SEO analytics is the collective process of tracking, collecting and analysing your marketing data with the core aim of growing the website’s organic traffic. It is advantageous as it allows one to identify improvement opportunities and gain a deeper understanding of the website’s data and maximise the ROI on your SEO efforts.
The SEO analytics tools are available for measuring your SEO data. The most commonly used SEO analytics tool is Google Analytics. One can use Google Analytics Reporting to convey that data to your team or your client.
In what way does Google Analytics help SEO?
Google Analytics is the tool that contains valuable data that your business can use to monitor and improve SEO performance, from keywords to the website’s top referral.
Mentioned below are the advanced ways to track your SEO efforts using Google Analytics
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Sync your search console account
The best way to measure SEO with Google Analytics is by connecting Analytics to Google Search Console. If someone uses Google Analytics without Google Search Console, they will never see the whole picture. By linking both, one can use queries to identify opportunities for improvement with target keywords and the pages you want to rank for.
The Google search console is the tool that tells you what keywords people are using for finding your content, what type of content they are finding, and where that content ranks on Google.
You can also analyze the information and determine various ways to optimize your pages.
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Create SEO-related goals
One should always start the SEO campaign by first setting up Google Analytics with the creation of a corresponding conversion page for tracking and not just when someone views a page with a conversion element on it.
-The conversion pages are sometimes called acknowledgement pages.
-The page should have its URL and include the NonIndex meta tag.
-It is done as they are not displayed organically. It will reduce the false-positive hits and add reassurance to the client of reporting accuracy.
One should always set up goals for generating leads from organic SEO. Higher the conversion rate, the better.
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Use the organic visitor segment.
One should ensure that they use segments and filters to remove spam traffic for accurate reporting. Crawlers and fake referrers, and ghost spam will ruin your reports. Hence, using filters and traffic will need to be excluded under referral traffic. This process is relatively simple; you only need to exclude the domain. This also solves the problem with the first type of spam traffic.
One should exclude the traffic that does not match their hostname. The first and easiest step to utilize the Google Analytics is by tracking organic traffic to a custom dashboard that is segmented for the organic traffic only.
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Compare organic visitors to non-organic
You have got your Google Analytics data broken down by the organic visitors. If you take conscious efforts, it will show an increase in the organic traffic and metrics. However, by excluding the organic traffic, you will be able to pinpoint the poor user experience that can be improved on. This provides an additional boost to the SEO efforts.
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Find top-performing content
One should regularly run down a timely report of your top-performing pages and see what you can do to optimise them. Updating the content means adding a stronger call to the action.
There are several great tools for tracking the effectiveness of the specific pages. You can track various types of page views and see which internal links get the most clicks. These are the measures that help you understand how effective your content is. You should also make changes to improve your content.
Many people make use of SEO Audit services which include an overall analysis to assess the strengths and determine the strategy of the SEO. These services also identify the On-page and off-page factors that affect the search positions. A comprehensive SEO audit report includes a scorecard, backlink report and a future site strategy.
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Look at top-performing landing pages
One of the most underrated SEO tricks is tracking your best landing pages. This data can also help you increase the page views and decrease the bounce rate. It also helps you identify the top and the least converting pages. You can also maintain a report that shows you which individual content pages are driving the most sessions.
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Add annotations to track content updates
It is important to track the optimization results and document them. The easiest way to do this in Google Analytics is to use the annotation feature on a specific day. Using the annotations in Google Analytics also helps us benchmark the performance of an article post the optimization process.
The SEO changes can take days, weeks or in some scenarios even months to bear results.
One should utilize the annotations and annotate each SEO optimization you make in Google Analytics. You can measure your improvements from the optimization efforts.
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Use the multi-channel funnel report
You can break down your organic visitors by the Organic traffic segment. If a user stumbled upon the site by an organic search and then came back later directly, then they came via search and left the source as organic. One should always remember that traffic source is a characteristic of a session.
Google Analytics is the tool that attributes conversions to the most recent traffic source. For measuring the full effect of SEO, one should check assisted conversions in the multi-channel funnel report.
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Track keywords in Google analytics
The major problem one can face with Google Analytic is to track the success with SEO. It is difficult to combine the certain keywords people use.
If you have a proper on-page SEO and URL architecture, this will show you the landing pages people are hitting. This will also give you a proper insight of the focal search terms people are using to find you.
It is very important to look at a full picture of what is being brought in on an optimized term. The quality of the content matters as much as the quantity.
If you target a specific keyword, you can see how well the word is performing and where it currently ranks. If you check this information daily, you can make gradual and effective adjustments to your SEO strategy.
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Find different referral sites.
If you are engaging in several active off-page SEO strategies, it is very important to know if you are building links and how these links are impacting.
One can also make use of Google Analytics referral data for finding links that are not reported in other tools.
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Manage your PPC speed
Monitoring Google Analytics has been vital to ensuring we make money from all the advertising efforts. Analytics show us which keywords convert into sales and which ones do not.
It is important to closely monitor the keywords and conversions as one should deliver quality content.
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Check how Google views the industry
The category of the website is very important in the eyes of Google. One can check the interest categories of the visitors of your site. You can also make use of the data that is available to see the main interest of the visitors of the website and plan the content marketing accordingly.
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Create custom dashboards
For measuring the SEO using Google Analytics one should make their own custom reports. One can also save the custom reports based on one section of the site to pick specific metrics such as the average time spent on that page and the total number of entrances to the page by date.
This becomes extremely useful for seeing which blog posts are the most popular on that particular website and for gauging how much traffic you’re getting through your own blog.
Below are the types of custom dashboards
- General SEO dashboard
It gives a broad look at the SEO campaigns.
- Topic-specific dashboard
This will show up the most viewed pages that are related to a product, service or topic and the top keywords in a given topic.
- Geographic areas
This is useful for the local SEO clients.
For a lot of clients, there are custom reports that show traffic and conversions growth from each landing page in the solutions and different blog subfolders. This also allows you to show value at the top, middle and the bottom of the funnel.
Wrapping up
These are some advanced ways to maximise your SEO efforts using Google Analytics. Making data-driven judgments and demonstrating the value of SEO are two of the major SEO problems. It requires more work than, say, search ads where you can quickly track and affect anything. Because of this, the most important lesson you should take away from this is to constantly utilise critical thinking while examining evidence.