Useful SEO Insights to Learn from Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the essential marketer’s tool that offers a range of insightful data - and it’s completely free. After all, with so much data accessible at our fingertips, understanding metrics can be a bit of a minefield, and most people only scrape the surface. To continuously build up and boost your campaign, you should extend close attention to the core of your data.
Keyword rankings are great for boosting your ego and producing a smile on the face of your client, but they don’t tap into the more overall picture. There’s a lot to take into detail, but here we’ll add an overview of the crucial Google Analytics insights to reinforce your SEO campaigns.
Many of these insights can be devised as custom information, which is convenient for tailoring your reporting to distinct business needs and sharing with customers. Read on and see how you can track and assess your SEO efforts.
Organic Search
It’s a noticeable one but clearly the first place to start. Go to the ‘Overview’ tab under ‘Acquisition’ for a basement level implication of your website’s leading traffic channels. This brings an actual summary of your preeminent channels and how each is functioning in terms of traffic volume, performance and conversions.
As well as presenting a general audit of organic traffic, you can also drill down deeper into the data by clicking on ‘Organic Search’ in the menu and putting around the filters. Look at the most familiar organic landing pages, a synopsis of keywords, search engines delivering the most traffic, exit pages, bounce rates, and more.
In the case of bounce rates, it’s a great idea to pay special attention to this metric with respect to individual pages. Determine those pages with a bounce rate that is below the average for your website. Take some time to reconsider these pages and analyse why that might be, finally applying any UX/UI or targeting modifications.
This is all very efficient and seems straight forward, but wouldn’t it be helpful if you could observe only your organic traffic across the entity of your Google Analytics? It’s simpler than you think. Just click to ‘Add Segment’ and look at the box for organic traffic. Leave the ‘All Users’ segment for an available comparison, or clear away this section for a view of only your organic traffic.
Bounce Rate Can Give You Some Good Pointers
The bounce rate of a site is the percentage of users who visit your site and then move away after viewing only one page.
While some huge bounce rates may not automatically turn into a poor user experience (take websites with a lot of recipes for example), it may be suggestive that visitors haven’t noticed what they were searching for on the website.
Say you rank exceptionally for a very long-tail, niche keyword but when a user gets to the website, the content does not convey to that query. So the user then quits, or they “bounce.”
Alternatively, say someone reaches a website and the page takes a lot of time to load, and then the user won't prefer to stay and they also move along. A site’s page speed performance, configuration, and poor UI/UX also generally leads to a high bounce rate.
Fix the time frame in Google Analytics and check your bounce rate quarter-over-quarter to resolve if it has either increased or decreased. If it has advanced significantly, it may be a hint that something on the website needs updating.
Locate Top Performing Pages by Conversions
Figuring out individual page performance and conversions that are happening on each page can provide huge amounts of insight. Click on Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages and modify the periods to analyse month-over-month or year-over-year.
Keep an eye on negative trends on each page. If a particular page has seen a notable decline, the problem is most likely confined to that one page. Anyhow, if there is a negative decline in many pages, it may be an indication that there are some more technical problems to work through.
Locate Underperforming Pages
Pages don’t always perform well and may fail to gain traffic and organic engagements over time. By utilising Google Analytics, you can also link conversion data with these metrics to examine which pages could specifically improve from a re-write or another kind of update. Click on Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages, and then choose a distinct period to compare.
Try to hold to a minimum 6-month time frame so that there is sufficient data to check. Afterwards, sort the table by clicks and decide which page you prefer to dive into further to look at search query data. Let’s say a page is getting a decent amount of clicks but has a very inadequate click-through rate (CTR). This could be suggestive that it’s time for a refresh.
There are a whole lot of other insights and views within Google Analytics. It definitely takes time to become well acquainted with all finer details of data and analy
