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.
In the majority of cases, when someone sets up Google Analytics, they install the default code on all their pages and leave it at that – happy with the data the comes inside the box. Here are some tactics on how to get collect more data (specifically Age and Gender) about your customers in non-intrusive ways.
Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.
When I hear the word, “cookies,” I generally think of warm, gooey homemade chocolate chip cookies. But when it comes to passing the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) test, I had to put my cravings for Mrs. Fields’ Nibblers aside and learn about the differences between first-party and third-party cookies.
There's been a lot of talk lately about whether user data from analytics is a ranking factor. I argue that Google and Bing don't need to tap into analytics - they have 2 powerful user metrics in their own log data: (1) CTR and (2) Dwell Time.
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Recently Mat Clayton from Mixcloud provided a great snippet of Javascript that could be used to record whether visitors to your site were logged into Facebook or not. I extend that idea to present similar code for Twitter and Google+ and then wrap it all up in Google Analytics goodness. Using this code you can monitor which social networks your website visitors are logged into.
If you use Google Analytics then this bug hyper inflates all your metrics and causes you to make sub optimal marketing decisions. I was recently checking my bounce rates like every analyst does now days and was shocked when I saw my home page with an 83.95% bounce rate. It’s not a blog either it’s a B2B site offering various services which made no sense at all. Put your detective hat on and guess what, you’ve got a bug.
It has been over three months since Google announced the (not provided) update that would hide search referral keywords for organic traffic. Since (not provided) results only show up while logged in to Google, the increase to over 60 million Google plus users – and estimates of 400 million by the end of 2012 – indicates that the problem of search referral data is not going away anytime soon.
If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.
We launched our site in July 2010. By the end of 2011 we ranked on page 1 organic results for 108 relevant phrases. During 2011 we went from 4 phrases in the top 3 results to 44 phrases in the top 3. Here are the SEO tactics we used to get the equivalent of $100K in PPC ads in 2011 for free.
A default Google Analytics implementation will break your visits when tracking cross domain websites (such as webshops using an external payment gateway) because the first-party cookies can only be read from the domain that set the cookies. When switching domains a new cookie is created and thus a new visit is registered. This could result in an incorrect report of the number of visits, but even worse, it could also strip the original referrer from your visits.
SEOmoz.org had 13.8mm visits from 6.25mm unique visitors last year (2011). Those numbers are pretty exciting, but what's not exciting is the external perception created by third-parties like Compete, Alexa, Quantcast, Doubleclick and Google Trends for Websites. These sites report massively lower and wrongly trending data - and SEOmoz isn't alone in experiencing this frustration.
With the new features that are released every month, Google Analytics becomes a more powerful tool for tracking conversion rates, engaged visitors, content performance and much more. Along with these new features, you can also find the ability to customize and add up to 20 dashboards to your Google Analytics account. However, I suspect that you've already tried to build your own custom dashboards and ended up staring at your screen without knowing where to start.
How would you spend your SEO time and money when given these choices: - Take phrase ABC that ranks #5 organically and try to move it to #3 - Take phrase DEF that ranks #25 and try to move it to page 1 - Create new content for new phrase XYZ where you don't currently rank, and then try to get it ranked on page 1.
It’s been live in the Netherlands since May, and for all you folks in the U.S., it’s been around even longer: Google Shopping. Why then are Google Shopping visits still so hard to separate from the normal organic traffic within Google Analytics?