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.
So, it’s time for my second swat-up on statistics. Last time we covered the different types of averages there are, and how you may use them. This time, we’re looking at how we can measure deviations from that. I know I said there would be a week’s wait, but I've ended up...
As recently as a month ago I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder. This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers. When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics wa...
Rand's presentation from eMetrics London on analytics and metrics for SEO. Includes the embedded slide deck and a description of the topics covered.
Analytics is one of those things that hasn’t always been at the top of my priority list until recently. Google Analytics has many features I’ve never used before because I haven’t had the time to sit down and really investigate what they can do for me and my clients. A few months ago, in one of my late night GA adventures, I found a section on event tracking, a small love soon formed.
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Last week, a few of us from SEOmoz attended WebShare’s Seminar for Success for Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer training. All of us who attended have a decent grasp on GA but really wanted to get some advanced information and gain a better understanding of GA’s potential. Plus, actually getting trained on something is always helpful, even if you feel you know it well!...
As an SEO, it’s easy to get lost in a world of rankings and ranking factors when we really just want quality traffic. And the reason we get lost in rankings and ranking factors is because Google (and other major search engines) make it extremely easy to track and measure the ROI that they offer. Conversely, sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, have arguably suffered by not providing ...
This is my first attempt at a YouMoz post. I decided that given my background it would be a good idea to write about something I know – statistics. We are all familiar in the SEO world with statistics. We use averages, trends and split test results to make recommendations, justify oursel...
Lets say you have a situation such as this one. A customer comes from a web site or search engine, leaves and then comes back from a different site or keyword search. How do you determine the original referral source? With a tool we have been using for the past several ...
We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. It provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail!
The history of web analytics has read a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail. We've gone through a list of candidates searching for the one true metric: Hits, Page Views, Visitors, Unique Visitors...
As you probably heard, Google announced last week that they are working on a browser plug-in to let users opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. But th...
I was really interested in one specific metric that Rand discussed in the latest SEOmoz webinar on Actionable Analytics. He mentioned that the number of keywords sending search traffic measured in increments (monthly, weekly) could be an indicator of whether or not content development positively influenced search traffic. Unique keyword growth suggests that content development on a site or oth...
If you’ve not used it before, bit.ly is a URL shortening service which is popular with Twitter. Due to the 140 character limit in tweets, characters are a premium so services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, etc provide an easy way to shorten lengthy URLs.So, you’re probably wondering what relevance this has to SEO? Well after using bit.ly for a while, I’ve com...
It's time for a quick mid-week geek-out - I wanted to collect together a bunch of resources I have written on first touch tracking in Google Analytics including (for the first time that I'm aware of), the technical implementation details: