Did you know 67.7% of all search engine clicks go to the first five organic results? Talk about good SEO performance! People are steering clear of ads in favor of organic results.
But how do you make sure you rank at the top in search results? It’s unlikely that one single strategy will work. You’ll need to measure your SEO performance, fix what’s not working, and continually be on the look for better optimization strategies.
Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term game.
Google Analytics (GA) can give you an upper hand over your competitors. Through GA, you can track your on-site metrics which offer deep insights on various ways to boost your website’s SEO.
Let’s take a look at exactly how Google Analytics can improve your SEO performance:
Analyze Your Traffic Flow
Do you know where your visitors are coming from?
After launching an SEO campaign, you must understand the amount of incoming traffic. Google Analytics provides such information – over different periods and in real-time.
It’ll specifically break down your site’s audience into four sources:
- Organic Traffic:Traffic originating directly from search engines like Google. In other words, site visits you get when someone types a query on a search engine and clicks on your page link.
- Referral Traffic:Website visits you get when people on other websites click on links that direct them to your website.
- Social Traffic:The traffic gained when users find your website through social media posts.
- Direct Traffic:Traffic that comes from users typing your website directly into a search bar or have bookmarked your site for easy reachability.
Understanding where your traffic is coming from will show you whether your SEO strategies are working. Google Analytics will provide you with updated figures on all traffic you get from each source.
Track Keyword Performance
Keywords are an important piece of the SEO puzzle. Google Analytics will suggest a list of keywords you can use to increase your online visibility. You’ll also know the number of times the phrases have been used before to find a website similar to yours.
Having this data will give you insights into the search phrases that are doing well and those you have under-optimized. You’ll also learn of new keywords you can include in your SEO campaign.
Know the Pages Searchers Visit the Most
Each of your website’s visitors uses a different path to get to a specific page. Understanding these routes is crucial for the success of your site.
Ideally, you want to give your visitors a perfect user experience. And one way to do that is to make it as easy and simple as possible for users to reach any specific web page of your website.
Google Analytics can make this happen. It will show you the links or pages that past visitors have clicked on the most. Where users have found the content both relevant and engaging- leading to a higher click-through rate.
Helping you understand whether your efforts are directing visitors towards the right pages. If not, you will have room to refine your keywords, improve your content, and optimize specific areas on your site.
Visitor Segmentation
For a successful SEO campaign, you need to ask yourself these questions:
- Are you targeting all visitors? In all countries and languages?
- Do you aim to increase new or returning visitors?
- Do you want more referral traffic or just any site visit will do?
- What age and gender are you targeting?
Google Analytics helps with segmenting traffic into even more defined groups. Allowing you to analyze a specific SEO campaign and see how well it’s working for you.
You’ll have a chance to group site visitors in terms of gender and geography. And see how many users got to your pages through a specific referral. While also allowing you to measure referral sources and analyze your backlinks’ quantity and quality.
Visitor segmentation lets you dig even deeper into the reasons behind an increase in site traffic over a period of time.
It could take you some time to pinpoint the metrics you should focus on to increase SEO performance. But the struggle to understand Google Analytics insights is well worth the effort.
Website Bounce Rates
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who visit your site and leave without any interaction with your site’s other pages.
While bounce rate may seem like the most obvious metric in an SEO campaign and Google Analytics reports. It can help you know whether you’re meeting your campaign’s objectives and understand what’s not working for your site.
You could have done a great job on your SEO campaign- optimizing your content and keywords- but still have a high bounce rate. Maybe because some of your landing pages have irrelevant or misleading keywords. Such that users who view the page learn nothing new and quickly close the tab, going back to the search results to find another site.
When optimizing specific landing pages, think about using phrases your ideal customer would use to search for a business similar to yours. Provide useful information to potential customers on all your pages. And provide answers to site visitor’s online queries promptly.
Every marketing campaign comes with a couple of objectives. And for a successful outcome, you should always track your goals. Understand what’s working and where to make changes. One tool that can help you analyze metrics- Google Analytics.
It’s an incredible tool for measuring your SEO campaign’s results. Providing you with insights into the types of visitor’s different pages on your site attract. Letting you know exactly how every searcher found your website and the effectiveness of your call to action. And for a tool with no paywall, it offers just as much, if not more, functionality as other paid Analytics tools.
Just set up some time to organize the data you intend to analyze and you’ll be well on your way to improving the SEO performance of your website.
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