Small Business Blog Tip #6: Measuring Website Traffic for FREE with Google Analytics

Last Tip:  In our last Small Business Technology Tip we discussed the idea of “pre-selling” and how to add lots of HELPFUL content to your website to help build up trust with your clients.  So keep adding more content every day or at least every week.  Bonus:  If you do this, the search engines will reward you with more targeted traffic as well as better rankings for having changing content!

Small Business Technology Tip of the Week

Ok, so as I mentioned above, if you are adding plenty of content to your website, over time you will begin to see more and more traffic on your website.  How will you KNOW if you are getting more traffic?  Well contact your hosting provider to find out how you can view the traffic coming to your site.  But if your web host doesn’t provide this, you can use another FREE tool from Google called “Google Analytics”.  This tool will measure the traffic for your website and let you know how much total traffic you receive, how many page views, the average page views per visitor, how many new visitors and where the traffic is coming from.  If the traffic is search engine traffic, it will tell you exactly what keywords are being used to find your website.  This is information you cannot do without!  You need to understand your traffic patterns and how your site is doing over time.  Even if you have access to some reporting information on your website, I would suggest using this tool as with all things Google, it offers lots of ways to integrate with other tools and is continually updated with new features.

To get started setting this up, access the Google Analytics Getting Started Guide.