Can Google Analytics help boost SEO on a website?
According to databox, 67 per cent of all users go to the first five organic search results. But it’s barely as easy as it sounds. Organic search results are the fruits of your SEO labour. With that said, restructuring your SEO policies and plans can be a bit cumbersome. This is where an SEO agency London comes into the picture. Tools like Google Analytics are used to understand the parts your digital presence lacks and those that need immediate attention.
Let’s explore this in detail.
Introducing SEO Analytics
Before jumping to Google Analytics, you must first understand SEO Analytics. SEO Analytics is the practice of collecting, tracking and evaluating all the marketing data. The core aim of this comprehensive activity is to help grow organic traffic for your website. It helps identify opportunities, understand data and improve the return on investment or ROI on SEO efforts. Several tools help with measuring SEO data, and Google Analytics is one of them.
Taking help of Google Analytics to boost SEO
Google Analytics comprises a range of data. From keywords to referrals, the tool has it all. Here’s how you can make the absolute best use of it.
Sync it with your Search Console Account
The synchronization of Google Analytics with Search Console shall reveal the larger picture you’ve been missing lately. The integration allows you to use queries for identifying opportunities, improving your target keywords and page ranking effectively. The Console puts forth the specific keywords that visitors use to find your content and informs you about the landing pages based on the clicks, impressions, and CTR. Missing links can be drilled down the Search Console too. The information then can be analysed and used for improving the optimization of your web pages. Better yet, you can also distinguish the data points using the filters of country and device.
Now that you know what you can find, how do you use all the information? The synced data can be used in A/B testing your title and meta descriptions. This shall help you garner higher CTR over time.
Formulate SEO-related goals
Like any campaign, the SEO campaign shall have set goals and objectives. To begin with, set up your Google Analytics tool and then go on to creating corresponding conversion pages. Conversion pages encourage visitors to perform an activity – Contact Us and Request Info forms are prime examples of the same.
These conversion pages’ help track when someone views the page. Furthermore, they also notify you of any activity within a session, including form filling and submitting. From a technical standpoint, conversion pages should have an independent URL and include the NOINDEX meta-tag. Not having these will render false positive hits and hamper reporting accuracy.
Organic Visitors
Note that just tracking organic visitors is not sufficient. One also needs to measure the quality of those organic visitors. Essentially, you want to know whether the organic visitors are credible and authentic. A modest way to do this is by using filters and segments for removing spam traffic.
There are two kinds of spam traffic –
- crawlers and fake referrers
- ghost spam.
The first one is relatively easy to tackle. All you have to do is exclude the domain – by using regex, for example. This helps to capture the multiple iterations of the spam-ridden parts. For the second, you need to exclude traffic that does not match your hostname. This can be done by setting filters on a ‘new view’ in Google Analytics. The process helps you ensure that you are not messing with raw data. Plus, any spam traffic is prevented from going further on.
Then there is the issue of retrospective traffic. It is here that segments come into play. What you have to do is set a custom dashboard that only accounts for organic traffic. Once done, this will also show each metric that aligns with your peculiar business environment and sector.
Separating the organic and non-organic visitors
Next up is to separate organic and non-organic visitors and traffic. Doing so allows you to pinpoint the aspects of poor user experience or design that need improvement. Once changed and amended, this renders a boost seo of your website.
Content Drilldown report to the rescue
There are a lot of capabilities that Google Analytics has on offer, and one of them is the content drilldown report. This section breaks down the non-sales page impressions and clicks. These then help you assess and track the blog content pages to see the trending topics. Once known, you can further optimize them by adding FAQ schemas and lead magnets.
Custom Dashboards
Creating custom dashboards help you cherry-pick metrics such as average time spent or the number of entries or visits to the page. And the best part? These can be done date-wise. The activity, for one, lets you know the popular blog posts. Also, the dashboards enable you to gauge the traffic volume garnered through blogs. The typical dashboards you should create are:
- General SEO dashboard: It gives an overall idea about your SEO campaigns.
- Content Performance Dashboard: For all your published content.
- Topical dashboard: This dashboard shows the most viewed pages for particular products and services, blog topics, or even top keywords within that specific topic.
- Geographical dashboard: For country-wise segmentation
Automated reporting of spikes and dips in organic traffic – Create Alerts
Look at this one as a tool that reports significant spikes and dips in traffic. That is, it alerts you about traffic fluctuations. You can create alerts for organic performance by going into the admin section, and then under ‘view column’, you can select the ‘custom alerts’ tab to create the new alert.
Setting up alerts will notify you of the increases and decreases in the organic traffic levels, thus making your optimization efforts more proactive. Keep in mind that you can regulate the numbers or ranges of fluctuations according to site volatility. It differs across industries and companies.
Parting Words
Given the complexity of SEO, there is no guaranteed hack or single strategy. There is a lot to ponder and process. Needless to say, what you can and should do is measure your SEO performance regularly. Also, keep a tab on your competitors’ SEO strategy and efforts to stay a step ahead of the market.
