How to Track SEO Results Using Google Analytics

Go to Google, or another search engine if you’re feeling rebellious, and type a query into the search bar. The results you see are the result of a lot of hard effort by digital marketers just like you who are all trying to bring their websites to the top of search engine rankings. In the digital age, those search results may make a significant difference in the bottom line for many firms, making search engine optimization, or SEO, a key digital marketing strategy.

However, SEO has gotten increasingly difficult to master. We have less real estate to deal with now that Google has prioritised adverts and reduced the amount of organic search results displayed on a page. Furthermore, more marketers recognise the significance of SEO: 61% think boosting SEO is a major inbound marketing objective. That implies you’ll face more competition as you try to rank high in search results.

When the competition heats up, businesses must step up their SEO game in order to win the search wars. Analytics can be useful. You’ve utilized analytics to examine website traffic as a digital marketer, but have you used that information strategically to boost your SEO? If not, here are three alternatives.

The Critical Part of SEO Often Overlooked by Marketers

There are really just two components to SEO: the actual SEO that gets your webpages listed well in search engines and the content that keeps people on your website once they click on your listing in the search results (SERP). This second stage is frequently overlooked. Marketers believe that by achieving a high position, they have completed their task, however this is not the true objective for doing SEO. The true reason you perform SEO is to persuade people to visit your website and remain until they convert. That conversion could be an email sign-up, a wishlist item, a purchase, or something else—even a social media follow. Something must occur in order for your SEO to provide a function. And for many, this is the crucial step.

Analytics must be used to determine if you are doing everything possible in terms of SEO. Determine which of your pages are causing people to leave and why. Take into account your bounce rates, page speed, and mobile-optimization. Then, make modifications to entice them to stay, and watch your SEO ROI rise.

When Pages Fail to Engage or Convert

First, look for areas where you may have fumbled the ball by focusing too much on search ranking and not enough on interaction. For example, you may have a popular website, but users usually click away rather than browsing to other sites on your site. This is referred to as a bounce. It says someone “bounced” off a page after landing there, but it doesn’t say why. That is what you must determine, and there are numerous probable explanations.

People may visit your page for the incorrect reasons, usually because the keyword they typed means something different to them than it does to you. If you have a page that receives a lot of traffic yet has a high bounce rate, you’ll know this is happening—something is bringing them there, but it’s not where they wanted to be. Examine the keywords they’re utilising as well as the potential intent behind those terms. What is the purpose of the person who types the query into the search bar? It’s possible that your meaning and their meaning disagree.

It’s also possible that your SEO was deceptive, promising but failing to deliver. People may click on a search result listing because of your promise, only to be disappointed when they arrive at your website. Or it could be that you are delivering, but your website needs work to make it clear to the site visitor. The content could be hidden, or the navigation could be confusing. In other circumstances, you just failed to engage them in such a way that they would want to stay, click on a link, and a little more. It is your responsibility to figure out what is going on so that you can repair the problem.

However, a bounce is occasionally unavoidable. For example, someone looking for your company’s phone number could use search to find your Contact page, acquire the phone number, and then leave your site. In that situation, your SEO performed admirably since it supplied the products. However, our ultimate goal as digital marketers is conversion, which means that webpages providing answers to visitors’ questions should be altered to attempt and encourage those visitors to stay a little longer. Using this example, you may want to rethink your Contact page to see if you can engage a visitor after they arrive.

You’ve had a visitor to your website. You must now think out how to persuade them to stay.

Slow Load Times Will Cause Bounces Too

In addition to looking at bounce rates to identify areas for improvement, consider the speed with which your pages load. Visitors are turned off by slow pages! This is another case where you may have done everything correctly to get the webpage to rank well, and you may even be delivering exactly the content that the searcher wants, but the searcher will not know because a slow load time causes them to click the ‘Back’ button and look for answers elsewhere.

How important is speed to Internet users? A great deal. They will abandon a website that is too slow, and they don’t allow you much leeway in defining slow. Kissmetrics reported the following page load speed statistics:

• 47 percent of people anticipate a webpage to load in less than 2 seconds.
• If a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% will abandon it.
• A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% decrease in conversions.

Your analytics will provide you with information about page load times, and you may discover a link between bounce rates and slow-loading pages. Follow through on the next step to ensure that your pages load swiftly so that you can capture the visitors you worked so hard to entice with that high SERP ranking!

Why Mobile Matters Much More to SEO in 2018

In addition to understanding (and correcting) bounce rates and page load times, you can use analytics to improve your SEO results by evaluating mobile traffic, which is becoming a larger proportion of search engine users. As of December 2017, mobile phones accounted for 52 percent of all Internet usage worldwide.

In response to this trend, Google plans to launch the new mobile-first index in 2018, therefore now is the time to ensure your website is mobile SEO-ready. By displaying bounce rates for mobile users, your analytics can assist you evaluate how well your website is functioning. Once the new index is in place, the rating of your desktop site will be determined by the ranking of your mobile site. So prioritise the SEO and usability of your mobile site, and use analytics to discover any flaws.

Gain a Deeper Knowledge of Analytics

Although Google Analytics is a popular tool for conducting this study, there are other web analytics platforms available to you, each with their own set of benefits and downsides. It is not so much the technology you use as it is how you utilise it, and SEO is an iterative process. You want to know what works so you can do more of it, and what doesn’t so you can remedy the problem. More importantly, you want to ensure that you are following through—not just winning searches, but also potential clients by engaging them once they click on a search result and land on your webpage.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the kinds of insights you may derive from your web analytics. As your skills as a digital marketer develop, you’ll discover that understanding how to use and apply analytics lessons will boost your value as a professional in the area. You can develop your abilities in digital marketing analytics in general or web analytics in particular by enrolling in online training. In either scenario, you’ll gain a better knowledge of the numbers, their meaning, and the ramifications for your digital marketing plan, allowing you to be adept in all aspects of SEO, not just rankings.