Author: Admin

Google Analytics for beginners Part 1

Often, our clients just need a quick guide to get them up and running on Google Analytics. Not everybody wants to do amazing things with data and statistics, they just want to see how their site is performing for the basics and what they can tweak.

To that end, welcome to our Google Analytics for beginners guide.

I’ll jump straight in and presume you have a Google account and you have setup the analytics code on your site. For best results, use a PC or laptop as it gives you a much better and less crowded screen display than a tablet or mobile.

Logging in

First, you’ll need to login with your Google account. A quick shortcut for most people is to login to Gmail, it then activates the login for everything else… Analytics, Search Console, Ads, TagManager etc.. One thing that this helps with is to be able to read and acknowledge any emails you may get from Google as you change things, especially where Search Console is involved. More on that elsewhere on this site!

Now, follow this quick-start guide to get a speedy analytics overview:

Open Google Analytics

Close all other tabs except Gmail and open a new tab in your browser. Go here to start Analytics:
https://analytics.google.com

Setting the date range

First, look at the left side menu you’ll use this for most stuff.

Click on Acquisition > Search Console > Queries

search console queries beginners guide

Find the date ‘dropdown’ menu (top right). You can set this to any time period but I’d suggest initially to set it to the last 3 months to give you a good idea of average website traffic. You can later set this to any time period but I like 3 months as a good metric.

google analytics beginner guide set date

What you see to the right now are your search engine queries leading to clicks to the site.

Set the time period (top right) to the last 3 months to give you a good idea of average traffic. Note that Google Analytics runs about a day behind so you won’t see live results for today.

 

Now go to Acquisition > Google Ads > Search queries

These are your search engine queries that resulted in your Ads being shown and clicked.

 

Now go to Acquisition > Search Console > Network referrals

Those are your social network referrals and you can expand by clicking on the network, e.g. Facebook. This will show you the URL that was shared in the social media post.

 

Now go to Acquisition > Search Console > User flow

Those are the paths that your social network users took through your website.

 

Now go to Behaviour > Behaviour flow

This shows much the same as the social one above but starts with the landing page.

That’s enough for now, part 2 coming soon!

 

Singular and plural keyword targeting

We’re constantly asked the same question when clients and SEO companies write their own articles – “Does singular and plural keyword targeting exist and if so, how do I optimize my pages for it?”.

Well the answer is fairly simple but the method for targeting both is a little more complex. That said, once you get your head around it then you can make giant leaps in visitor numbers.

Many SEO companies choose one term, plural or singular, for their customer then leave it at that. Their reports show something like 150 uniques per month for the term “red widget”. Brilliant, but why not get another 150 for “red widgets”?

Can Google tell the difference between singular and plural?

Search engines such as Google and Bing are certainly clever enough to identify the relationship between plural and singular words. Moreover, they definitely are aware that people who search for the plural of a word may still get some appropriate value out of sites that target the singular term too. The reverse applies here too of course.

Let’s imagine the case where 2 identical sites exist, the imaginitively named Site A and Site B. For the more pedantic out there, let’s ignore any duplicate content penalty for now. Site A targets a plural keyword, Site B targets a singular keyword. When a search engine user types in the plural keyword, then Site A will definitely outrank Site B. However, you can bias this result by adding some good quality external links to Site B with plural keyword anchor text. This will then mean that Site B is likely to outrank Site A. The relevance of backlinks from a website that already ranks for the plural keyword is not to be underestimated here either, this is a solid choice of strategy.

Targeting competitive niches and keywords

In a competitive niche we would further vary these links to give related plural LSI keywords if we felt it necessary. On a recent case study, we had a client that we took to position 4 of Google’s search results for a hugely competitive two word plural term. The singular term (exactly as the plural but without the ‘s’) took significantly more backlinking effort in this case. The content was equally biased for both terms and backlink anchor text was equal too. We worked a bit harder and gave the client some link juice from sites that ranked for the singular term and, hey presto, both rankings are now equal.

For most search terms, search engine users apparently prefer to search on a singular noun unless normally grouped (eg using a pair of shoes as an example, the search term is “cheap shoes” not “cheap shoe”!).

The best singular and plural combination titles

For your titles, we would suggest you consider using something mixed if you are not creating separate content for each variation of a keyword.  Note that this is only to be used where it reads well because overuse is bordering on the realms of keyword stuffing. For example:

“Ipod charger review, the top 5 ipod chargers tested”

You can also mix your h2 and h3 headings up to get a good on-page blend of singular and plural.

To summarise, be aware of the singular and plural keyword when article writing and providing backlinks as it definitely does help rankings.