In theory, you could do SEO without measuring and reporting, but a solid grasp of analytics is essential to success. SEO analytics covers a wide range of topics, but often focuses on performance metrics around traffic, keywords, URLs, page speed, conversion rates, and more.
Beyond performance metrics, research metrics present another focal point of SEO analytics. This includes topics like keyword analysis, backlink research, and other areas to inform your SEO strategy.
Here, you can browse our top resources on SEO analytics, as well as find the most recent blog posts on the subject below.
SEO Analytics and Reporting : Check out our free SEO Learning Center where we've collected the top resources on analytics and reporting.
The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics : The most popular website analytics platform in the world, Google Analytics is a must-know platform for all SEOs.
A Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console : A companion to any web analytics platform, Google Search Console offers a wealth of SEO information to webmasters.
When and How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Count Metrics : SEO metrics have a special place in analytics. Rand Fishkin shows you how to use these popular metrics correctly.
The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics : This article covers a very specific niche topic, but also an important one! Learn why that direct traffic in your analytics platform isn't what you think it is.
This tactic was actually shown to me by Jeremiah Smith (my brother) over at SimpleTiger. The need for this came about when one of our Healthcare Marketing clients needed to track the actual impact their PDFs were having on their organic search volume, and traffic in general.
The latest hurdle in the search industry is the possibility of 100% of search referral data to be hidden from Google organic search. Yowza. I'm not going to lie, that stings. But, as usual, marketers will not only find a way, but the savvy marketer will find a way to stand out from the pack.
Visitor analytics tools like Google Analytics provide critical data to marketers, but we need to go beyond that information - both higher level (across competitive leading indicators) and deeper (into business metrics) to truly succeed.
The moment I lay my eyes on this Inbound Link Categorization dashboard (see image below) in Mitch Monsen’s post, Tools for the Ultimate SEO dashboard, I could hear the data screaming to be released from those pie charts....
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Have you seen complete marketing funnels, but not been sure where to start building yours? In this post, John Doherty walks us through how to build a rudimentary full marketing funnel, from first touch to conversion, all with Google Analytics data.
One of the most common questions about this year's Search Engine Ranking Factors study is whether there are any differences in search results across queries with different search volumes and topic categories. This post dives into the data to find the answer.
Implementing Google Analytics is fairly simple, but most people don't take full advantage of what it offers. With custom segments, marketers can divide their audiences into smaller sets of data, learning how best to earn the business of each group.
The results are in! Come check out Moz's 2013 Ranking Factors as Matt Peters presents a preview of the results from the survey and correlation study.
According to data released by Yahoo!, around 2% of users in United States search the Internet with JavaScript disabled. This figure may sound small, but if we consider that number of Internet users in the U.S. was almost 240 million in 2010, we realize that we're probably missing out on the opportunity to track millions of potential visitors, and that's just in the U.S.!
Today's web search engines have sophisticated ways of measuring whether a web page is related to a given query, based on decades of research in Information Retrieval. Join me as I explore the inner workings of a search engine's relevance engine and explain what it means for SEOs.
With initiatives like Google Secure Search, Universal Search, and Knowledge Graph, it's becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to figure out how and why they receive Google referrals. It's time to reclaim your data by analyzing the VED paramater to make sense of the black hole (not provided) has left in Google referral traffic.
Ecommerce sites have it very easy when trying to tie sales information back to online marketing activities whether it be organic, social, email, or paid campaigns. Since the purchase happens online, web analytics packages capture the transaction details and can generate detailed analyses on sales, visitor profitability, visits and days to transactions, etc.
This is an ode to a data visualization I found on my box of tea. It's a perfect reminder of how we sometimes get carried away as marketers, especially as our tools make visualization easier.
Any good blogger with a relatively new blog should already be doing a couple of things. Firstly, you should be writing excellent content (old news I know), and secondly you should be promoting your content and your brand all over the place. What follows is a quick look at how we at ThinkTraffic are growing our blog traffic and also how we are using Analytics to make our efforts more effective.