As a business owner and someone who is striving to optimize their website in the most efficient ways possible, you already know that Google Analytics is a crucial tool for evaluating specific details and statistics regarding the traffic that is arriving to your site. How many visitors arrived to the site in the last month? How long was the average time spent on the site? These are a couple of common questions you may have and intend to find answers to when using this tool. However, there are often other common questions that provide beneficial information when answered, but are not as easily found when a newer Google Analytics user is searching for them, such as: How do I find out the top areas/locations where visitors to my website are coming from? The steps to take in order to find the answer are simple:
- Access your Google Analytics account
- Go to your “Audience Overview” page and select “Geo” from the choices in the menu on the left side of the page
- Select “Location” in the sub-menu, then choose your country followed by the state you are targeting/most concerned with
- View detailed breakdown of the towns/cities that are bringing the most traffic to your site in this specific region: you are provided with the top 10 locations, but are able to view additional areas as well and helpful details such as the percentage of new visitors, average visit duration and more.
A breakdown of the top towns and cities that are bringing traffic to your company’s website is more important than you may initially think. Yes, it is great to see the overall total visitors to your site increase each month, but what good will it do if these people are out of your area of service? These geo-focused analytics will allow you to confirm whether or not your targeted audience and services areas are being reached. If not, you are able to move forward by improving upon the location-focused content on your website whether it is through creating service area pages, editing and enhancing service area pages that already exist, better optimizing meta-data with business-related and area-related keywords, and much more.