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.
I've had more than a few people tell me they really missed our old advertising page, not because we sold any ads, but because our monthly traffic, search and referral stats were always there and relatively frequently updated. As consolation (and since I always did intend to keep SEOmoz's stats as public as possible), here's an exhaustive roundup of important analytics data (from Indextools) for...
With the wind chill factor at –2 degrees in New York on Tuesday, 3/6/07, I attended an awesome seminar at the New York Hilton, “The New Age of Web 2.0 Marketing,” presented by ClickZ and sponsored by Unica. It was free, and it was great! I used to think that there were two main parts to a successful website: web design/development/usability and SEO/M. ...
At the beginning of October Rand and I launched 25 ad campaigns on Google AdWords. We chose keywords that got a fair amount of searches each month but were by no means popular so that we'd be able to bid on them for dirt cheap; hence, we bid on words like "Punnett square," "snark," Venn diagram," and "uvula." Our goal for this experiment was to see ho...
Last week, during the Vintage Tub & Bath Dinner, Hitwise won a link from the SEOmoz blog. But, in typical Rand fashion, I decided that rather than simply point a bit of traffic their way, I'd do a real, constructive, signally post using some Hitwise data. Below, I've looked at several commercial sectors on the web that have recently seen entrance...
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I've just been shopping around for a Heat Map tracking software and stumbled upon those two, which looks good to me: CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?...
In continuance with trust post I did few weeks ago, I decided to rant about backlink statistics various search engines so generously provide. Without further ranting and blathering, let’s see some statistical tables!Lies… ...
Last week I wrote a piece offering a free linkbait idea on web analytics. Incredibly, several folks responded, indicating they'd give it a go. Yesterday, I sat down with two of the frontrunners - Eric Enge from StoneTemple Consulting & Jonah Stein of ...
I should be eternally castigated to the fiery furnace for spoofing a Devo tune, but hopefully redemption can come in the form of this post's value. We've been spending some time in analytics programs lately, both for our own in-house projects and for some clients. In every instance, the addition of action tracking makes a huge difference to how well we can optimize and make changes to internal ...
Over the last week, we've collected visitor traffic data from 25 popular websites in the search and online marketing space, including: Brian Clark from Copyblogger Aaron Wall from SEOBook Matt Cutts from MattCutts.com ...
I recently had the opportunity to renew 1000 of my spam domains.Since the domains only cost me 99 cents each when I bought them and renewal was nearly $6 at the time, I decided it wasn't worth it.In fact, my evil plan was that I was going to simply let these sites expire and then buy them back once they expired and went into the domain pool...Imagine my surprise...
Have you ever looked at a set of search results and scratched your head in disbelief? If so, you're like me - occasionally, I'll at some search results at Google and have no comprehension of why one site is ranking in front of another, or why it would rank in the top 10, period. This blog post is an open call - feel free to list keywords and search results in the comments that simply make no se...
At nearly every SES conference, I hear it mentioned that analytics must track 60-90 days out in order to maintain a close watch on latent visits and conversions. In a meeting I had today with a large non-profit based website, the issue of latent tracking over the longer term came up... My question is - is it valuable to track via IP address over the long haul (100-300 days) or are the changing ...
You may already be familiar with eye tracking, a technology used to conduct marketing and usability tests for websites by examining the vision patterns of users as they view a page... but have you seen it in use? Etre, a company specializing in usability, offers an eye tracking service for clients, and feat...
Quick one - Visits vs. Visitors is a great piece on why the first matters more than you might think and why the second is less accurate than you might presume. Good read: Here are my top reasons for using visits:1) Visits are more accurate than Unique ...