While there are a million things to dial in, fine-tune, and calibrate when it comes to your website’s search visibility and SEO optimization, some issues might be easier to spot than others with the tools you already have. In the same vein, it is important to remember that just like a small hole can sink a big ship, those small things can lead to an easy increase in revenue. So let’s dive into something obvious that you might be overlooking… Everyone needs a friendly reminder here and there!

We often get so entrenched in the warfare that is website maintenance and campaign reporting that we forget to check the obvious. Let’s say you have a lot of products on your website, like many of our clients do, and you are constantly glancing at Google Analytics to get a better idea of your traffic and your audience engagement, but did you know that even the most basic report from Google Analytics can lead to some big revenue if you know what you’re looking for?

Here’s how I stumbled onto it...

Since I was working on SEO, I had to isolate the data in Google Analytics down to the USA / Organic traffic segments to get an idea of how people are landing on the site. Once there, I went to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, and this is what I saw:

If this doesn’t throw up a red flag for you, then it should. Just for context, this particular site was a Prestashop store. And with Prestashop, all pages ending with “.html” are product pages. Are you seeing the red flag now? A product page that falls in #2 for ALL ORGANIC TRAFFIC to the website with a bounce rate of 90.78%. That’s a big problem!

What could be the reasons behind a high bounce rate? Well, as I’m sure you already guessed, it turns out this is the URL of an out-of-stock product page.

Next steps are:

1. Use a filter to see only those URLs ending with “.html”. I want to get a list of only product pages.
2. Export the list as CSV.
3. Use the freeware “Screaming Frog” to see which of these pages are out of stock.
4. Pass the list of these out of stock product URLs to the client (or yourself if you manage your own store), and explain to them why these pages are important.

These product pages are incredibly important because they already generate Organic traffic to your site which is good in the eyes of Google. Yet, since they are out of stock they are very unlikely to satisfy the user query, which is bad in the eyes of Google. All we need is to do is re-stock these products and BAM - quick revenue from the low hanging fruit.

Long story short, don’t overcomplicate things when it comes to Google Analytics, it is a powerful tool that can give you very important information even in the simplest of reports. Always keep an eye out for the easy targets and you will prevent your small hole from sinking your big ship.