Get Quick Blogging Insights With Google Analytics

For law offices, legal services, or anyone building a practice or brand, content rules. Putting out useful, quality content. And blogs provide the forum. But how is your content performing? Google Analytics can show you. And it’s free!

You can do a deep dive with the tons of information that this robust application provides but that can get complicated and act as a barrier to bloggers looking for basic analytics. Measuring your blog’s success is important, but keep it simple – at least in the beginning. Here are a few basic, but meaningful insights from the big three – Audience, Traffic Sources, and Content.

Audience – Who’s reading your blog?

See how many visitors checked out your blog and the number of pages they visited. Find out which country, and even which city they’re in, and which web browser or mobile operating system they’re using to access your site.

Traffic Sources – Where is your traffic coming from?

This dashboard gives you an overview of direct, referral and search traffic. Have a Facebook Page, Twitter account or LinkedIn profile? Find our how much traffic is coming from those sites and others that link to your website or blog post. See the keywords people typed into search engines to arrive on your site, and the breakdown of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. It’s a good bet that the vast majority will be from Google.

Content – What are your top pages and blog posts?

Find your site’s most frequently visited pages and posts. Here’s you’ll see how often people visit each page of your site and how long they stay. You’ll also see which keywords visitors entered in the search box on your site.

Use these metrics to see which posts are resonating with your target audience and how search engines are identifying your site. Are the top keywords related to your practice or the message you’re trying to get out? If not, adjust your content.

This touches the surface of the type of information Google Analytics provide. It’s a good place to start and if you want to dig deeper, the application has an intuitive interface with useful dashboard overviews.

Want to see how consuming tracking analytics can be? Check out the Google Analytics iPhone App. It’s a bit pricey at $6 but well worth it.

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