Today, SEO or Search Engine Optimization has become more important for marketers and business owners than ever before. The best way to drive organic traffic is to analyze your SEO reports and optimize your content or site for both search engines and users, and Google Analytics does this job better than the rest.
Nearly everyone uses Google Analytics these days to extract useful information ranging from conversion metrics to engagement metric insights and more, there is no shortage of opportunities and knowledge to be gained to optimize the overall performance of the website. Still, not everyone is familiar with how to use those valuable insights to improve their SEO efforts. To do so, all you need to know what data to watch out for, how to comprehend it, and then take action.
In this guide, we will go through several actionable ways to use Google Analytics to improve your SEO and avoid common mistakes. But first, let’s get into its basics.
How Google Analytics Help SEO?
One of the most powerful tools you can use to improve SEO is Google Analytics. It gives a lot of valuable data related to the performance of the site in search engines such as traffic, organic page views, customer engagement, conversions, and so on. If you are new to SEO or want to improve your current marketing strategy, you will find these metrics very useful and soon you will be all set to utilize such reports to improve your websites’ SEO.
You can use these analytics to navigate sections that need to improved, pages that aren’t working effectively than the rest, and sections that need your significant attention. More advanced users can also take it to the next level and perform customer segmentation, do experiments, and various other things.
How to Use Google Analytics to Track and Improve SEO?
To get started, first you need to take care of the basic setup of your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account. Knowing the basic fundamentals is good, but if you really need to step ahead, you should know some smart ways to track those reports and use them further to boost your sites’ performance. So let’s dive into them: –
1. Find How much Traffic You Received from Search Engines
One of the metrics you should track consistently is how much traffic you receive from Google. To do so, select Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels and then set the date in the analytics. This way, you can get a summary of all the sources that have brought traffic to your site for a specified period. If you witness a big decline in your traffic that means you have lost a large portion of your rankings and you can drill down further to find out the reasons and exact keyword/pages.
2. Find Most and Least Popular Pages
Knowing which pages are bringing good results and which aren’t could be the smart move. You can see this by selecting Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Besides this, you can also view the time visitors spent on each page to comprehend the bounce rate and the number of users that exit from your website after seeing a specific page.
3. Find Which Pages do Visitors See First
To move forward, click ‘Landing Pages’ to see which pages do people view the first time they visit your site and compare them with the most popular pages. This report will give you a clear understanding of which pages do users like to visit and you might add them in your sidebar on your homepage to increase engagement.
4. Ensure Google is Crawling Your Site
It is crucial to see how often Google crawling renders pages around your website and links when you publish a new blog, post, and site page. To do so, you need to log into your Search Console and click ‘Fetch as Google’ in the ‘Crawl’ section. Moreover, you can also use Google’s robots.txt tester to find out if you’ve accurately set up your robots.txt file for all web pages you want Googlebot to crawl.
5. See How Much Traffic is Coming from Mobile
Nowadays, a mobile-friendly website holds an individual and important place. To find out if this trend is working out well for your site, click Audience > Mobile > Overview to view mobile traffic report. You can see this section divided into three categories i.e. mobile, tablet, and desktop. Depending on its results, you can implement several steps.
For instance, if you are gaining a high number of visitors from mobile devices, you can analyze your mobile pages and ensure that they load fast, adhere to Google Webmaster guidelines but also include your call to action tab in noticeable positions.
Google Analytics is a powerful and useful tool that gives you extensive visibility into the data from customer segments to engagement, traffic metrics, conversion metrics, and so on so that you can take smart SEO decisions to accomplish your business goals.
If you are unsure how to put these steps into practice, our professionals have your back to clarify all your queries and boost your marketing performance. Feel free to get in touch with us!
