Having a successful website and business is all about knowing your numbers. Just like you track and record your turnover, gross profit, and net profit for your business on a monthly basis you must also get in the habit of tracking your website statistics so you can see which traffic and SEO strategies are working the best.

Google makes this very easy to do as they have developed their own, free method of allowing you to see how many visitors are arriving at your site on a daily / weekly / monthly basis. It is called Google Analytics and it is highly recommended that the first thing you do is setup a free Google Analytics account and put the code on your website to start tracking your metrics. Here are just a few things that Google Analytics allows you to do:

• Find out how many visitors your site has had between any two dates.
• Find out what websites these visitors came from.
• Find out what part of the world your visitors are coming from.
• Find out what your visitors are typing into the search engines to find your site.
• Find out what pages your visitors are looking at on your website.
• Find out how long your visitors are staying on your website for before they leave.
• Find out whether a visitors is brand new to your site, or whether they have been before.
• Plus much more advanced stuff.

Why is all this data important to you?

Well once you know how many visitors you are getting and where the majority of your traffic is coming from, you can then endeavour to try and improve this traffic – when you know where it is coming from this is a lot simpler.

For example, Bob runs a carpet cleaning business and website. He logs into his Google Analytics account and can see that last month he got 500 visitors to his website, and of that 500, 148 were from people typing ‘office carpet cleaning’ in to Google.

Bob then sits down and writes 2 or 3 articles about ‘office carpet cleaning’ and posts them to 3 different Article directories which all link back to his website. He does this every week for 2 months. He then checks his website stats once more and notices now that he got 650 visitors last month, and 203 of them were from the keyword ‘office carpet cleaning’.

Only by knowing how many website visitors you get each month can you ever expect to increase it. And if you dig even further to analyse where this traffic is coming from, you can improve upon the traffic you are already getting for your strongest keywords.