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…And what gets managed gets improved.

In Gordon Bethune’s (CEO and champion of Continental Airlines) book From Worst to First: Behind the Scenes of Continental’s Remarkable Comeback, he writes numerous times about measuring those things that need to be managed. His reasoning states that if you don’t know where you’re struggling, you won’t know where to begin to fix it. Even though he is in charge of a multi-billion dollar company, the same approach can and should be taken in small business. For starters, most small businesses have websites. In order for your customers to find you, they need to be able to find your website. The basic concept of web tracking, analytics, and statistics is to figure out where your trouble spots are on your site and improve them. This forms the basics of SEO: search-engine optimization.

Google Analytics makes tracking and measuring who’s visiting your site very simple. With pretty graphs and easy-to-read information at hand, you can dissect who’s browsing, what they’re interested in, and where they’re coming from. While this information is great to see, it’s what you do with it that makes it invaluable for your SEO efforts.

Using data from analytics software allows you to provide more of what works and less of what doesn’t. If you have a page that is getting 80% of your traffic (80% of your visitors are reading what’s on it), and it’s not the homepage, you need to quickly find out:

• How they’re finding the page.
• What they’re doing on the page (are they signing up for a newsletter/RSS subscription/etc.?
• What you want them to do on the page (do you want them to sign up for a newsletter subscription/etc.?)
• Where they’re going after they do whatever they do on that page.
• Are they coming back to that page (called repeat visitors).

SEO involves analyzing the results of tracking information and applying the data discoveries to your marketing goals. In other words, by using data from past site visitors, you can manage future visitors. Tweaking and modifying your landing pages, sub-pages, and homepage to fit your marketing goals is crucial for any successful website.

If you’re struggling with interpreting the data from someplace like Google Anayltics, it may be time to hire an SEO firm or specialist. They’ll be able to help you examine the findings and show you where and how to increase the rankings for your site on search engines, but also should be able to help you get your internal pages optimized for the best conversion rates possible.

Be careful, though–there are many “SEO firms” or “SEO specialists” out there who really don’t know what they’re doing, and will essentially take your money after running you around and telling you nonsense about who’s coming to your site and what they’re doing. A good way to find out if they know what they’re talking about is to Google their information, name, or brand and see if they’re the first result to show up. A good SEO will properly optimize their own page and get great search-engine results, don’t you think?

Remember–measure, manage, and improve. The best managers don’t leave things to chance once they look alright–they improve on what’s working and get rid of what’s not. Sure, you shouldn’t fix what’s not broken, but a solid understanding of SEO will help guide you fix what can certainly be better!

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