Preparing for SEO-Armageddon With Google Analytics Intelligence

Having your website drop from Google overnight sucks.

It’s happened to me before, too aggressive a link building strategy, getting malware on your site or sleeping with Larry Page’s wife can see your site drop from the rankings. Good news though, it’s not irreversible (particularly if you are an established site,  though if you’re a new site you’re better off starting again), and you can even ward it off using a lovely trick discovered recently – using Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

What Are Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts?

Quite simply, they are conditions that you put on your Google Analytics account so that when certain conditions are met, you receive an email. For example – if you usually get 100 referrers, then getting over 200 referrers may be odd and you may wish to investigate it. As such, you can put an alert on your account for this. You shouldn’t check your stats everyday (you’ll suffer from analysis paralysis), so this is a great way to be alerted to your account for any anomalies, meaning you can spend your days doing more constructive things and growing your blog.

How To Create Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts

To create a Google Analytics alert, visit Google Analytics (this is using the new version of Google Analytics), click on “Intelligence Events > Overview > Custom Alerts”. Click “Manage Alerts” then “Create New Alert”.

Give the alert a name and a time period (as well as checking the “send an email” checkbox), and then set your conditions. The alert pictured above says that “whenever somebody finds the site from search engines searching for the word ‘author’, send me an email”. If you’re familiar with Google Custom Reporting, then it should be fairly straightforward.

Note: You Can Only choose one form of traffic – though you can use segments to group multiple sources

The SEO-Armageddon Intelligence Alert

Generally speaking, you shouldn’t lose half of your search traffic overnight (with the exceptions of weekends in certain industries). As such, you should set an alert if your search traffic drops below a certain level over the course of the week. The alert above will inform me of any week that the amount of traffic drops below 30 visitors for the week.

The Pre-SEO-Armageddon Intelligence Alert

Tin foil hat time! Google’s offices are located in Mountain View, California. Although unconfirmed, webmasters have reported visitors from that part of the world have visited their site days before dropping in the search engine rankings. As a fail-safe, many have this alert set up so they are able to quickly jump on the site to fix it.

Two Of Mine! Now Show Me Yours

Do you have any custom Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts on your account? Share them in the comments!