Why SEO Matters for Growing Your Service's Traffic

Imagine you're searching for the best restaurants in your area on Google. You type in your query, and suddenly, you're faced with a flood of results. Often, you might only click on the top two or three results, leaving the rest unnoticed. But why does that happen, and as a service provider, how can you ensure that your platform makes it to the top of that list?

Understanding SEO

Whether or not you're a developer, you've likely encountered the term SEO at least once. At first, it can seem mysterious, almost like an invisible force. I remember feeling overwhelmed when I first encountered it, imagining it as a vague and complex entity. However, it simply stands for Search Engine Optimization—a practice that's vital for anyone with an online presence.

If you're still unsure about what SEO entails, don't worry; you're not alone. It can take a bit of time to fully grasp, but with patience, you'll see it's all about making sure your website or content stands out in search engine results.

• Search Engine
  • This refers to systems like Google, Bing, or Naver (popular in Korea) that search the web for information.
• Optimization
  • This involves adjusting and improving the elements of a website to enhance its ranking on these search engines.

So, the next time you hear SEO, just remember that it's your ally in getting your service noticed without paying for ads. We'll dive into all the benefits and strategies in the following sections.

Never Underestimate the Power of Searching

So, what are the pros? These days, web pages often serve as gateways, allowing users or clients to explore services before making any commitment. With that in mind, let’s break down the benefits into two key facets. (Yes, I believe that the only way to get anything done is to divide it into smaller pieces!)

• Better User Experience Equals Better Retention
  • When you optimize a website for performance as part of your SEO practices, it becomes easier for users to navigate your service. This means you've succeeded in keeping users engaged longer, which can lead to significant growth for your service.

Retention refers to the ability of a company or service to keep its customers or users over a period of time.

• Higher Search Rank Equals Higher Organic Traffic
  • Organic visitors find your service by typing in specific queries or keywords that match your content. This reflects a sustainable long-term strategy that doesn't require high marketing costs.

Organic traffic refers to the visitors who land on a website as a result of unpaid (organic) search results.

Knowledge is Power!

Once everything is set up, what comes next? Here's a hint: what do you do after posting on social media? You check how people are reacting. This is where analytics tools come into play. You want to understand user behavior—like which content resonates most with your audience, which countries bring in the most traffic (if your audience is global), or even track errors.

Analytics tools make it easier to have a conversation with users when your service isn't face-to-face. Tracking user engagement is crucial for any digital product. That's why there are so many analytics tools out there, like Mixpanel, Firebase Analytics, Google Analytics, and more.

For my test product, which happens to be this website—suzie.world (welcome again, everyone)—I’ve chosen to use Google Analytics. The reason is simple: the website itself is straightforward! It doesn’t have any complex features that might cause errors and require late-night troubleshooting.

Integrate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is simple to set up, offers a wide range of metrics, and best of all, it’s free! Let me walk you through how easy it is to get started.

First, head over to Google Analytics. From the dashboard, you can create an account for the service you want to integrate. I won’t dive deep into each step of the integration process because Google has already provided a beautifully crafted guide. However, once you’ve set up your service, Google Analytics will provide you with a code snippet that you can install on your website.

In my case, I didn’t use a website builder like WordPress or Shopify, so I manually installed the code myself.

If you're using Next.js, it's recommended to use next/script through the @next/third-parties library to avoid impacting your webpage's performance. Since I use Next.js for my website, I followed this recommendation. With this setup, the code would look something like this.

Reference: Using Google Analytics with Next.js

import { GoogleAnalytics } from '@next/third-parties/google'
 
export default function RootLayout({
  children,
}: {
  children: React.ReactNode
}) {
  return (
    <html lang="en">
      <body>{children}</body>
      {/* Replace XYZ into your measurement ID */}
      <GoogleAnalytics gaId="G-XYZ" />
    </html>
  )
}

Not long after deployment, you'll start receiving monitoring data quickly. It provides user data segmented by country or channel group, showing whether users are direct or organic. There are many other metrics you can track as you set things up, but here I’ve attached a screenshot of two reports right after the integration.

Users by Country shows the top most common countries active users are visiting from and the number of active users from each of those countries. (Reference: User attributes overview report)

Channels are rule-based definitions of your website's traffic sources that let you monitor the performance of all of the channels sending traffic to your website. You can find descriptions and definitions of the channels in the tables below. (Reference: Default channel group)

Conclusion

Congrats! Now you’ve got the idea of integrating SEO and Google Analytics into your service. You’ve learned how SEO can benefit your service by increasing organic traffic, and you’ve also gained insights into the performance of your marketing efforts through analytics tools.

Before you go, here’s a little tip: to ensure your metadata is correctly set before sharing a website link on any social media platform, you can use Facebook’s Open Graph Debugger by simply copying and pasting your website URL.

See you in the next post!