Analysing your website’s performance is one of the most important things you can do if you want to increase the effectiveness of what is your most accessible business generation tool.

After - hopefully - finding you on Google, your website is most likely the first thing people will see that represents you and your business. So, other than ensuring that it looks good and functions well, you need to sweat that asset as much as possible!

Understanding what is happening when visitors land on your site is crucial. Fortunately, Squarespace* has some good analytics data embedded in the admin panel and these are sufficient for most small business owners on a day-to-day basis.

This video gives you a guide to how to interpret the data you can access and what to do with it. (Note: this video was made for 7.0 but it remains valid for 7.1)

Having said this, there are a LOT more complex ways of looking at this data using Google Analytics (other tools are available too but GA is free and it’s the source of all the other data you might be looking at).

For growing businesses and those where either online sales or online lead generation are critical, it pays to get some expert help with using Analytics as it’s difficult - perhaps impossible - to improve on something when you don’t really know what’s working and what isn’t.

Google has various other tools that can help you understand your site performance. The next most important one is Search Console. It has a new interface now which is much easier to understand. It shows you at a top level, how many people are looking for you, finding you and what they are spending time looking at. Crucially it’s also the place where you would check for errors on your site such as mobile compatibility, broken links and other measures.

If I’m your go-to web designer (great, thank you) and we haven’t already spoken about Analytics and Search Console then get in touch and I can make sure your site is linked up to both tools. Once set up, these are tools you can freely access yourself without technical help if you wish.

But if you want me to monitor and fix your search performance for you, I’m ready to help.

I use a fantastic tool for managing clients’ search engine performance - it’s called SEMrush* and it pulls together data from Analytics and Search Console for your site and your competitors’ sites to give a really in-depth view of how well you are doing at getting found and keeping people interested once they’ve found you. Plus, crucially, it tells you how well your competitors are doing. This data is absolutely invaluable.

Not only this - the tool can also pull in data from all of your social media platforms, and those of your competitors so you can clearly see what activity gets results.

I charge just £22 a month for access to this tool plus however much time you want me to spend on optimising your search performance. I can use the tool even if I didn’t build your site for you. So if you’d like to learn how well you are doing against others in your field and take steps to beat the competition, get in touch. You can also grab a free trial of SEMrush and try it out on your own first.