In addition to guest posting on the UpCity blog, CTRL+ALT Digital is featured as one of the Top Local SEO Agencies in the United States. Check out their profile!
When it comes to measuring how much of an impact your website has on the success of your business, the return on investment depends on which metrics you’re tracking.
While paid search campaigns inherently offer a clear way to measure your ROI via the amount you spent and revenue coming in from those particular clicks, other methods that drive traffic to your site and build awareness—such as search engine optimization, or SEO—can often be trickier to quantify.
Tracking the impact of your SEO, whether for a newly launched website or after making changes to your existing site, requires a tool that gives you access to all of the metrics you might ever need, and that’s where Google Analytics comes into the picture.
To quantify your SEO efforts, it’s always best practice to link the site to Google Analytics and claim your account there in order to collect data on your website traffic. Google Analytics is a useful tool to track anything SEO-related, but the sheer volume of data stored and tracked by the tool can be daunting.
Even the best marketing experts can be challenged to decide how best to parse the data there in order to understand and improve SEO presence. In this article, we’ll explore several of the most important metrics you can track using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics helps determine where your organic traffic is coming from
It’s helpful to know what SEO metrics are most important so you can fully understand what you’re looking at when trying to measure your campaigns using the Google Analytics tools.
Acquisition Overview
When we talk about how effective SEO efforts are, we often want to understand how users arrived at our website or landing page. The Acquisition Overview is typically the best place to start when looking to see the path users took in finding your digital presence.
Amidst Google Analytics many drop-down menus, navigating to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels will reveal a row of data around Organic Search, with several metrics that will help you measure the success of your campaign.
The stats shown here are the most common metrics that play into Google’s ranking algorithm, so it’s the best place to start learning where to focus your attention to help your site rank well in organic searches.
Identifying New Users, Top Exit Pages, Page Speed Issues, and other SEO metrics
While it’s nice to see a large number of users on your page, you can dig into more data here that paints a more meaningful picture of your site’s SEO effectiveness.
For example, it’s good to have returning customers who already know your name, but if you’re using SEO to find new customers searching for a relevant keyword online, you may be more interested in the amount of New Users.
The Bounce Rate and Pages Per Session also give insight into whether people are leaving your website as soon as they get there, or if they’re viewing multiple pages on your website. If people continually get to a page on your site and leave without converting, it may be a sign that you need to improve the SEO content and calls to action on that page to keep people interested and wanting to use your product or service.
The Time On Page also can signify if people are reading your SEO content and finding it helpful, or if they skip right over it, deciding it’s not what they were looking for.
All of these metrics help prove relevancy to the keywords people are searching for when finding your website. The more relevant, the more likely people are to click through to your site and stay there for a while.
User Behavior metrics reveal whether searchers can find what they are looking for across your webpage
Typically, certain key performance indicators (KPIs) such as higher time spent on a page, lower bounce rates, number of visitors, and other metrics, are useful overall.
However, each page on your site will have different goals. It’s important to know what certain metrics say about user behaviors so it’s easier to realize when something is off according to the data revealed in Google Analytics about a specific landing page.
Say you run a business that offers multiple services. On your website, you’ll have different service pages, which should all be optimized with a different set of keywords. For example, HVAC companies will have different service pages for heating and cooling. If someone is searching for a broken furnace or heater, they are likely to see the heating page show up in organic search results.
If they go to this page and it’s relevant to what they’re looking for, they may fill out the form or schedule an appointment on that page and then leave your site. While this might show in Analytics as a higher bounce rate, an understanding of the data relative to conversion rates will reveal that users are getting the services they need from you faster because of effective SEO tactics.
That is why it’s important to drill into user behavior when analyzing your campaigns so you can see the full story.
Google Analytics helps to establish and track SEO KPIs and goals to boost site performance
As we mentioned at the head of the article, paid advertising provides much clearer data relevant to your ROI on marketing spend in that channel, as clicks can be directly tracked to specific conversions.
Efforts to maximize SEO, on the other hand, are extremely challenging, as the money you’re investing is being put towards tactics designed to boost your ranking position in SERPs and your overall domain authority.
These tactics are often built around ensuring that your website will show up in SERPs relative to a specific set of search terms and keywords.
Tracking Organic Search and Organic Conversions
What makes maximizing the impact of your SEO tactics even more challenging is that you often do not see an immediate impact on organic search traffic, as it takes time for search engines to properly crawl your page, analyze site content, and properly track your indexed pages as well as identify and establish the strength of backlinks to your page.
In Google Analytics, you can also set up Goals or eCommerce tracking events in order to see how many people who found your website through organic search results ended up purchasing or contacting you through a form fill or phone call to become a lead.
Goals are something you define in Google Analytics, such as a contact form submission, or views to a specific page you’re trying to drive traffic to. Once you have these set up, you can view how many times your goal has been reached through each specific channel, including SEO.
If you can see that people found you organically, filled out the contact form, or scheduled an appointment through your site based on goals specific to your business, it can make SEO seem a little more tangible.
You can go one step further from setting up Goals for eCommerce sites. If you sell products online you can set up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics to track things like Purchases, Revenue, and Average Order Size.
Both of these types of tracking can then be seen in the Acquisition section with the rest of the metrics we talked about at the beginning of this article. This makes it easy to keep everything that can help you measure your website traffic and organic results in one place.
Finding Keyword Metrics To Improve Your SEO
Now that we’ve gone over the metrics that help measure the success of your campaign, it’s important to also look at metrics that show opportunities to help improve it.
Google Search Console is another tool that provides website information, audits, and keyword-level metrics. It can be integrated with Google Analytics so you can still find everything you need in one place.
In Google Search Console, you can find search queries that have led to your website appearing in search results. You can see which keywords people were typing into Google, along with the clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and Average Position.
Knowing this information helps you plan your content calendar around which keywords you want to be ranking in a better position for or focusing on keywords that have the highest CTR, meaning when people search for them they are more likely to click on your site.
CTR is an important factor in how a website ranks organically. If more people who search for a keyword are interested in your website, then Google is more likely to show your website when those terms get searched for. This understanding can help you prioritize your major focuses to the keywords that will help your organic rankings the most.
Hear From Industry Experts
Read the latest tips, research, best practices, and insights from our community of expert B2B service providers.
Building the best SEO Strategy using Google Analytics
Successful SEO requires a very robust strategy supported by data. The metrics gathered and made accessible through the use of Google Analytics can help marketers and small business owners identify which pages are ranking well, which pages need improvement, and which keywords should be used to help achieve that improvement.
If you would like help honing the best SEO strategy for your business, check out our directory of top-rated SEO service providers.