“You can’t improve your efforts if you don’t measure them”, that’s the line which is very popular amongst digital marketers. In SEO, measurement is very crucial to know the results of your efforts. SEO does not ends at ranking the pages for more and more pages higher in search queries. It is more about going beyond keywords report: how organic search brings revenue and profit to the business. Thankfully, there are free tools that paint the exact picture of your SEO efforts and is probably installed on your website.
Ways In which Google Analytics is very helpful
1. Track only organic search traffic results
This is not very obvious as it may seem because many companies believe a myth that whenever there is a drop in traffic to the website then they immediately conclude that organic traffic is on a drop. Many times digging a little deeper has revealed that organic traffic was still up while other sources of traffic were on decline.
Steps to look at organic search traffic are:
Under your Google Analytics report click on: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. There you will see traffic sources segmented by channels. Click on “Organic Search” in the list of channels which will give you a more detailed report.
This report is actually going to be robust to your SEO reporting. From this report you will be able to analyze which search engine is sending the most traffic, which landing page has the most search traffic, top performing keywords and much more.
2. Measuring the quality of SEO traffic
To judge the quality of search traffic, the most commonly known report in Google Analytics is the Assisted conversions report( Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted conversions ). With this report we should follow the directives as by setting the date range to ‘last month’ and then compare it to ‘previous period’. Now you can see month-to-month comparison of conversions directly from search or in case of multiple visits to the site, Conversions where search played a role but is not directly attributed to conversions( visitor for the first time found the company by search but then later made multiple visits directly typing the web address of the company.)
You can use this report to determine the decline or improvement in the conversion from search traffic. All it needs is an analysis to tell that the traffic coming in from search is of quality or use to the company or not.
3. How much is it worth?
This is a report which we can use to tell in a more traditional way that whether the traffic coming in to the site, apart from telling improvements in traffic, visibility or conversions, how much the organic traffic is worth in dollars. To assign a dollar value to a sites organic traffic, we can compare how much the keywords would have costed if bought from Google Adwords campaign( you must have a Google Adwords Account.
We should navigate:
Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries
With this report in one tab, leave it as it is and open up your Google Adwords account > Tools > Keywords Planner > Get Search Volume Data and Trends. You will want to pull up some of the most searched keywords from your Google Analytics report previously opened and type in those keywords here in the keyword planner to find out their search volume and their worth if you would have purchased them.
Now we require to make a spreadsheet listing down all the keywords driving traffic to our website, amount of clicks received from them, and the estimated CPC( cost-per-click) received from them. The final column will contain the sum of estimated CPC multiplied by amount of clicks, resulting in the total organic traffic value per keyword.
4. Helps in Identifying Slow loading page time
Speeding up Page Load times is something that is very essential to your SEO efforts but is oftenly overlooked by marketers or SEO’s. Apart from the point that it drives the user experience factor, page loading time is also a factor that matters for search rankings.
To measure page load times for page-by-page basis, we need to navigate: Behaviour > Site Speed > Page Timings. We’ll set the middle column as ‘Avg. page load times’ and the right column as ‘% Exit’. Now we need add a secondary dimension of ‘medium’ and filter down to show only search traffic.
This report actually paints the picture on a page-by-page basis; as the avg. page load time increases, exit percentage begins to skyrocket. Now it is the SEO’s job to bring this report to the site developers and ask them to improvise on the page load times as it is causing the site traffic to drop. Once it has been improved compare the following month’s report with this one and you’ll see the difference.
