Analyzing Site Visitors with Analytics and Webmaster Tools

Google has an important tool that you can access for free - all you need is a Google account. They call it Webmaster Tools and it can give you information about your web site that you cannot obtain from any other tool or method.

Note to HubPages writers: Webmaster Tools is only available for use with your own website. You can't get this information for your pages at sites you do not own.

Surely I must be wrong? After all, there are some very powerful SEO tools available - some cost a lot of money, surely a free tool from Google can't provide information not available elsewhere?

Well, yes, it can.

A peek from the inside

What Google gives you with Webmaster tool is a look at your website from their point of view.

For example, the report to the right here is the Search Query report for my website over the last month. It tells me some very important statistics about Google Search and my pages.

Your eye might be drawn to that big 3,350,000 figure. The first time I ever looked at this report it was that number that caught my eye. It was different then, but it was still quite large and it was much, much more than the total number of visitors to my site. What the heck was Google trying to tell me here?

It's the number of times somebody had a chance to see a page from my site in search results.

Take your time and understand this completely before moving on. That figure ("Impressions") is the number of times someone had a chance to see a page. That is, if someone searched for some phrase and one of my pages appeared on the first page of results, that is an impression. If my page only appeared on the second page of results, it is an impression if and only if the searcher actually looked at the second page of the results.

The figure to the right of that, the 201,000, is the number of times they clicked on a result to go visit my page. Notice that's less than 6% of the time and - obviously - I'd like to improve that percentage. In an ideal world of my dreams, I'd like everyone of those 3.5 million chances to turn into a page visit. That's not going to happen, but maybe we can do better than what's happening now.

Improving CTR

OK, so we'd like to increase CTR from SERP.

Did those acronyms send your brain spinning? CTR is click through rate and SERP is Search Engine Results (Position or Page, depending on usage). We have three and a half million people who could have noticed one of my pages and most of them did not. How can we fix that?

One way might be to increase the SERP (with the "P" meaning Position here). If my pages are landing way down on page one, it might be that the searcher never gets that far - they could have noticed my page, but they just never got to it

Google helpfully shows us the average position that our page(s) attained for each search term. Notice the "s" in parentheses there: while we are usually only getting a report for one page, sometimes two or more pages match the query. That's unusual - especially for page one SERP - but it does happen sometimes. If you click on the search query, Google shows you the pages.

The report to the right here shows such a case - three matches, but really only one has much activity.

If the average SERP position is already high (that is, position 3 or less), there is obviously not much more we can do to make it better.  Yes, you might be able to bump it up a notch if it's at 3, but what can you do if you already own position 1?  There's no room for improvement!

Let's not give up yet

If we look at that first chart, many of the pages have decent CTR. We might hope for 100% (and do get it on a few search terms not shown here), but 70% isn't exactly shabby. On the other hand, that "sudo" search term has a miserable 2% CTR. Sure, it isn't in the top 3, but it is in the top 7, so what's up with that? The page it references is a good page, and has had many positive comments over the years, so it's a good bet that if more people did click through they'd be happy. Why don't they click?

It's my fault.

It's my fault because I didn't give Google any good help in deciding what to show those searchers as the blurb that appears under the search result. I was lazy, and as a result, Google ended up being a bit boring and not particularly descriptive: they decided to display this text:

Using Sudo

Most Unix systems have some way of letting ordinary users perform certain tasks as root or some other privileged user. Many Unixes, and Linux, use sudo.

The "Using Sudo" was my lazy title. Google goes out of their way to behelpful about displaying what you'd like to be displayed here, but I wrote that page in 2002 and as that was before Adsense even existed for most of us, I honestly didn't think much about SERP.

Improvements

So, what could I do to make it better? Well, the page itself explains how to use "sudo" (it's a geeky Unix command). I wrote it because when I first started using it, I found the available documentation to be quite confusing - the people who wrote it were far geekier than I and talked way over my head. Apparently every month more than a few thousand people still find that true and go a-googling for better help. My task is to help Google help convince more of them to click through to my page.

The first thing I changed was the title. Instead of "Using Sudo", I changed it to "Understanding and using sudo in Unix or Linux". For the meta description, I now use this text:

I'm sure that there are more poorly written man pages, but "man sudoers" is among my all time favorites for obfuscation and poor explanation. Let's clear up some of the confusion.

These changes should give searchers the idea that my page is one that will help them understand sudo rather than being yet another rehash of the manual page.

A little caution

However, you do have to be careful. Other searches may lead to the same page and if you add up their individual totals, they could exceed the total of this particular search. If the CTR is high for those searches, you don't want your revised description to interfere with those clicks.

Google Analytics can show you all the entrance keywords used to find your page. If you come back to Webmaster tools after gathering those terms from Analytics, you can see a more complete picture of what was being searched and how successful you were at getting those searchers to visit your page.

Way out there

If we sort the report by Average Position, there are a few - a very few - search terms that got found well beyond page one.

These should be optimized, of course, but it may not do much good. Anyone who has reached page 4 of search results is trying very hard to find something and is not having good luck - either that, or they are researching and will click through to almost anything. If your titlle or the blurb that Google shows is truly poor, it may help to fix them up, but these searches may not have the value higher hanging terms have. I'm not saying to ignore them, I'm just pointing out that you may have better luck higher up in the reports.

Other Data

This is not the only data that Webmaster Tools provides, of course. If you sign up for a free account, you will see what a valuable resource this truly is. There is no code to install on your pages; you only need to verify that you own the domain, and that can be done in several different ways.

You can also get this data for Blogger and Google Sites pages. Google has specific instructions for each of those.  As I have shown here, Webmaster Tool reports can help you track down poorly performing pages and improve their chances of being visited.

Do you know someone who should be reading this? Click the Share button below to send it to them easily or to post it to Facebook or Twitter.