Google Analytics (GA) is one of the major tools that the search engine company offers to website owners. You might be already using it to study your website’s data. But, do you know how to improve SEO through Google Analytics?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a small 3-letter word but ignoring it could be catastrophic for your business. You might have SEO in your mind every time you analyze your website’s rankings using tools like Semrush.
Almost 90% of marketers think that SEO is writing keyword-specific content, posting it on the site, and creating backlinks to it. Do you also have the same views about SEO?
In the initial days, I too used to think the same way. But as I gained expertise in website designing and digital marketing, I realized that there is a lot more to SEO. The major part of the game is ignored by most of the businesses out there.
What is the point of investing your crucial time in formulating strategies when you don’t know what’s running behind the screen? Let me ask you a question – Have you ever analyzed Google Analytics to the core? Well, some of you might have done that but I know most of you haven’t.
In fact, some of my existing digital marketing clients don’t even know the importance of Google Analytics (GA) before meeting me. In this blog post, I walk you through some winning tips on Google Analytics and how you can better optimize your site for SEO using GA.
Google Analytics Basics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool from Google. When I am writing this post, approximately 50 million websites use GA to analyze the traffic and performance over time. By any chance, if you are not using it for evaluating your site’s data, you are making a big mistake. Through GA you can get access to a broad range of reports and data that can help you optimize your site accordingly.
Google Analytics knows everything about your site. How much traffic is coming to your site on daily basis, what are the various traffic sources, from which location, from what devices, and many more? All this data can be used to further improve the SERP rankings. For businesses and website owners, Analytics is the second most important tool after the Search Console.
Getting Started with Google AnalyticsÂ
The first time when you will login into your Google Analytics accounts you will see the Home dashboard. The Home page of GA doesn’t really contain anything insightful. It only shows the users, revenue, conversion rate, and sessions for a particular period.
In order to see detailed reports and insights, you need to go to the left corner of the screen, under the Reports section. There you will find every data related to your site in detail. The Reports section comprises the below-mentioned options:
- Real-Time
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversions
All of these options mentioned above further have sub-options under them which also need to be evaluated to well optimize your site for SEO.
How to Optimize Your Site Using Google Analytics?
1. Google Analytics Helps Analyze & Evaluate Market Behavior
Figuring out potential markets for your business with Google Analytics is another fantastic application of the tool. You may check the number of visits and conversion rates individually by country to choose where to focus more and which locations are worth focusing on if your business runs on a worldwide scale or if you are considering becoming global. When you exactly know which regions where you are getting the most traffic, you would want to optimize your site as per the behavior and interests of people living there through well-written and relevant quality content.
The market comprises customers who have different interests, opinions, and behavior. You should research people who want to read the content you are producing on your site. It is important to know the advantages and disadvantages of different markets. For instance, you deal in digital marketing services for which the USA is the ideal market but the content you are creating is getting the most traffic from African countries. Do you think you will be able to make a good business out of such traffic? Absolutely not! Hence, you should analyze & evaluate the market to know what you want and what you are actually getting.
2. Google Analytics Helps Keep an Eye on Bounce Rate
As a business or website owner, it is pivotal for you to know what is happening with your site. There are many SEO factors determining your site’s ranking on Google, and out of those bounce rate is one of the most influential factors. If people are coming on to your site for a particular search query but do not spend time on your site for more than 10 seconds, Google will get a signal that your site doesn’t have anything worth reading. These further impacts not only the ranking of your particular page but the ranking of your entire site falls apart.
One of the most crucial metrics for website optimization is the bounce rate. You know you have a concern if the bulk of your users is abandoning your website after just one page. But there are numerous options! Make sure your sites load quickly, are visually appealing and are simple to browse. You can also start by compressing images and removing any unnecessary CSS or JavaScript. Another choice is to include videos, which frequently draw attention.
It should be your priority to analyze how your site visitors are reacting to your site’s content. If the time spent by people is very low then it should be understood that your site lacks quality content. What next? You need to improve the quality of your content by editing and adding more information to the existing content. It is important for your business to prevent your visitors from bouncing back as soon as they click on your site. Always create engaging content so that people at least spend 2 minutes reading through your business website.
3. Google Analytics Helps Identify the Best ContentÂ
With help of the Google Analytics tool, you can identify which piece of content on your site is most popular among your audience. After getting to know about the content that is performing well, you can generate more content on the same topic with a different message, tone, and approach at the center. Doing this can help your content go viral on the web. However, never overdo your content. It means, don’t create write content for a question that doesn’t exist for the sake of writing a variation of your previously hit write-up.
If your strategy includes content marketing, you are aware that it can be challenging to identify the type of content that resonates most with your target audience. When you do produce content that connects with readers, you must understand precisely how and why it succeeded in order to maintain enthusiasm. It’s simple thanks to analytics! All you have to do is determine which of your pages receives the most visitors, conversions, and outcomes. This offers you a decent understanding of what people value, and you can decide what content you will develop or tweak to attract your audience based on that information.
4. Google Analytics Helps Study the Behavior Flow
Discovering the routes that visitors to your website take when they browse the site is made much easier with the aid of a tool called behavior flow. This report provides you visualizations of the paths your visitors travel around your website rather than providing you with straightforward number statistics. By doing this, you can quickly determine which pages visitors engage with the most or which page they last visited before leaving your website. This will enable you to determine which content they found insightful and interesting, and which failed to leave much of an impact.
5. Google Analytics Helps in Analyzing Trends
A number of different measures, some of which depend on one another, are included in Google Analytics. A viral visual or ranking first for a difficult keyword might sometimes boost your bounce rate or decrease the number of pages per session. Additionally, it displays both recent and historical patterns, which will assist you in properly comprehending what people are looking for, what keywords are popular, and regardless of whether these topics are frequently searched for or if a particular topic was momentarily popular.
6. Google Analytics Helps Discovering Best Traffic Sources
This is simple yet essential. You need to understand which type of traffic—organic or paid—is producing better results for you and, within each, which sources are the most lucrative. You may keep an eye on your campaigns, including Google Ad campaigns and bespoke campaigns, to see what outcomes they are producing and how people are responding to the advertisements. This will assist you in making the best use of your budget and maximizing your commitment in areas that genuinely provide results.
7. Google Analytics Helps Optimizing Pages Driving the Maximum Traffic
Tweak and optimize these pages to increase conversion after determining which ones garner the most user attention. It’s a really simple technique to improve ROI. By optimizing your sites, you may help search engines better comprehend them and give them a higher ranking. You may optimize multiple pages for various keywords, which will again raise your rating in search results. Your sales will increase since it will be simpler for potential clients and customers to find you online if your meta tags and keywords are clear and pertinent.
8. Follow the Mobile First Approach
You can find out what percentage of your traffic originates from desktops and how much originates from mobile devices thanks to Google Analytics. Optimizing this is essential given the increased significance of mobile traffic (nearly half of all Google searches now occur on a mobile device). It’s time to optimize your website’s responsiveness and processing times if your mobile traffic has a significant bounce rate. On the other side, Google will give you a high position if your website is mobile-friendly.
9. Take Help from Google Analytics 360°
You can have a deeper knowledge of precisely which channels affect our results using Google Analytics 360. Google Analytics 360 offers you additional sophisticated capabilities in addition to basic ones, including Unsampled Reports, BigQuery Export, and Data-Driven Attribution. Additionally, you’ll have resources to assist professionals and a wealth of other information.
10. Google Analytics Helps Identifying the Key Keywords
What search terms are people using to find you? Do you have any preferences for these? Your website will be optimized, you’ll be able to connect with people who are enthusiastic about your goods or services, and your revenues will rise if you can make these two replies coincide. Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Moz are a few tools you can use.
11. Google Analytics Helps Study the User FlowÂ
User Flow is another crucial website criterion, much like behavior flow. Despite the fact that these two may sound extremely comparable, they actually demonstrate separate ideas. You can see through User Flow how much traffic is flowing from various sources to your website. Examples include which marketing channels are driving a lot of traffic, what regions are sending you a lot of visitors, etc. It displays the user’s journey to and through your website so you can adjust for better outcomes.
To Conclude:
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools that Google provides to marketers. If you know how to use Analytics effectively, you can easily get into the shoes of your customers and think like them. When you start thinking like them it becomes super-easy to create content that converts. Google Analytics can help you create content that is liked by your audience members. And when they will like what you are creating for them, not only your site will be optimized but also the chances of conversions will also boost.
Google Analytics helps to know the details of your audience, the demographics of the audience, what your audience likes the most on your website, and how they are interacting with your content. All this information helps in determining the performance of your website. Also, you could know the drawbacks of your site and find out the areas where more work needs to be done. If you could do it in a way that fits well with the needs, behavior, and interests of your audience, you can drive voluminous traffic in no time.
