So what to do: 1. Look at the list of Queries and see if there are any that you would like a page on your site to rank higher for.  If you see a suitable Query with a high number of Impressions take a closer look. If your highest ranked page for that term is below Position 1 or 2,  and consequently getting few Clicks, you should look to optimise that page for this Query. To do that look at on-page factors, particularly the Page Title, then look to get back links, ideally from external sites, with the Query as the anchor text.

2.  Check the snippet which appears in the Google SERPS results for the top terms that you want to be found for.  Does the snippet  ( and the Page Title) accurately describe what you are offering and if so does it encourage visitors to your page ?

Most popular Social Sites

Social Sites such as Facebook and Twitter are now major sources of traffic for many web sites and for some web sites rival Google in their ability to drive traffic.

However for these UK charities the social  networking sites are not big drivers of traffic. The analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter accounted for over 95% of visits from the social sites, although Stumbleupon had some success. While the data says that Twitter brought about 33% of the visits that Facebook brought in reality Twitter probably brought more as many believe that Google Analytics undercounts Twitter visits by a factor of 5 or more.
Social Networking sites have an important role to play in reaching specific audiences but for now it is best to tag each tweet and check the stats for the specific landing page to really measure the impact on visits.

To see how it may affect UK charities I compared the search results for the current Google and `caffeine` using the nifty comparison tool put together by sembience ( nice example of link bait !). For four different sites that attract between 50k and 250k visits per month I looked at their top 10 keywords. From them I excluded the `brand` terms eg organisation name and terms clearly not related to the organisations mission – leaving about 5/6 keywords per organisation. For one organisation `caffeine` put all 5 terms lower than current search results. Two organisations had a majority of terms producing lower results and one had no net loss or gain.

Before it becomes Google`s new search engine no doubt `caffeine` will have a lot of modifications but it is well worth checking your top terms now and seeing if you are on track to lose or gain visitors when it happens.

Webmaster Tools Top Search Queries

Further to the right is the section headed Clickthrough. Here you can see similar data but  now for those who clicked through to your site.  First  look at the search query terms.  Are there any here that you did  not expect ? If you are gettings clicks from a term that you do not rank highly for and want more of that traffic then get working on that. Note that you can select the specific date range and region that you are particularly interested in.

Further down Your Site on the web is the Keywords menu. This shows ” the most common keywords Google found when it crawling your site “. This is great data when planning the next steps for your site.

Keyword Tool Local Global Search

A quick test indicates that the data in Local Search Volume is good but the lack of historic `Local` data is a pity eg a search term may be popular globally each month but here in the UK you will be making a decision based on just one months data. I suspect that for many the reverse would be better ie the current months data for Global with Local showing historic data. Google has not yet explained how this new data relates to the statement further up on the Keyword Tool page that ” Results are tailored to the languages and countries you choose below:” My vote would be for more local data and less world wide.

First User Engagement. Google Analytics provides on the Dashboard two useful indicators ie Pages per Visit and Avg. Time on Site. Next, in the Visitors section > Visitor Loyalty there are two further indicators of how engaged visitors are with the site – Length of Visit and Depth of Visit. Taken together these 4 give a clear measure of how `engaged` users are with the site.

To measure the overall User Loyalty we can consider 3 figures. First, from the Dashboard we can deduce the percentage of returning visitors from the % New Visits figure. Second, we can determine how many visitors make more than 3, 4, 5 (whatever number we choose) visits per month from: Visitors > Visitor Loyalty > Loyalty. Finally the number of Visits divided by the number of Unique Visitors will give the average number of visits per visitor.

While average figures can be useful they rarely provide the all important `actionable insight` that we really need. To make the User Loyalty and User Engagement metrics as defined above really useful we can do two things. First we group pages or sections of interest together so that the people who author material can see clearly how the audience is responding . Secondly, segment by Traffic Sources ie direct, referring site, PPC, etc so we can see what the `best`traffic is coming from. In this way we get real insight into how each part of the site is performing.
Fortunately Google have now provided a really easy way to do all this selection of pages and sources in Google Analytics – The Advanced Segments feature. This feature allows non programmers to easily segment any group of pages and see all historical data for them. Something that until now was not possible in GA. Well worth checking out.