Did you know that in a search engine, the top five organic results receive 67% of all clicks?
You undoubtedly already know how crucial it is to fight for the top ranking position and put the proper SEO techniques in place to do so.
There is only one issue: you’re unsure whether your SEO investment is yielding results.
Fortunately, one of the top free tools for tracking SEO efforts can help you figure this out: Google Analytics.
When utilised correctly, Google Analytics may give you a wealth of useful information that you can use to manage your SEO initiatives.
You’ll be able to enhance your overall strategy once you begin using Google Analytics to track your SEO efforts.
What is SEO Analytics?
Let’s take a broad look at SEO analytics first before getting specific about how Google Analytics can track, measure, and enhance your SEO efforts.
The term “SEO analytics” refers to the procedure of gathering, monitoring, and analysing your marketing data with the primary goal of increasing the organic traffic to your website.
This is really helpful since it enables you to spot areas for development, comprehend the data on your website better, and ultimately maximise the return on investment from your SEO efforts.
For measuring your SEO statistics, there are excellent solutions on the market right now. Google Analytics is one of the most widely utilised free SEO analytics tools.
Additionally, you can always share such information with your team or a client using Google Analytics Reporting.
What Is Google Analytics in SEO?
Web analytics and SEO tool Google Analytics provides advanced information and fundamental analytical tools for website optimisation and marketing.
Google Analytics is an essential SEO tool for marketers because it provides website performance and visitor statistics.
Because it tracks client behaviour, Google Analytics is used to improve marketing strategies in addition to SEO.
However, Google Analytics works well with other technologies. SEOs utilise at least two technologies in addition to GA to assess SEO performance, according to the firms we surveyed.
How Does Google Analytics Help Improve SEO?
Google Analytics, the product of the search engine visitors use before visiting your website, can provide unique insights and data that other SEO tools cannot.
GA’s website performance, visitor data, marketing activity success, goal completions, user engagement patterns, and target audience and demographic data aspects aid SEO.
With this data, you can make website improvements to better serve customers.
If your bounce rate is high, create more interesting content. You can also use target audience demographics to guide marketing initiatives.
How often should you check GA SEO data? Most SEOs check data weekly. Some companies desire daily rankings checks. Chris Christoff from MonsterInsights suggests checking the “top Google Search Terms daily” to effectively measure SEO efforts. You can track a keyword’s performance and rank. Checking this daily lets you make steady, effective SEO strategy changes.”
How to Track and Assess Your SEO Results
You will monitor different on-page events and metrics using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to learn more about how visitors to your website engage with your landing pages. These tools offer insightful data on how well your landing pages are doing and which ones require improvement.
You can identified which pages drive the most search engine traffic and sign ups by measuring organic sessions by landing page. Additionally you can monitor the organic goal completions by landing page to determine which sites are effectively turning people into buyers and which ones can benefit from optimisation.
A deeper knowledge of how users arrive at your website and which pages appeal to them the most can be gained by measuring organic clicks by searches and organic clicks by page. You can keep track of how many total organic search sessions your website receives.
Our team of SEO and website conversion professionals have developed a Databox template that consolidates the most crucial performance indicators for landing pages into a single user-friendly dashboard to make the process of tracking these indicators easier. You can use this free tool as a standalone dashboard or use it in your marketing reports.
It’s simple and doesn’t require any coding knowledge to set up the landing page performance dashboard. By following these three simple steps, you can complete the task in only a few clicks:
Get the pre-designed dashboard template for the performance of the landing page as the first step.
Connect your Databox accounts to your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts in step 2.
SteTake a seat back and watch as your dashboard is instantly filled with the crucial performance information for landing pages.
How to Track Your SEO Performance with Google Analytics:
- Connect Your Search Console Account for More SEO Information
- Set SEO-Related Objectives
- The Correct Filters Should Be Used for Accurate SEO Reporting
- Boost SEO on the pages that convert the best.
- Make use of the Content Drilldown Report.
- Track Updates to Content by Adding Notes
- Consider using the Multi-Channel Funnel Report.
- Discover Referral Sites
- Control Your PPC Spending
- Verify Google’s perception of your website.
- Make personalised dashboards
- Create alerts
- Discover Low-Hanging Fruit to Increase Traffic
- Detecting Internal Site Search Opportunities to Find New Keywords Detecting Slow Page Loading Times
Connect Your Search Console Account for More SEO Information
One of the items that our survey participants concurred on was the fact that by linking your GA account with Google Search Console, you can obtain a lot more pertinent SEO info than by concentrating on just one tool.
Connecting Analytics to Google Search Console is the best advice I can give for using Google Analytics to measure SEO, according to Leadhub’s Kim Doughty.
You can utilise queries to find areas for target keywords and the sites you want to rank for to improve them now that GA and GSC are connected.
According to All My Web Needs’ Brandon Howard, this is true: “The major issue with utilising Google Analytics to track success with SEO is that the keyword field is largely “(not given),” making it challenging to correlate the terms users use with website behaviour.
To view which landing pages users are visiting when arriving from Google, after syncing both tools, go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages in Google Analytics. You may then have a better sense of the main search terms people are using to reach you.
The SEOs we questioned also provided us with some advice for analysing the synchronised data. For instance, Christy Kravetz of CanIRank suggests looking at more than just the traffic on the exact keyword.
Set SEO-Related Objectives
To obtain more specific insights, experts advise defining SEO goals in Google Analytics prior to implementing an SEO strategy. You must establish a matching conversion page in addition to setting up goals in GA in order to track your progress. These conversion pages, also known as acknowledgment pages, serve only to inform the form submitter that their submission has been received.
As Sidewalk Branding Co’s Chris Sheehy points out, this conversion page “should have its own URL and include the NOINDEX meta-tag, so they are not displayed organically, which will reduce false-positive hits and add reassurance to the client of reporting accuracy.”
You shouldn’t just concentrate on tracking your organic traffic when establishing goals to gauge the effectiveness of SEO initiatives. Measure the calibre of your organic visitors in its place. Growth Hackers’ Jonathan Aufray suggests “setting goals for leads coming from organic SEO” to accomplish this. We look at a page’s organic traffic volume and, more significantly, the number of leads generated by those visitors. The better, the higher the conversion rate.
However, despite the fact that GA goals can be quite valuable, marketers sometimes ignore them because they think the creation procedure is too difficult.
Try Databox’s goal tracking function if you want a less complicated answer.
With Databox, you can visualise goals against current performance for any measure you’re already measuring. One benefit of using our goal function is that you will have access to previous data, which will enable you to set more accurate goals. The fact that you will be able to tell if you are on track or off track within the first few days of the month will be more crucial than trying to accelerate performance in the middle of the month.
The Correct Filters Should Be Used for Accurate SEO Reporting
It’s essential to utilise the correct segments and filters when using Google Analytics for SEO to eliminate spam traffic and ensure accurate reporting.
Crawlers (false referrers) and ghost spam are the two main categories of spam traffic, as Vic Spall of Browser Media reminds us to be aware of. Additionally, Spall explains how to exclude this traffic from your GA data.
Create a new view first in Google Analytics. It’s crucial to do this to avoid tampering with your raw data.
*Take note that starting the day you deploy the new view, spam traffic won’t start showing up in your reports. However, it won’t retroactively eliminate spam traffic. You need to create a unique dashboard just for organic traffic and use GA segments to retroactively delete spam traffic.
Regex codes can also be used to catch many iterations of well-known spammy domains that employ various TLDs, for example, in order to block spam traffic. However, you must block traffic that does not match your hostname if you receive spam traffic via direct.
On identifying and removing bot traffic from Google Analytics, we prepared a comprehensive manual. In addition, an SEO expert guest posted on our site with some helpful Google Analytics regex codes you may utilise for more precise reporting.
Boost SEO on the pages that convert the best
Another excellent suggestion from our correspondents was to regularly examine your best-performing pages and look for potential for optimisation. This might be anything from adding more recent content to an article to making the CTA more potent.
Even if these pages already have high rankings on Google, you need make sure they stay there so they may continue to generate the most traffic.
Additionally, Alex Birkett advises determining whether there are any pages with “significantly decreased organic traffic or pages with high traffic but low business value.”
These are the pages that are ripe for promotion, updating, and CRO.
The analysis of your best-performing blog article will provide you a better notion of what subject matter your future material should focus on, which is another positive outcome from this.
Make use of the Content Drilldown Report
To determine your most popular pages and content, you may track and analyse the performance of other parts of your website, such as your blog using Google Analytics’ Content Drilldown reports.
Views of a URL page bounce rates, exit rates and average time on page are displayed by Content Drilldown.
This research aids our respondents in locating duplicate content and successful website segments and pages.
The founder of Prep Expert, Shaan Patel, claims that their favoured tool for assessing SEO success on Google Analytics is Content Drilldown. This is due to the feature’s ability to split down impressions and clicks on non-sales pages which offers useful information about the effectiveness of various parts of your website.
We keep close track of the themes that are hot so that we can further tailor our blog content pages with FAQ schemas and other lead magnets.
The biggest limitation of the Content Drilldown report is the requirement to compare page performance across several subdirectories.
This procedure is made simple and your most popular web pages are shown in this free Google Analytics (Content Drilldown) Dashboard Template.
Track Updates to Content by Adding Notes
Tracking and reporting pruning results can make a big difference. Most marketers prune every 3-6 months.
SEO content updates take weeks or months to show results.
Without sufficient documentation and tracking, your updates will be hard to evaluate.
G2’s Hannah Tow recommends Google Analytics’ annotation tool.
Google Analytics annotations on a given date. This can enable you benchmark article performance post-optimization and measure improvements.”
Databox Annotations take it farther.
Our platform lets you upload observations and insights straight to Databoards, so everyone can map activities to results.
Instead of developing several slide decks with data and insights added afterwards, the insights may be found in one spot.
Consider using the Multi-Channel Funnel Report
Google Analytics links eCommerce conversions to the user’s previous search, ad, or campaign.
Website referrals? Conversion role?
Multi-Channel Funnel reports. Your marketing channels convert.
Some Googlers automatically buy your brand.
They may have noticed a social ad or blog about your business while searching for industry products.
The Multi-Channel Funnel report demonstrates how prior referrals affected conversions and sales.
“Organic users may not be organic,” argues ScienceSoft’s Liubou Zubarevich.
Google Analytics measures traffic source by session, not user. GA remembers the initial source and attributes it to the entire session, so if a user arrived to your site via organic search and then returned straight, their source would still be organic.
The Multi-Channel Funnel aids this.
The Google Analytics multi-channel funnel report has much of relevant data, but it may not track key factors.
Databox’s Metric Builder allows you create multi-channel funnel measurements.
Discover Referral Sites
A Google Analytics referral is a new visitor from a website that refers traffic to you.
It’s a website’s recommendation.
If you’re using off-page SEO, you’ll need to track this measure to see if you’re building the correct links and how they’re doing.
Kerry Sherin of North Star Inbound recommends using Google Analytics referral data to “find links that aren’t reported in other tools and also find relevant reports or bloggers to pitch to.”
Download our Referral Overview Dashboard for free to see all referral statistics (e.g., which external sites produce traffic and conversions).
This dashboard shows which external sites generate traffic and convert well.
Control Your PPC Spending
One of Google’s most well-known services is PPC (paid per click), which enables website owners to invest money in particular keywords that certain people use to search for their items on Google.
The website pages you have chosen to promote through this channel will be pushed onto the SERPs as sponsored advertising as a result of your decision to spend in PPC because you may quickly see results in terms of ranking.
You might also show up on sidebars or pages of other websites around the internet, depending on how you set up your adverts.
But before you can effectively manage a PPC campaign, you must first link your Analytics account with Adwords.
To access this option, go to Product Linking > Google Ads Linking. Make sure you have admin permissions (rather than user access) for the website you want to track in Google Analytics.
Go to Admin > AdWords Linking after opening your Google Analytics account. Select the necessary Adwords account, then click the confirm button.
Verify Google’s perception of your website
In Google’s perspective, your website’s category matters. pages with a specific topic typically rank better since they want the pages appearing on page one to be authoritative.
Google Analytics is the “perfect tool” for it, according to Haseeb Najam of LinkBuildingHQ, if you want to know how Google sees your website.
This might aid in positioning your site’s E.A.T. score and content adjustment.
“Open Google Analytics and navigate to Audience > Interests > Overview. Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments, and Other Categories will be displayed.
As a publisher, you can utilise this information to determine the primary interests of the people who visit your website and develop your content marketing strategy accordingly, says Najam.
Google will provide the categories that it thinks are appropriate for your website. To locate a similar interest or topic, you can triangulate from these three category categories. To establish your website as an authority, this should be your primary category.
Make personalised dashboards
To remain on top of SEO in Google Analytics, you can also make your own custom dashboards for the particular indicators you want to pay attention to.
Google Analytics custom dashboards, in accordance with SEOs, will assist you in seeing the large picture and implementing extremely targeted changes to important areas.
You can use them to narrow your attention to a single area of a website and then select out the most crucial metrics. By doing this, you can see what content is most read and how much organic traffic it is bringing in.
Joseph Colarusso of ESM Digital advises “segmenting by channel, URL, location, etc. This enables you to pinpoint a certain segment of your website traffic and derive conclusions from it.
Although Google Analytics allows for the creation of custom dashboards, this feature isn’t particularly strong.
Check out Databox’s SEO dashboard templates if you want to speed up the creation process and receive a far better custom dashboard lot sooner.
Simply connect your data, choose which metrics to include, and with a few button clicks, visualise the results.
Building custom dashboards has never been simpler because to SEO dashboard tools like Databox.
Create alerts
Although it is sometimes disregarded, Google Analytics’ custom alert feature can be useful for tracking SEO.
Data is effectively monitored without the main GA interface being opened. Email is used to immediately report data updates.
Setting up triggers for specific KPIs, such as a 5% rise in organic traffic or a 2% drop in bounce rate, is advised by Nick Maynard, a digital marketing expert at Ridgeway. Google will then immediately send you email alerts to keep you informed and help you keep track of crucial indicators.
Multiple metrics cannot be tracked by Google Analytics’ alert function.
Custom notifications from Databox don’t.
You can quickly create performance alerts for measurements, objectives, outputs, and outcomes with Databox and specify the circumstances under which they should be sent.
In order to avoid wasting time on pointless meetings, you can set up email alerts for yourself and your team.
Alerts may be set up quickly.
Discover Low-Hanging Fruit to Increase Traffic
Since pages won’t rank forever, updating and republishing material keeps them fresh.
Google Analytics conversion statistics in Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages will reveal outdated pages.
Choose a time frame for comparison. Compare six- to eight-month intervals to find republishable pages.
Choose a landing page from the table to view search query data.
Now look for patterns that could boost organic traffic.
First, consider freshness. Is your material still relevant after a few months? Does something prohibit users from seeing your page?
For example, if you created a post about Google Analytics capabilities in 2021, some of them may have changed, rendering the content useless.
Second, verify if navigational query search volumes changed, causing a large organic traffic drop.
If neither of these strategies yields useful information, get more specific.
If you target specific nations, check device category changes for localization difficulties.
Detecting Internal Site Search Opportunities to Find New Keywords Detecting Slow Page Loading Times
Visitors looking for specific brands, goods, or content on your site use the internal search engine most.
Marketers are unaware that Google Analytics may track internal searches.
Search for Google Analytics SEO keywords without landing pages. You may not have relevant content or keywords that match the search intent.
Google’s internal search ranking guide should assist. You can also read our Google Analytics site search tracking setup and use guide.
After collecting data for a few months, go to the “Search Terms” report under Behaviour > Site Search.
Use a filter to swiftly remove unneeded long-tail keywords.
Use weighted sort and filter by search exit percentage.
This is the easiest Google Analytics prioritisation method. You can view user inquiries that yielded no results.
Search exit analytics show how many users left your website after using internal search.
GA’s weighted sort prioritisation provides enhanced search word data.
Slow Page Loading Times
Page load speed affects user experience and search rankings.
Many SEOs ignore this.
If you’re spending a lot on keyword rankings and SEO, don’t allow poor loading time deter you.
Google Analytics Behaviour > Site Speed Report has this info.
Check page-load time and interaction execution speed here.
If pages load slowly, notify the site creators since they optimise page load time.
The Google Analytics Site Speed Overview Dashboard will help you monitor site speed and detect broken pages and other optimisation opportunities.
This free dashboard displays crucial stats like pageviews, bounce rate, average page load time per device, and pageviews.
7 SEO Metrics to Monitor the Performance of Organic Search
Numerous organic search indicators are available for users to analyse in Google Analytics, but if you aren’t tracking the proper ones, your conversion rates won’t improve.
To stay on top of the performance of organic search, keep an eye on these 7 crucial SEO Google Analytics KPIs.
1. Bounce Rate
A “bounce” (also known as a single-page session) happens when a user of your website exits the page without interacting with the Google Analytics server again.
The percentage of sessions (sessions that begin and end on the same web page) that result in bounces is known as the bounce rate.
You may gain further insight into how visitors are interacting with your website by monitoring the bounce rate. It goes without saying that you want them to stay as long as they can.
So what does a desirable bounce rate entail? The CEO of Advantix Digital, Robert Taylor, notes that “a ‘bad’ bounce rate can be both too high and too low.”
The bounce rate of 0%, for instance, may indicate that your Google Analytics tracking code is firing twice, making it impossible for a bounce to be recorded. On the other side, a bounce rate that is very high—more than 70%—can be a symptom of user experience problems or bad website design.
2. Dwell Time
The amount of time a user spent on your page before leaving to view the search results is indicated by the metric known as “dwell time.”
If a page’s dwell time is poor, the content didn’t offer enough useful information or satisfy the visitor’s search criteria.
Even while dwell duration and bounce rate are comparable, they don’t exactly mean the same thing.
No matter whether a user spent 3 hours or 3 seconds on a page, a bounce occurs whenever they click the back button without clicking anything else.
Google takes into account dwell time when determining how to rank your page; if the information is compelling enough to keep visitors on your site longer, it will be rated higher.
3.Time on Page
The time on page metric in Google Analytics measures how long users stay on a particular page.
For illustration, reading an article for 3 minutes will count as one time on page. Google Analytics will count it as two times on page if they read the first article and then move on to another.
One of the important measures that can help you assess the effectiveness of your website is this one.
Google came to the conclusion that visitors who spend more time on a page are more likely to become customers and spend more money than visitors who spend less time there.
This information can be seen in the GA All Pages report, which also includes the Avg. Time on Page measure. Google values this data since it demonstrates visitor involvement.
4.Site Speed
Truth be told, most of us aren’t very patient when it comes to waiting for content to load online, thus site speed is crucial. In fact, try to recall each time you had to open a new Google page after waiting too long for the previous one to load.
Your UI and SEO are both impacted by how quickly your website loads, as we can infer from the preceding example.
Go to Behaviour > Site Speed > Page Timings to see if your website is optimised in this regard
5.Traffic from Mobile Devices
This indicator, as its name suggests, focuses on the mobile traffic that comes to your website.
Mobile traffic should be regularly watched because it can assist you rapidly identify any anomalies that could harm rankings.
Audience > Mobile > Overview is where you may get information on mobile traffic.
6.ROI (return on investment)
One of the most important SEO Google Analytics metrics that marketers monitor is return on investment (ROI), as it tells them how much money each campaign is bringing in.
You should “forget about traffic, bounce rate, average page session, and other metrics which don’t show how much money your efforts are bringing,” according to Aleksandar Pesic of Market Republic.
“You can show your client reports of keyword positions and traffic, but if they don’t see the results on their bank account, it won’t matter,” Pesic further explains.
7.Organic Conversion Rate
The organic conversion rate shows the percentage of site visitors who arrived via a search engine and went on to take a certain action, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter, for example.
The organic conversion rate in GA will be 10%, for instance, if 100 individuals found your website through Google and 10 of them signed up for a product trial.
Here are Gary Stevens’ thoughts on this organic search measure from Hosting Canada.
My preferred method of using Google Analytics for SEO is to compare traffic and conversions.
This enables me to calculate the traffic conversion rate, which aids in planning the time I should devote to developing conversion techniques for particular pages.
It’s simple to feel happy when you look at a website page and see the number of hits you receive on it, Stevens continues. If the traffic isn’t bringing in revenue, it’s not really worth much.
One of the best ways to boost website revenue is by using Google Analytics to assess conversion. Additionally, it may highlight any troubling trends that you would have missed otherwise. Conversions ought to be increasing each month.
