’ve got some good measures set up, you want something to measure right?

So how do you get more traffic to your site?

Google My Business is a great help. It’s free. It’s from Google. And it can put your company and website information in a lovely big box on the SERPs as well as on Google Maps.

Wondering ‘how to get my business on Google Maps‘? So if you want to know how to list your business on Google – this post is a great place to start.

It takes you through the process to get yourself on Google My Business, get verified and take a step closer to getting more visitors to your website.

Lastly – get a bit optimisey

With all that in place, now you can really start optimising things.

Perhaps your customers aren’t using those carefully chosen keywords you targeted? What are they searching for? And when they do, which of your pages are coming up in the results and how are they doing?

If only there was a way…

There is and it’s called Google Search Console – and it’s often overlooked by lots of websites, small businesses and start-ups.

This may be because of it’s former name, Google Webmaster Tools, which gave it a bit of an exclusive, nerdy air.

Regardless of what it’s called, it’s free, its dead easy to set-up and can give you oodles of great tools for and data about your site.

This last one walks you through from what is Google Search Console to how to set up Google Search Console and the first steps you should take – like hooking it up to Google Analytics.