Measuring your Website Performance with Analytics

So, you just paid your designer to build you a new sleek-looking website. It’s “optimized” for the search engines and is supposed to do better than your last site (which was just sitting there collecting virtual dust). A month goes by. Is your website doing well? Is it doing poorly? Did you get your money’s worth? How are you supposed to know? Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to actually measure your site’s performance.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Basics

Getting to the top of the Google search results is a big deal, clearly. When I do a Google search, I don’t too often travel far beyond the first page of results, and you probably don’t either. The bottom line is that if your website is on the first page, you get lots of traffic (and business). If your website is on page seven or twelve you’ll get zilch.

So how do you get to the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? Well, SEO (search engine optimization) of course! But, SEO is costly and complicated, right? After all, there are people whose sole profession is to optimize websites…