This week, learn how to add Google Analytics tracking and optimize the SEO of a Weebly Website in 5 minutes or less.

Happy Monday! We hope that you had a safe and happy 4th of July weekend.

We are back today with another digital marketing how-to tutorial.

This week, we are focusing on a web hosting service that we have never spoken about before on a Momentum Monday blog – Weebly.

Weebly is one of the most used web hosting services next to other services such as GoDaddy and HostGator. Currently, it has over 250 million unique visitors every month and hosts over 30 million websites worldwide.

Websites are great, but what is a digital marketer’s best friend? Tracking and SEO!

Even if you have no experience with Google Analytics or SEO, Weebly makes it easy to implement these tools on your website!

Read more to learn how to connect your Google Global Site Tag to your site for tracking purposes and how to easily add SEO keywords to your website.

Why Google Analytics and SEO?

First things first – let’s get a refresher on the importance of Google Analytics tracking and SEO for your website.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google. This service was created to help you easily track the traffic on your website. For a small business owner, this knowledge could make or break your business.

At Momentum, we are Google partners, so we love Google tools. Some other amazing Google platforms small business owners should be utilizing include Google My Business and Google Adwords.

There are many reasons why you should be using Google Analytics as a small business owner, but some of the main reasons include:

• Learn which channels drive traffic. Instead of wasting time and money figuring out how your audience is finding your business, Google Analytics will tell you where the traffic is coming from.
• Know the best marketing channels. Again – stop wasting money! Google Analytics will tell you which channels are the most profitable for your business.
• Know your audience. Doesn’t every small business owner want to know exactly who their audience is? Luckily, Google Analytics will tell you!
• Figure out which page is performing best. This tool will also break down which page has the most page visits and tell you how long users are spending on each page.

Basically, Google Analytics helps you eliminate the guesswork!

Let’s move onto our friend, SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is basically how your business is found online by potential customers. And the best part? It is free.

Why focus on SEO? Some things to keep in mind for small business owners are:

• Organic search drives the most traffic. How many times have you found a new business by simply searching for something like “BYOB restaurants in Philly?” Having good SEO will get you found by more people.

• SEO creates a better user experience. Google is smart – it knows if your website is the answer to a searcher’s question. Why not solve all of the user’s problems by using SEO to share your business’ solutions.
• Builds trust. When is the last time you went to page 5 of Google’s search results? Never! Get your business higher on the search results to establish yourself as a business with credibility.

Now that you know why these things are important, let’s move on to how to add them to your Weebly Website!

Create a Weebly Website

If you don’t already have a Weebly website, now is the time to create one! You can do so by going to www.weebly.com/signup. If you are looking for a bit more guidance, check out this awesome video that will walk you through creating your own Weebly site.

If you already have a Weebly site, log into your account now.

Create a Google Analytics Account

If you don’t already have a Google Analytics Account, you should create one now before moving forward. You can quickly and easily make one here. 

Again, if you are looking for a step-by-step guide, this video guide is super extensive and helpful for a first-time Google Analytics user.

If you already have a Google Analytics account, log into your account now.

Once you are in your Google Analytics account, navigate to Admin, which is located at the very bottom of the menu on the right-hand side of the screen.

Once in the Admin tab, you will be redirected to a screen with 3 main columns – account, property, and view. For the sake of this tutorial, we will be sticking to the “property” column, located in the middle of the screen.

Within the property column, find “Tracking Info.” Once selected, a drop-down menu will appear. Select “Tracking Code.”

Google will bring you to a new page with your very own Google website tracking code. In order to install this onto your Weebly site, copy and paste the section of the code located under the words “Global Site Tag.”

Optimize for SEO

Leave Google Analytics and navigate back to your Weebly website.

Once logged in to your Weebly account, select the “Edit Website” box in the upper right-hand corner to edit your site.

Once selected and redirected, select “Settings” from the toolbar at the top of the page.

On the Settings page, locate the menu on the left-hand side of the screen. Find and select “SEO.”

Once opened, you will see Weebly’s built-in SEO optimization options for your site.

The options include:

1. Adding a Site Description. This is the description that will appear in the search engine results under your website URL. This description should tell searchers exactly what your website is about. In this section, there is a 250 character max.
2. Meta Keywords. This is where you want to place all of the keywords for your website. Separate each keyword with a comma.
3. Footer Code. This is where you will paste the Google Analytics Global Site Tag that we copied over a few moments ago.

After you have optimized the SEO and inserted the Google Analytics tracking code, find the blue “publish” button in the upper right-hand corner to save your changes.

Just like that, your Weebly website is now optimized and ready to go!

Thanks for reading! If there is anything else you’d like to learn about Weebly, or any other web hosting service, leave it in the comments below and we will write future blog about it!

See you next week!