Increasing the visibility of a website is exactly the kind of objective that web analytics aims to fulfill. After tons of research and exploration of the insights gained by tracking the activities of visitors, if the results of the analysis are anything but satisfactory, major steps are taken by analysts to up the performance of a website.

Despite a large number of keyword-optimized posts, do you fail to generate enough organic traffic? Some webmasters and SEOs find that they are not yet ranking for coveted keywords or in their target geographies. Even with a lot of hard work, webmasters may find that their traffic is untargeted, which leads to lukewarm conversion rates.

To do so, the first step is to increase its visibility. One question that every webmaster and business owner asks is, ‘whether customers even know their website exists’. If the answer to this question is full of doubts, all efforts of web analytics are then targeted towards this goal.

In essence, increasing the visibility of an online platform is at the heart of analytics because all the research and hard work aims to discover why visitors left the website early, why they did not complete an action or why they leave even before one page is downloaded. Therefore, making a website more visible is the most obvious remedy to a very low conversion rate and minimum internet traffic.

In the previous topics, the basics of web analytics have been discussed. These topics have revolved around concepts you need to know to understand the field of web analytics and to grasp its importance. In this discussion of increasing the visibility of a website, we have reached the implementation stage when a webmaster is in control of the data and has all the metrics he needs to begin the assessment process.

Ideas to mitigate such failure may be hidden in your web analytics reports. I love analyzing my site to find specific answers to the issues on organic traffic. If you are using a tool such as Google Analytics to understand your website, you have access to ample data in order to improve your organic traffic.

Let’s take a look at several ways in which you can use Google Analytics to improve your organic reach.

WHY INCREASE VISIBILITY?

Why would you want to increase the visibility of your website? Is it so ‘invisible’ that customers cannot find it? The need to increase visibility emerges from one basic principle of marketing and sales, i.e. attracting new customers. A website or a business usually finds it easy to attract the same customers as long as it provides excellent customer service and its products are reliable and unique. No doubt, repeat purchases are essential for a business to record revenues on a regular basis. Moreover, it is these loyal customers who can be trusted to spread positive word of mouth regarding your business and keep coming back for your services.

However, every business reaches a stage in its life when it wants a fresh approach because the existing customers, though very valuable, can only buy or subscribe just this much. To increase revenue beyond the present limits, attracting new customers, new markets and new segments of a demography is essential.

Nonetheless, at the same time, a webmaster also has to ensure that the new customers, in other words, the increase in traffic directed to the website, is part of the most relevant target market. Getting visitors on your website, who are not part of your segment usually results in impressive traffic metrics, but staggeringly low conversion rates. Therefore, relevancy is a big criterion to make sure a business attracts only those who can make a difference to its bottom line. This is where increasing visibility comes in.

Web analytics helps a business looking for increased visibility by pointing out the areas that need work, those that are already performing well and those that should probably be cut off altogether. It is with this information that a business puts together its most experienced minds to devise strategies and actions that can tend to the problem areas and fix them.

Page Speed

Speed has become one of the most important search ranking factors, especially after the advent of mobile-first indexing by Google. You can assess your site’s loading time through various online tools, such as Page Speed Insights or GTMetrix.

But in order to find the loading times of specific web pages on your site, you need to get into Google Analytics. The GA page speed report is based on actual data generated from visitors accessing your web pages. Find the report under Behavior > Site Speed > Speed Suggestions.

Scan search engines and improve ranking

It is hard to deny that the majority of website traffic comes via search engines. The fame and popularity of the search engine giant, Google, is undisputed. So is the fact that even if users know the direct URL they want to visit, they usually punch it in the Google search bar, for convenience sake.

Therefore, identifying the search engines that send you the most visitors, who then convert to customers, is the starting point of increasing the visibility of the website. Smart business owners use web analytics to segment the visitors they receive by the search engine they are coming from. The engine that sends the highest percentage of traffic that ends up performing an action, is the one to prioritize.

Since your marketing budget for search engine promotion is limited, marketing on every engine is a waste of resources. This is why, identifying the top one of two search engines is an ideal strategy. In this regard, search engine rankings play a crucial role.

Optimize content

Within the realm of search engine rankings is content optimization. To appear on the first few pages of a search engine, you have to optimize the content of your website to make it interesting, and beyond that, relevant to the search criteria used by visitors.

How do you know what visitors are looking for? The answer is by exploring keyword searches. Most of search engine and content optimization is about using the right keywords. Keywords and phrases, that are most used by visitors and those searching for specific products online, should be made part of the content included in your website. This way, when a user looks up this keyword on Google, your website pops up.

Web analytics helps with content optimization in the following way:

Benchmark search engine ranking – What is your present ranking? Where do you want to get?
Identify top converting keywords – Not only does web analytics identify the keywords that are most used for your website, it also helps track conversions that took place because of particular keywords used. It is essential to know which keywords work for you because it enables you to leverage on them and increase visibility by incorporating these key phrases in web content.
Finding new keywords – To attract visitors who are presently not using these top keywords, experts suggest that businesses go beyond the most used keywords and look for new ones. According to this approach, a business puts together some of its less-frequently-used keywords in a bunch/combination to target less competitive areas of a market with low-traffic content.
3. Revisit advertising
Once you have identified the search engine and the keywords that work best for you, the next step is to revisit your online advertisement strategy. The area of online marketing and promotion is vast. There is a lot that a business can do to up its promotional campaigns on the right medium and with the right keywords.

For instance, a website can be promoted with any one or all of the following ways:

• Banner advertisements on search engines :These are the best advertisements to use in high traffic areas because of the positive impact on conversion rates.
• AdWords and pay-per-click ads
  These are the most cost effective ads. They can be fully customized to target any market segment you want.
• Social media ads
  Promotion on social media is one of the most effective ways to increase the visibility of your website. If your website has a social media tab to attract visitors to related pages, this type of promotional strategy works best.
• Starting blogs
  Just like referrer websites direct traffic to your website, paid or unpaid blogs can also urge visitors to discover your products and services. Since blogs are usually written by third parties, they are perceived as a reliable source of information by customers.
• Affiliate programs
  Even though designing and launching an affiliate program can take time and effort, it can be a great way to spread your reach beyond the demography you have always targeted. Affiliate programs build a network of marketers who can advertise your website at minimal costs.

The three approaches combined make up search engine marketing, with improving ranking and content optimization being part of SEO and organic reach, and online advertising using pay-per-click ads, being the part of paid reach.

GOOGLE METRICS THAT HELP WITH WEBSITE VISIBILITY

Besides using Google Analytics, a lot of website owners use Google Search Console in order to combine the functions and benefits of these tools with increasing website’s visibility.

Increasing website visibility with Google’s tools is a top concern for all webmasters who use these tools as their primary web analytics kit. Both of them offer the advantage of having access the informationvisibility of your website.

Coupled with search engine data, a number of metrics you can get from these, and similar tools, can be used to determine how visible your website is on the internet. Since visibility and reach are two of the most important goals of effective web analytics, these metrics are some of the most used measurement criteria to evaluate a company’s online efforts.

Crawability

Crawlability is a measure of how easily a search engine can find and crawl your website. Appearing high in search engine results is a definite boost to the visibility of a website, because most of those users, who search for websites using keywords, usually do not look beyond the first few pages of Google search.

Therefore, if you want your website to be highly visible to the target market, you have to make sure it appears on a rank that is visible and considered acceptable by the market. Appearing on the first few positions may be hard. However, if you use the right keywords and optimize your website, a high rank is not impossible to achieve.

Crawlability also encompasses the technical reasons that prevent a website from appearing on high ranks. For instance, any one of the following may be the reason that has a negative influence on the visibility of your website:

• A lot of redirected pages
• Pages being blocked by the noindex meta attribute
• A lot of pages being blocked by robot.txt files
• 404 Error pages that prevent your website from showing up
• Pages that are subject to other types of server errors

Mobile Optimization

These days, with the burgeoning popularity of smartphones and tablets, you need to make sure that your website is well optimized for mobile devices. As of 2016, traffic from mobile devices surpassed traffic from desktops and laptops.

If you have a responsive and mobile-friendly website, most of your traffic may be from smartphones and tablets. You can check whether this is true in your Analytics report.

Under Audience, go to Mobile and click Devices. You will see the report on all the mobile devices used to access your website.

Organic Search Appearance on Other Search Engines

Besides Google, there are other search engines that have decent market share on organic search. Some of the other top-ranking search engines include Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and Ask.