SEO Consultant Ireland

Search Engine Optimization is all about Google really. I never got a client that rings me and says – I want to be the first in Yahoo! Or MSN, or Live, or whatever it is called today. Google rankings is what web site owners are concerned about – Google SEO!

Most of the web site owners think that SEO is some magic or a trick. And SEO consultants are not really the most popular people. Trust me!

A client told me last week that he SEO Consultants are like the hairdressers. Whenever you go to a new one, he looks at your haircut and asks: Who on earth have done this?! You just sit and answer: Well the last one,… that I as well paid to do it…

SEO is not a secret, magic or a trick. In fact, our dear old Google will teach you all you need to know about SEO. We might as well call it Google SEO School.

Google gives SEO experts a long list of free SEO tools. And the list of those free SEO Tools is getting longer and longer almost every month now. As wall as publishing new SEO Tools, Google almost constantly updates and improves the existing Google SEO tolls.

Where to start with Google SEO tools?
Google SEO tool No. 1 – Google Analytics
Google SEO Tool No. 2 – Google Webmaster Tools
Google SEO Tool No. 3 – Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions
Google SEO Tool No. 4 – Google Website Optimizer
Google SEO Tool No. 5 – Google Insights for Search

Not really a Google SEO Tool, but if your business has a local aspect, you will find the Google Local Business Center very beneficial.

All your Google SEO related questions can get answered by the combination of the data from various Google SEO tools listed above. You can get your keyword list (AdWords), check the search volume (Trends & Insights), check your ranking historically (Webmaster Tools).

Then use your imagination to calculate if it has the value for your business to increase the ranking for each of your keywords. It is not Voodoo really! Google SEO Tools give you all the ingredients!

When you manage to capture your web site visitors, understanding how you did it is extremely important to base your future efforts on how to grow your web site traffic. Here are the basic questions you need to answer for each of your visitors:

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

Google Analytics Motion Chart lets you can take advantage of advanced data exploration and visualization. If picture says a thousand words, a movie says ten thousand!

This Google Analytics Motin Chart displays the number of the pages visited by the Returing Visitos (green) and the New Visitors (Blue). The display perios is 30 days, and each dot displays one day.

You can use the visualisation of your web site visitors data to analize and understand the visitors trends. Not only can you see that the New Visitors see more pages on your site thatn the Returning Visitors, but by playing the Motion chart you acn asctually see the trend in time as well.

How to get a Motion Chart like this for your web site?

Just open the below URL and replace the ID (red 1234567 in the URL below) with your ID. Where will you find you Google Analytics Property ID?

Profile ID
The profile ID of your account can be found in the URL of your reports. For example, if you select a profile from an account and view your reports, you may see a URL string that looks like this:

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/?reset=1&id=123456&pdr=00000000-00000000

The profile ID is the number that comes right after the &id parameter. So, in this case, your profile ID would be 123456.

https://www.google.com/analytics/reporting/trend?id=1234567&rpt=VisitorTypesReport&cmp=average&ts=%7B%22showTrails%22%3Atrue%2C%22sizeOption%22%3A%22visits%22%2C%22stateVersion%22%3A3%2C%22iconKeySettings%22%3A%5B%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22Returning%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%2C%7B%22trailStart%22%3A%222008-09-16%22%2C%22key%22%3A%7B%22dim0%22%3A%22New%20Visitor%22%7D%7D%5D%2C%22iconType%22%3A%22BUBBLE%22%2C%22xAxisOption%22%3A%22bounce_rate%22%2C%22duration%22%3A%7B%22multiplier%22%3A1%2C%22timeUnit%22%3A%22D%22%7D%2C%22xLambda%22%3A1%2C%22yAxisOption%22%3A%22transactions%22%2C%22yLambda%22%3A1%2C%22colorOption%22%3A%22revenue_per_transaction%22%7D

Google introduced Custom Reporting (beta) to the Google Analytics.
Here is what Google says about the new Custom Reporting:

Design a custom report to display the dimensions and metrics you want to analyze. For example, you can build custom reports to help answer questions like:
• How are my keywords performing in different countries?
• Should I target my site to Spanish users?

There is also a short video from Google:

Google Analytics Custom Reporting

If you are serious about understanding your traffic the Custom Reporting is exactly what you need. Then again if you do not truly understand your current traffic, you are not really in the best position to start increasing your web site traffic.

Just looking at the Google Analytics of one of my sites and found Under the Traffic Sources in the Referring Sites the site called Cuil. That made me thinking, why doesn’t Google display Cuil under the Search Engines in the Traffic Source where it belongs? Is it just that Google doesn’t really like Cuil?

Check your web log analyser and you will see the same!