This inquiry, asked recently by a prospect prompted this post on how to use Google Analytics to analyze and improve my SEO efforts. My intent isn’t to rewrite an SEO guide, but rather shine some light on how existing data can identify opportunities on the SEO front.
5 SEO-related Google Analytics strategies
- Identify which keywords are currently driving traffic to your site – This part is straightforward, and is on most web analysts radar when running through a standard analysis of a site. On the traffic sources report, click on ‘Search Engines’, then Non-Paid.
- Create a branded-only filter. Depending on your brand name, this should be Create an advanced segment for branded traffic and one for nonbranded traffic. For branded traffic, . If all else fails, the or character “|” in regular expressions is very useful. For nonbranded traffic, simply exclude the same regular expression you included on the other filter.
For example, our client Hoover’s could set up a regular expression as simply as hoover, which would match all of the following : hoovers, hoover’s, www.hoovers.com,
Apply liberally to your reports. Goal conversion rate is typically much higher on a branded search than a nonbranded search (think sales funnel, etc) - Find out which pages on your site are being ranked for which terms. Most interestingly, look at which pages aren’t being ranked for anything.
A little excel wizardry will help this cause. Do a csv export on your top content report (grab a big date range, use the big downloads cheat to get more than 500 rows at a time), then of your top landing page report (again, pull a large date range, maybe a month or 2). Arrange the data so that the list of content pages is in the same worksheet as the list of top landing pages from organic search. Select the first page in the list then use the vlookup function to find it in the other list.Vlookup(contentpage, entirelistfromtoplandingpages, 1, false)Those that come back ‘na’ aren’t driving traffic via organic search. For some pages, this is absolutely fine (privacy policy, anything behind the registration wall, your shopping cart and thank you pages), but there are other content-rich pages on your site that aren’t ‘pulling their weight’ at getting ranked and driving traffic.
- Find out which sites are linking to you – head over to the referring sites report to determine which sites are linking to you. Visit their page. Potentially contact the webmaster and request they update the anchor text to reflect your target keyword phrase. The assumption here is that this person values your site.. They will likely help you out.
- Identify your ranking for those keywords and pages – using the Yoast method of tracking ranking with Google Analytics, it’s possible to identify on which page of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) your page was listed. Although conventional wisdom is that fewer than 5% of visitors proceed beyond the first page of google to click on a result, I’ve found some long-tail keywords being clicked on much deeper in the rankings. To give you an idea, put yourself in the shoes of the searcher here.. if I waded through 20-30 listings to find a site whose description sounded best, I’m likely a very motivated prospect. Get found. Push these high value listings higher using some combination of linkbuilding and onpage content refocusing.
Try these out and let me know what you think!
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