Google Analytics is one of the most valuable tools for measuring the effectiveness of your SEO performance. By providing in-depth answers about your SEO efforts, you can monitor the development of your site's pages and detect opportunities and problems for both technical and on-page SEO.
Google Analytics provides various SEO reports that can help you bolster your SEO strategy. These reports can provide valuable insights into the performance of your website, allowing you to optimize your website and improve your search engine rankings. Below are some of the SEO reports in Google Analytics that you can use to support your SEO efforts.
With Google Analytics, you can identify opportunities and problems related to both technical and on-page SEO. By analysing metrics that reveal what's working and what's not based on your goals, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your time and resources.
Moreover, Google Analytics provides valuable information about your website traffic, including its source and behavior after arriving on your site. This data is crucial for optimising your website to improve your SEO efforts.
Here are just a few examples of the types of insights you can gain from using Google Analytics for SEO:
By analysing the data provided by GA4's Acquisition report, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy to optimise your organic traffic and boost your website's visibility.Referral traffic refers to the visitors who come to your site from other sites that link to yours. This is different from organic traffic that originates from search engines. Referral traffic is a crucial factor for improving your SEO because it increases your website traffic and creates valuable backlinks that improve your Domain Authority and search engine ranking. By identifying the sites that link to your site, you can reach out to them and explore opportunities for collaboration.
To view your referral traffic in Google Analytics 4, follow these steps:In Google Analytics 4, the landing page report provides valuable insights into the pages users first see when they visit your site. This report is crucial for understanding the initial impression users have of your website, which is vital for SEO. By understanding which content areas users pay more attention to, you can identify opportunities to increase traffic.
To exploit these opportunities, start by reviewing the top 10 pages in the landing page report. Look for pages that perform well based on metrics such as revenue, engagement, views, and sessions. Note the pages that are working well and their trends. The goal is to create more of what works and discontinue what doesn't.
Pay attention to trends as well, as they indicate content that sparks your audience's interest. Place your offers, promotions, lead magnets, or news on the pages that attract the most traffic. Additionally, include links to other articles on your website to keep users engaged.
Low-traffic or low-engagement pages can also present conversion opportunities. Compare these pages with high-performing landing pages to identify areas for improvement.
To perform effective content and SEO analysis, consider setting a longer date range of 6 months to 1 year. This will provide a comprehensive view of your website's performance over time.
Before you can start analysing organic search results, such as clicks to your site or search result rankings, you need to connect Google Search Console to GA4. Once integrated, you can explore organic search results in GA4's analytics features. This adds two new reports to your analytics arsenal:
You can find this report under Reports → Retention. It's recommended to calculate user retention on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.
To calculate the rate of returning visitors, use this formula:
Google Analytics provides various SEO reports that can help you bolster your SEO strategy. These reports can provide valuable insights into the performance of your website, allowing you to optimize your website and improve your search engine rankings. Below are some of the SEO reports in Google Analytics that you can use to support your SEO efforts.
- Conversions Report
- Traffic Acquisition Report
- Referral Traffic
- Landing Page Report
- Google Search Console
- Site Speed Report
- User Retention
- Mobile Report
- Report Snapshot (Automated Insights)
- Looker Studio
How Google Analytics Can Enhance Your SEO Strategy
Google Analytics is an essential tool for any website owner or marketer looking to improve their SEO efforts. This powerful platform provides detailed insights into the performance of your website's pages, enabling you to monitor their progress over time.With Google Analytics, you can identify opportunities and problems related to both technical and on-page SEO. By analysing metrics that reveal what's working and what's not based on your goals, you can make informed decisions about where to allocate your time and resources.
Moreover, Google Analytics provides valuable information about your website traffic, including its source and behavior after arriving on your site. This data is crucial for optimising your website to improve your SEO efforts.
Here are just a few examples of the types of insights you can gain from using Google Analytics for SEO:
- Where is your traffic coming from?
- Which content is the most engaging?
- Which pages generate the most sales?
- Which devices do your visitors use most frequently?
1. Conversions Report
It can be a challenge to justify increasing your SEO budget or demonstrating its return on investment (ROI). Simply measuring success by the number of website visitors can be misleading, as high traffic numbers don't necessarily translate into conversions or revenue, regardless of your search engine rankings.
This is why it's crucial to define clear objectives for your website and translate them into measurable goals, referred to as conversions in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). By setting up GA4 conversions, you can track specific target objectives and provide evidence of SEO results to justify the additional budget allocation.
Conversions can take many forms, including page views, sales, lead generation through form submissions, or any other action that you anticipate users to take on your website. Once you have defined the interactions that you want to track on your website (referred to as Events in GA4), turning them into conversions is a straightforward process.
To track conversions:
This is why it's crucial to define clear objectives for your website and translate them into measurable goals, referred to as conversions in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). By setting up GA4 conversions, you can track specific target objectives and provide evidence of SEO results to justify the additional budget allocation.
Conversions can take many forms, including page views, sales, lead generation through form submissions, or any other action that you anticipate users to take on your website. Once you have defined the interactions that you want to track on your website (referred to as Events in GA4), turning them into conversions is a straightforward process.
To track conversions:
- Go to Admin → Conversion Events.
- Then, turn on the desired event from the list of Existing Events by toggling it on; it should turn blue
- You can now view the list of your conversions under Conversion Events
2. Traffic Acquisition Report
SEO aims to enhance the visibility of your website's pages in organic search results. Google Analytics 4's (GA4) Acquisition report offers valuable insights into your website's traffic sources, including organic traffic from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. You can analyse organic traffic in GA4 and compare it with other traffic sources like Google, Direct, or Organic Social, among others. This helps you understand where your users are coming from (the source) and how they are getting there (the medium).
GA4's Acquisition report has two attribution models or lenses, resulting in two reports under Acquisition:
GA4's Acquisition report has two attribution models or lenses, resulting in two reports under Acquisition:
- User Acquisition
- Traffic Acquisition
To access the Traffic Acquisition report:
- Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition.
- Click on the primary dimension, Session default channel group, and
- Select Session source/medium from the list of dimensions. By filtering the table to display only organic traffic, you can examine the report highlighting the organic traffic coming to your site
Measuring Organic Traffic Performance
To measure the performance of your organic traffic, consider using metrics such as Users, Sessions, Engaged Sessions, and Average Engagement Time per Session. These metrics provide insights into the number of unique visitors, the number of sessions, the quality of the sessions, and the average time spent on each session.
By analysing the data provided by GA4's Acquisition report, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy to optimise your organic traffic and boost your website's visibility.
3. Referral Traffic
To view your referral traffic in Google Analytics 4, follow these steps:
- Go to Reports → Acquisition → Traffic acquisition
- Scroll down to the table and look for Referral, but you won't be able to click on it for more details
- Type Referral in the search box to view the details
- Add Session source as a secondary dimension by clicking on the + sign, to identify the sources of your referral traffic, then
- Select Traffic source and Session source
4. Landing Page Report
To exploit these opportunities, start by reviewing the top 10 pages in the landing page report. Look for pages that perform well based on metrics such as revenue, engagement, views, and sessions. Note the pages that are working well and their trends. The goal is to create more of what works and discontinue what doesn't.
Pay attention to trends as well, as they indicate content that sparks your audience's interest. Place your offers, promotions, lead magnets, or news on the pages that attract the most traffic. Additionally, include links to other articles on your website to keep users engaged.
Low-traffic or low-engagement pages can also present conversion opportunities. Compare these pages with high-performing landing pages to identify areas for improvement.
To perform effective content and SEO analysis, consider setting a longer date range of 6 months to 1 year. This will provide a comprehensive view of your website's performance over time.
How to Generate a Landing Page Report in GA4?
GA4 doesn't provide a default landing page report. However, you can build your own report with GA4's Explorations feature. If you're not familiar with Explorations, don't worry, it's easy to set up. Here are the steps:- From your GA4 account, Go to the Exploration tab.
- Click on Create Exploration and
- Select New Custom Exploration
- In the exploration settings, select the Landing Page dimension
- Add relevant metrics like sessions, page views, and bounce rate to analyse user behavior on your landing pages
- Filter the report to focus on a specific time frame or user segment to get more accurate insights
5. Google Search Console
- the Organic Search Traffic report and
- the Queries report
- Organic Google search clicks
- Organic Google search impressions
- Organic Google search click-through rate (CTR), and
- Average search position
Connecting Google Search Console to GA4: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Go to Admin → Property in Google Analytics
- Scroll down to the Products Links section and select Google Search Console Links.
- Click on the Link
- Choose the accounts you want to connect
- Select the property (website) you want to connect to and click on Confirm
- Select the data stream (website connected to Google Analytics)
- Click Submit after reviewing your selection.
6. Site Speed Report
Website speed can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings. Your site visitors expect fast-loading pages and a slow site can negatively affect their experience, potentially leading to lower conversion rates and repeat visits. In GA4, you can recreate this report using tools such as Google Tag Manager or BigQuery.
Key metrics from the Site Speed Report include:
It's important to have returning visitors to increase the chances of achieving a conversion, like making a purchase or filling out a form. GA4's Retention report can help you see the ratio of new vs returning users and benchmark it against your goals.- Site Speed
- Average Page Load Time
- Average Server Response Time
- Average Page Download Time
7. User Retention
You can find this report under Reports → Retention. It's recommended to calculate user retention on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.
To calculate the rate of returning visitors, use this formula:
Rate of returning visitors (RVR) = number of returning visitors in a given period / Total unique visitors
You can find the number of total unique users in the Acquisition overview.
It's generally considered good to have a 30% returning visitor rate. Anything below that might need improvement. By demonstrating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and gaining customer/audience loyalty, you can hit these numbers and even increase them.With GA4’s automated insights, you can easily detect unusual changes and growing trends in your data, such as sudden traffic increases or decreases. The system will automatically notify you of these changes and how significant they are.
You can also set up custom insights tailored to your specific SEO-related conditions. The analytics intelligence will notify you when these conditions are met in real-time, presenting them in insights cards that you can click on to get more information.
To access these insights, you have three options:
It's generally considered good to have a 30% returning visitor rate. Anything below that might need improvement. By demonstrating the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and gaining customer/audience loyalty, you can hit these numbers and even increase them.
8. Mobile Report
With more than 60% of internet traffic worldwide now coming from mobile devices, it's essential to consider mobile optimisation as part of your SEO strategy.
To ensure that your site is optimised for mobile devices, check your mobile data and compare it with engagement metrics in GA4. For instance, a high bounce rate for mobile users may indicate that your website is not mobile-friendly.
To gain insights into how mobile users experience your site:
To ensure that your site is optimised for mobile devices, check your mobile data and compare it with engagement metrics in GA4. For instance, a high bounce rate for mobile users may indicate that your website is not mobile-friendly.
To gain insights into how mobile users experience your site:
- Navigate to Reports → User → Tech → Tech details in GA4. Then,
- Scroll down to the table and switch the primary dimension from Browser to Device category
9. Report Snapshot (Automated Insights)
You can also set up custom insights tailored to your specific SEO-related conditions. The analytics intelligence will notify you when these conditions are met in real-time, presenting them in insights cards that you can click on to get more information.
To access these insights, you have three options:
- The first two are within the Reports Snapshot. You can either scroll down to the main Insights card and click on any insights listed there or click View all insights to see the full list of insights cards.
- The third way to access insights is by using the search box, where you can type SEO-related questions like "How much traffic from the organic search" The system will present you with a list of suggestions, and clicking on the Suggested Questions button will provide you with a list of pre-selected common questions.
10. Looker Studio
While GA4 offers a range of useful SEO reports and visualisation capabilities, it may be challenging to read and understand these reports if you're new to the platform. That's where Looker Studio, previously known as Google Data Studio, comes in handy.
Looker Studio is an excellent complement to GA4 as it allows you to merge data from various sources into one central location and create engaging all-encompassing dashboards. So, even if you're not well-versed in GA4, Looker Studio can help you create a more comprehensive view of your data and make more informed decisions.
All in all, Google Analytics offers valuable insights into your website's performance, helping you pinpoint SEO areas that need improvement. With reports like Conversions, Traffic Acquisition, Referral Traffic, and Landing Page, you can track key metrics and make informed decisions on where to focus your efforts. By optimising your website, you can improve search engine rankings and enhance your SEO strategy.
All in all, Google Analytics offers valuable insights into your website's performance, helping you pinpoint SEO areas that need improvement. With reports like Conversions, Traffic Acquisition, Referral Traffic, and Landing Page, you can track key metrics and make informed decisions on where to focus your efforts. By optimising your website, you can improve search engine rankings and enhance your SEO strategy.