Continuing our series on SEO for clinics … Google Analytics: explained

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What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is the industry standard online tool for web analytics and can be used for any business, big or small. Google Analytics is a platform that provides you with the tools to measure the performance of your website, as it enables you to measure the site traffic, conversions, advert performance, and see how people use your website.

5 key features of Google Analytics
  1. Traffic reporting – At the most basic level, Google Analytics can be used as a traffic reporter. The tool can be used to tell you how many users are visiting your website on a daily, monthly and annual basis. This information can be used to spot trends in the audience behaviour which can, in turn, be used to influence your marketing decisions. For a clinic, it is immensely helpful to know where your visitors come from, as it will show which strategies are working well and which need improvement.
  2. Conversion tracking – Conversion points of a website include contact forms and e-commerce sales. After identifying the conversion points for your site, you can track them using Google Analytics; the information will show you when someone converted and the source of traffic that they came through as well as other useful insights.
  3. Keyword referrals – As we know from previous blog posts in this series, SEO is a vital part of a successful website. Google Analytics will tell you which keywords users searched for to arrive at your site. This information can vastly improve your SEO strategy as you can learn which keywords to target. Sometimes, it can be hard to know what keywords to target, so having this data will make it much easier to target keywords that are likely to succeed.
  4. Third party referrals – Google Analytics also tells you which websites sent you traffic, this helps you to know which sites are worth spending more time on as well as seeing if any new sites have started linking to yours.
  5. Custom dashboards – With Google Analytics you have the ability to create custom dashboards; the dashboard is the first thing you see when you log in and you can customise it to your taste. If you want to see conversions, for example, then you can add them to your dashboard.

These 5 features cover only the basics of the capabilities of Google Analytics. For more information on getting the most out of Google Analytics, be sure to check out Google’s Analytics Academy, and look out for further e-clinic blog posts to explain specific features in more detail.