How Not to Visualize Your Data
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.
SEO Analytics
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.
Most Recent Articles on SEO Analytics
Using Analytics To Grow Blog Traffic And Improve Your Link Building
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.
Tracking Google Analytics Events with Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a great tool that can really streamline the implementation of your favorite web analytics tool. Basically you put a container tag on your site editing your template, and then you should be able manage the configuration and the data collection process of your web analytics tool without touching your template again. You should be able to do it, but the trut...
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How Do You Know If Your Data is Accurate? A case study using search volume, CTR, and rankings
As inbound marketers, we have access to all kinds of data that offers huge value to our campaigns and businesses. However, this data is only valuable if we can unlock it. Our Data Scientist, Matt Peters, takes us into the world of analytics and shares his tips to help you sort through the data around you to find (and implement) the gems.
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Overwriting (not provided) Keywords with Inferred Keywords in Google Analytics
This post describes a method for overwriting the dreaded keyword (not provided) with the keyword which you have inferred that (not provided) represents.
How Much will Google Reader's Demise Cost your Business?
The impending demise of Google Reader is more than a mere inconvenience to those of us who use it to follow an overwhelming collection of industry blogs, Google Alerts, and xkcd and Oatmeal comics. If you offer RSS as a way to subscribe to your content, whether it’s a blog or some kind of feed, then you stand to lose a chunk of your traffic on July 1.
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Back to the Future: Forecasting Your Organic Traffic
Great Scott! Today, we will be learning about the importance of forecasting organic traffic and how you can get started. Let's begin our journey.
Mathematical Ideas for Marketers
Math and marketing make a serendipitous pair; who knew? Will Critchlow shares his tips on how mathematical ideas can help us out as marketers by making us better at our jobs, and by helping us understand advanced, abstract concepts when analyzing data.
When It Comes to Analytics, Are You Doing Enough?
We all know analytics are important. As marketers, we spend a great deal of time in the data, and should feel that we have the data necessary to make great recommendations, troubleshoot issues, and forecast our efforts accurately. However, data can be intimidating. In today's post, Joanna Lord talks about the different types of analytics and common places to start with them.
Single Google Analytics Tracking Code for Multiple Sites: When to Use & How to Report
The practice of tracking multiple domains using a single Google Analytics profile is not for every situation. In fact, anyone attempting to use this practice should pay careful consideration to their landscape to decide if this is really the best option for their client or company. Implementing the same tracking code on multiple sites and gathering aggregate data across them rather than site-specific data is not for everyone. Attempting to filter that aggregate data and collect takeaways can also be a burden.
Tracking SEO 'Broad Match' Keywords in Google Analytics
Tracking keyword performance in Google Analytics is, in theory, easy to do and very flexible. Using customised reports and filters, you can drill down into data, filter items, create custom variables and present the information in ways which will usually be sufficient to answer your questions. But what about producing reports to compare groups of very similar keywords? The term ‘broad match’ is usually reserved for paid search, but as SEO managers, we often want to track the performance of terms we are optimising, including their close variations. There is no default report in Google Analytics to help you with this, but you can use existing features to help you build it yourself.
Strategies for Administering Client Google Analytics Accounts
This past year, while saving up for my wedding, I completed a large number of freelance Google Analytics jobs. In doing so, I had to deal with many different problems which arise when you are working on Google Analytics accounts for a large number of clients. This post details some of the solutions I found.
Using Google Analytics to Power an Effective Q&A Strategy
When you know too much about your product, you can't know what questions users will actually find useful. Here's how to mine your Google Analytics for the questions people are already asking!
Using Google Analytics for Blog Post Timing Insights
Google Analytics provides a lot of information about your website; but there is always room for more. The traffic for a website vary by day of week, and of course, throughout the day, and it is very useful to know when a website expects the most (or least) visitors. The goal of this post is to show the advantages of using more detailed data to help you make decisions such as when to launch a specific post or take down your website for maintenance.