This is a follow up to the post I created yesterday on using analytics. When optimising your site and analysing data it’s best to go after the quick wins in the short term while still having a strategy for your long term goals. The quick wins would be to optimise and link build for the keywords that your ranking on the 2nd page of google and receiving traffic.
The appeal of this technique is pretty obvious. If your receiving traffic already from the 2nd page of google, how much traffic would you receive if you ranked on the 1st page of Google? If you already rank in the Top 20 of Google for the keywords how much link building will be required to move into the Top 10 compared with optimising and link building for a new keyword?
So now we know the benefits, how do we track our 2nd page rankings?
Thanks to Will and the guys at Distilled, I’m going to show you how to set this tracking up in Google Analytics.
- Create a new Profile for the site
- Add a filter and apply it to the newly created profile
- Set the filter up as follows:
The text in the Field A –> Extract A box is (\?|&)(start)=([^&]*)
This is a regular expression which extracts the parameter called ’start’ from the referring URL. Google uses this to determine which page of results to display (page 2 is start=10, page 3 is start=20 etc. for anyone with the default settings of 10 search results / page)
Segmenting the data
Now when we go into the profile we have the above data but it’s not quite what we want, we need to segment the data just to capture the keywords from referred from Page 2 of Google. To this we do the following:
- Select Advanced Segments
- Click on the drop-down and add a new segment as shown below:
- Finally Apply this segment to the report
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This is some text prior to the author information. You can change this text from the admin section of WP-Gravatar Leo is regular contributer to online forums Related Posts
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