If you’ve ever had a severe drop in your Google rankings in search results, you may think of Google more of an enemy than an ally.
But if you knew what I do, you’d realize that there are tools provided by the search engine that help you learn more about your traffic, and may even help drive visitors to your site.
Here are five ways that Google provides free traffic assistance.
Because that is what we used to do! We used to ride the waves of information and see where it took us. Remember those day’s? We would type in a key word or phrase in our favorite search engine and start clickin’. Each site would have a link leading us to another site, and as you went you would always see something else cool, and click that. You started out looking for apples and ended up with zebras.
You could start with same word as many times as you wanted and never end up in the same place twice. It was the information highway, and you went on a road trip. It was an ocean of information, and you went surfin’. We didn’t care what it was we were looking for at first, because we found all this other cool stuff we would have never known about.
Two big things have just happened in Google-land: Jagger and Google Analytics. Together, these two events may have changed the face of search forever.
Jagger
First, let’s discuss Jagger… Just like hurricanes, Google updates have names. (A Google update is a change to the way Google determines its rankings. Google makes these changes periodically, and they’re universally feared because they can impact dramatically on a website’s ranking.) The latest update is called Jagger, and it has search engine optimizers (SEOs) all around the world in a state of panic.