After the Launch

The site is designed, built, and live. It’s beautiful and effective. Now what?

Continually relevant websites require time and effort. Your main job managing a website is to keep the content updated, relevant, and of good quality, but you also need a way to measure your results and monitor your sites performance. I always recommend two tools to clients for these purposes: Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. Search rankings are important and Google is the biggest name in the search business.

Google Analytics

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is a key metric to understand where valuable links to your site are coming from. It helps answer questions regarding ROI from social media investments, advertising, and online relationships. Don’t forget to look at organic referrers that you may be able to increase with a little bit of attention.

Search Engine Keywords

Keywords are the terms that visitors use to find you through search engines. This is valuable feedback for how visitors are already finding you, and therefore what kind of content adjustments to make to either increase keyword phrases that are appropriate (qualified traffic) or decrease keyword phrases that are inappropriate. If you feel you should be getting traffic for a particular keyword phrase, this can tell you whether your efforts are working.

Top Content

Not only can you see how that new blog post is performing with visitors, but you can see how older posts remain popular. With this knowledge, you can make adjustments and optimizations to that content to help pages perform better or leverage performing pages to better meet the needs of your users.

As time goes on, you’ll also want to monitor your top landing pages, exit pages, and bounce rates (users that visit that page and then immediately leave). Are users exiting where you want them to? If bounce rates are high, is the pathway to that page misleading? or is the content not immediately relevant to expectations? Cross-reference this with the traffic sources for that page to find potential problems.

Google Webmaster Tools

Crawling Issues

Most of this information is found under Diagnostics, but Crawler Access is under Site Configuration. Crawler Access shows the robots.txt file that Google sees for your site. The robots.txt file includes instructions to search engines on how to crawl and index your site. If your site isn’t being indexed, this is a good place to start.

Crawl Errors tells you if Google found any links to nonexistent pages on your site. These can crop up from incorrect internal links that you have control over or incorrect external links that you don’t have control over. Regardless, this information helps you understand possible reasons for bounce rates you found in Analytics and you can move forward either correcting internal links or accommodating traffic from the external links.

Links and Keyword Relevance

Under “Your site on the web,” you’ll find information on how Google sees your site. Google values internal and external links in its algorithm, and here you can see all the links it has indexed both internally and externally. Additionally you can see which keywords Google views as most relevant on your site. This doesn’t directly correlate to search engine, as your competing with other sites which may be more relevant with the same keywords, but it gives you more feedback on how your content curation is going and where you might need to spend some more time.