Search Engine optimization

using Google analytic to use SEO

Here is a post explaining a simple way to add some extra info to your Google Analytics data to help improve your natural search traffic. In this post I hope to show you…

1. An explanation of what’s missing from Google Analytics in terms of actionable SEO data.
2. How to fix it.
3. A free excel template so that you can play about with it yourself.
4. A tutorial to accompany the excel spreadsheet.
5. The actions to take as a result of the data.
6. Some suggestions for extending this further.

Part 1: The Problem with Using Google Analytics for SEO

The SEO data in Google Analytics pretty much consists of these 2 things:

1. A list of terms that are bringing you traffic.
2. The numbers of visits for those terms.

You can track whether you are increasing or decreasing traffic over time. And there are extras there, like bounce rate & conversion rate by keyword, which help you to fix the journey aftersomeone lands on your site.

But for the most part it is far more useful for seeing “did we do ok with search engine traffic yesterday?” rather than the more forward looking  ”what can we do to improve traffic from search engines tomorrow?”

The reason it’s difficult to use GA in an actionable way for SEO is there are 3 key bits of information missing:

It’s absolutely painful to get it to tell you where you rank for particular keywords.

There’s no indication of how much extra traffic you could get for any given keyword.

It’s far harder than it should be to get a list of keywords cross-referenced against landing pages. (you can do this, but it’s only really useful for sites with 5 or less pages).

Part 2: How to Fix this Problem – SEO gap analysis

1. Our current percentage of the maximum available traffic.
2. Our current rank for each term.
3. Which page of ours is currently ranking.

And here’s how this all looks when combined:

So rather than scratching our heads wondering where to start, that immediately tells us:

1. Which search terms are bringing us most visits today?
2. Which keywords do we have the potential to improve for? (& which the fastest?)
3. What pages do we need to change to do that?
4. What extra actions can we take to get more traffic for each term?