Bloggers want far more than just a few visitors bouncing to their sites. If you’re like most bloggers, you want content that draws in readers, helps your site rank higher in search engines and converts visitors into mailing list subscribers and/or customers.

Even the overall appearance of your site can have a huge impact on how long visitors stay there and whether or not they return. Fortunately, you don’t have to just guess what readers want. Google Analytics offers the feedback you need to improve how marketable your blog is and how readers perceive your content. You can look at overall statistics or the finest details to see how healthy your blog is.

1) Bounce Rates

Millions of visitors aren’t worth much if they only stay on your site for mere minutes and then bounce away forever. Google Analytics can help you measure:

• Which pages visitors are landing on
• How long a visitor stays on that page

For example, if you notice that a lot of your visitors are landing on a specific page or leaving when they land on that page, it might be time to update the content. Figure out how to make the page more visually pleasing, break up content so it’s more readable and decrease load time.

2) A/B Testing

Blog owners who wish to improve conversion rates typically come up with a hypothesis on elements that will make a landing page successful. They then turn to A/B testing to see which elements create a positive response from site visitors.

Using Google Analytics in conjunction with A/B testing can help you increase your conversion rates. In fact, this is such a popular method that the WhichTestWon/Marketo survey found that 94 percent of online marketing professionals consult analytics reports when doing split testing.

3) User Profiles

Another way to use analytics reports is by figuring out customer buying habits, which products are most popular and even what locations your customers are visiting from. Gaining access to this type of information is particularly helpful to stores that deliver goods and services, such as a restaurant. Identify the delivery zones and divide them up accordingly.

4) Competition

Since many sites use Google Analytics, you can often use the Benchmarking reports to figure out how your site compares to others in your industry.

There are more than 1,600 industry categories, which you can sort by location and average traffic stats. If you want to compare your blog to another blog that has similar amounts of traffic, you can easily do this by refining your search.

5) Keywords

You can also use Google Analytics to figure out which keywords are drawing traffic to your blog, so you can either repeat them or add additional keywords that will attract the audience you most desire for your blog.

The Keywords report will show you the top keywords for your site. You can also compare this information to see how many visitors are returning to your site and how many are leaving after only a few minutes. Once you see a few patterns and discover the keywords that drive ongoing traffic to your site, you can use this information to create e-books, courses, additional content or even gear guides to this target audience.

More than likely you already know the basics of using Google Analytics. Now, dig a bit deeper, seek ways to market better to your audience and get a leg up on your competition.

Sarah Landrum graduated from Penn State with degrees in Marketing and PR. Now, she’s a PR Specialist writing in her free time. Sarah is also the founder of Punched Clocks, a site dedicated to helping young professionals navigate the work world and find happiness and success in their careers. You can find Sarah tweeting @SarahLandrum 

Image Courtesy Search Engine People Blog