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.
Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I'm calling that picture the 4 R's: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R's, I'll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.
To invoke the parlance of the Interwebs, "teh internets are srs bsns." And it's true - after all of the analyzing, optimization, and long-tail research is done, doing business online still carries with it the same credo held by traditional businesses: "make money." The theories, the hot trends, the Internet superstar programs and toolkits all exist to do...
Howdy Folks, Unlike most of the posts that I've put out recently which are more strategy based this post is a from-the-trenches-tip which I've recently come across that I thought I'd share. I'm going to talk all about using the Google Analytics API but I'll show you how anyone can do it, you don't need to be a developer! All you need is a Google Analyics account and Excel.... ...
In present times when the word “crisis” is repeated so often, tracking the performance of the website is getting even more important. Working a lot on SEO & web analytics of different classified businesses all over the world, I try to sum up what web metrics are really crucial to evaluate website properly. The advantage is, you can also measure them with free tools such as ...
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1. StatisticsAll these statistics! Traffic, time on the site, bounce rate, oh my! Whatever happened to keeping it to just plain old "hits"? Plus, who possibly has the time to go through all of these measurements?...
Being avid followers of SEOmoz and the YOUmoz blog, we here at Fresh Egg got very excited when we read that “Web Analytics Now Expands to Include Offline Phone Call Tracking” as far back as September last year. That post involving Mongoose Metrics got our pulses racing because it seemed to be an answer to one of our most persistent frustrations. As an SEO provider using analytics packages, we know our clients are getting sales calls. The frustrating reality has been that we can’t prove that those calls are due to the PPC or organic SEO work we are doing for them. Mongoose had cracked the problem – but the service isn’t available in the UK.
A post appeared on Search Cowboys last month claiming that Universal Search was now trackable by Google Analytics thanks to somebody's eagle-eyed discovery of the URL parameter oi=value.
I really like Google Analytics - the interface is easy to use, the information easy to interpret and it's free. You can do great tricks with filters to slice the data in different ways. I do wish that less of the reports used sample data and it'd be nice if you could label points in your data to cross-reference with your SEO activities. But the one thing that really bugs me about Google Analytics is that the JavaScript you tag your site with is broken.
A combination of advanced Google Analytics tips and tricks as well as some insight from Avinash Kaushik on details of the way that GA tracks repeat visitors.
In his book “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis explains the working of Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland As and his role as an asset manager. Unlike the NFL, in which teams share television revenue and stick to overall salary caps, major league baseball allows teams to fend for themselves. As a result the big market teams (e.g., the New York Yankees) have more money to acquire top players and assemble a winning team. Managers of teams with smaller budgets, like Beane, have to be smarter in selecting lower paid players. Lewis admires Beane’s use of hard numbers in evaluating players and identifying underpaid ones.
Many SEO projects begin with a site review or audit, identifying potential weaknesses and opportunities. However, a great number of these analyses leave out a healthy dose of collecting metrics - a critical factor in helping to benchmark future progress and see how far you've come (and what effect your SEO changes have had). Thus, I figured it would be valuable to review, in full, the pre-...
**Please note I have no affiliation with Inc Magazine or their website. I read the article while waiting to get a haircut at my local barber. I recently read an article in Inc Magazine titled "Improving Your Sense of Site," which focused on ways in which your analytics can show you how to increase sales. It was a great article and worth the read (gave me some great ideas), but one thing stuck out and I thought was worth discussing. The website owners gave a reaction to the comments made regarding their analytics, and one of their reactions was:
Display advertising intrigues me - the best bits have the capacity to inspire, but measuring their success can be harder. One of the best sessions I attended at SMX Advanced back in the summer was the advanced analytics panel. It covered some fantastic tips on advanced methodologies and metrics for search analytics. It was the inspiration for this post, which is going to cover some slightly different areas. Although we primarily deal with SEO and search advertising, we do a little online display advertising and have recently found ourselves thinking about measurement metrics for PR and offline advertising:
As I've been watching my traffic stats lately, I've noticed something quite interesting. One web page on my domain is receiving significantly more traffic than the others. It took me a while to figure out why. Where was this extra traffic was coming from? Finally, I figured it out. The page in question is ...