SEO Analysis Techniques With Google Analytics

People have now almost stopped going on about the “good old days”, when SEO Analysis Techniques With Google Analytics used to let you know what keyword search terms people had used to find your website. It made finding out what your audience wanted to know talking to them so simple. Well what if there is a way that you could still get a lot of the information around how people found your website and put this intelligence to good use?

All you need to do is shift your thinking away from keywords and onto topics.

Let’s clarify that. You want the data that you already posses to help you create or curate content that is relevant to the topics that your audience are interested in. Well it’s all still there in Google Analytics, you just need to look for it from a slightly different angle.

google analytics

So where you used to look for keywords now you need to look at your Landing Pages. Go to your Google Analytics account and navigate to Acquisition (1) >All Traffic >Channels (2) then select Organic Search (3) in the table and pick Landing Page as the primary dimension, to do this click on the drop down arrow next to Other and search for it (4).

Your website Landing Pages will be listed in order of popularity, as defined by your audience, relevant to your business. Get a pen and paper and write down these “topics”.

Now assuming you have your Google Analytics account hooked up to your Google Webmaster Tools (if you haven’t yet now is the time to do so), we can look at some more data. Go to Acquisition (1)>Search Engine Optimisation (2)>Landing Pages (3) and take a look at the data displayed. What you are looking at is individual Landing Pages detailing:

  • The impressions they have received (the number of times any URL from your site has appeared in a users search results in the given date range)
  • The clicks each page has received (the amount of times your URLs have been clicked on in Google search pages)
  • The average position that the page has achieved (the average ranking of your website URL for the query or queries)
  • The click through rate or CTR (worked out by clicks divided by impressions x 100)

How well are your pages turning up and what can you do to improve your CTR?

If you look back to the navigation panel, just above Landing Pages you can see Queries. This is where you can compare the top queries against your top landing pages. As each page of your site is optimised for one keyword phrase (right?) this shouldn’t throw up any surprises.

You can then look at the data in Google Webmaster Tools, Search Console, using the Search Analytics tab.

This lets you visually connect Queries to Landing Pages, this is another tool to help you to decide where to concentrate your efforts

Now you can go back to your Google Analytics reports, Behaviour (1)>Behaviour Flow (2), Landing Page should load by default, if not select it from the drop down (3). Now you can select the biggest box click on it and select Highlight traffic through here (4). This can give you insights as to how your visitors move to and from your most popular pages and you can plan your content around this data, allowing you to give them more of what they want, improving their journey.

The last piece of the puzzle is the on-site search, if you haven’t got one you could be missing out on some great data. Look under Behaviour >Site Search and use the data in this section to make sure your site content makes sense to your visitors. Under the Search Terms report your visitors will give you hints as to exactly what content they want to see and help you build up your keyword and content database.

So hopefully I have shown that SEO Analysis Techniques With Google Analytics to study your keywords data is not lost, you just need to shift your thinking as to where the data is and the fact that you need to approach the science, for want of a better word, from a slightly different angle.

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