Google Analytics

How to use Google Analytics to improve SEO performance?

Did you know that 67% of all clicks go to the first five organic results in a search engine?

In fact, there’s probably a free tool that you’re currently using to track your on-site metrics: Google Analytics. That leaves you questioning:

Does Google Analytics Help SEO?

The short answer? Yes.

Google Analytics contains valuable data that your business can use to monitor (and improve) SEO performance–from keywords to organic pageviews.

Here are 10 use cases that show how our experts use Google Analytics for SEO:

1. Sync your Search Console account
2. Create SEO-related goals
3. Use the organic visitors segment
4. Compare non-organic visitors to organic
5. Find top-performing content
6. Look at top-performing landing pages
7. Use the Content Drilldown report
8. Add annotations to track content updates
9. Use the Multi-Channel Funnel report
10. Track keywords in Google Analytics

Before we dive in with the details, start getting to grips with the data inside your account with our Google Analytics SEO dashboard. You’ll be able to view the most popular metrics by the page on your site:

Sync your Search Console account

“My number one tip for measuring SEO with Google Analytics is to connect Analytics to Google Search Console,” says Leadhub‘s Kim Doughty.

“If you’re just using Google Analytics without using GSC you will never see the whole picture. With GA and GSC linked, you can use queries to identify opportunities for improvement with target keywords and the pages you want to rank for.”

SCORE‘s Nabil Freij adds: “Google Search Console tells you what keywords people are using to find your content, what content they’re finding and where it’s ranking on Google.”

“You can analyze the information and determine ways to improve the optimization of your pages, so you stand a better chance of ranking on the first page of Google,” Freji says.

Medicare Plan Finder‘s Omar Fonesca explains: “Another valuable section is ‘Search Console’ which will provide you more in-depth information into the Landing Pages and Search Queries (Keyword Terms), based on Clicks, Impressions, CTR %, etc.”

“You can also analyze what ‘Countries’ your traffic is coming from and what ‘Devices’ they use to find you!”

NameBounce‘s Axel DeAngelis explains how you can use this synced data: “For example, using the GSC data to A/B test title tags and meta descriptions can give you a higher search click-through rate over time.”

“By doing that, you can court Google’s RankBrain algorithm and boost your rankings in a more controllable way,” DeAngelis adds.

Create SEO-related goals

Chris Sheehy says that Sidewalk Branding Co “always start any SEO campaign by first setting up Google Analytics including Goals along with the creation of corresponding conversion page(s) to track not just when someone views a page with a conversion element on it (like a Contact Us or Request Info forms); but to report when a form like this has been successfully filled out and submitted.”

“These conversion pages are sometimes called acknowledgment pages and simply notify the submitter that the form has been received,” Sheehy continues.

“This page should have its own URL and include the NOINDEX meta-tag, so they are not displayed organically, which will reduce false-positive hits and add reassurance to the client of reporting accuracy.”

Plus, Growth Hackers‘ Jonathan Aufray says: “When measuring SEO using Google Analytics, you don’t just want to track your organic traffic. What you want to do is measuring the quality of your organic visitors.”

“How? By setting up goals such as leads generated coming from organic SEO. What we check are how much organic traffic a page gets and most importantly how many leads we got from those visitors. Higher the conversion rate, the better.”
WealthTurbo‘s Jon Tabbernor summarizes: “This is a great way to compare SEO efforts compared to other marketing campaigns such as PPC or social media.”

Use the organic visitor segment

When using Google Analytics for SEO, Vic Spall of Browser Media recommends to “ensure that you are using segments and filters to remove spam traffic for accurate reporting. There are two main types of spam traffic that will ruin your reports – crawlers and fake referrers, and ghost spam.”

“Using filters, traffic will need to be excluded under referral traffic – this is relatively simple to do as you need to do is exclude the domain (you can also use regex to capture multiple iterations of known spammy domains that use different TLDs, for example). This solves the problem with the first type of spam traffic.”

Spall continues: “However, you may also get spam traffic coming via direct, in which case you need to exclude traffic that does not match your host-name. See ya later, ghost spam!”

“Filters, which should be set up on a new view in Google Analytics so you’re not messing with raw data, will prevent spam traffic from showing up in your reports from the day you implement it. But what about removing the crappy traffic retrospectively?”

“This is when segments come in. Segments are your friend,” Spall adds.

“The first and easiest steps to utilize Google Analytics to track organic traffic is to set a custom dashboard that is segmented for organic traffic only and to show every metric that is important to someone’s specific business,” says Erez Kanaan of Kanaan & Co.

In fact, total organic traffic is the most popular Google Analytics metric that SEO experts track regularly:

Compare organic visitors to non-organic

 You’ve got your Google Analytics data broken down by organic visitors.

But Company Man Studios‘ Joe Fortunato thinks you should “focus on specific pages and track metrics for Organic traffic, then exclude organic traffic and measure those metrics as well.”

“Successful SEO efforts will show an increase in organic traffic and metrics, but by excluding the organic traffic, you’ll be able to pinpoint poor user experience or design that can be improved on, providing an additional boost to SEO efforts.”

Find top-performing content (and update it)

When we asked Shotkit for their best SEO tip when using Google Analytics, Rachel Kaiser said: “Regularly run down a report of your top performing pages and see what you can do to optimize them.”

“Maybe that’s updating them with fresh content, maybe its adding a stronger call to action… whatever you need to do to really get maximum return from the areas of your site that are already ranking in search and to keep those pages in the top results.”

HubSpot’s Alex Birkett explains: “For example, are there pages that have dropped significantly in organic traffic? Probably some promotion and update potential for those pages.”

“How about pages that get a lot of traffic but drive very little business value? CRO potential there,” Birkett adds.

Best Company‘s Alice Stevens explains: “It’s also a great tool for tracking the effectiveness of specific pages. You can track page-views, dwell time, and see which internal links get the most clicks. These measures can help you understand how effective your content is, find pain points, and make changes to improve your content.”

Look at top-performing landing pages

“Tracking your best landing pages is one of the most underrated SEO tricks. This data can help you increase page views, decrease the bounce rate and identify top and least converting pages,” says BforBloggers‘ Aayush Bhaskar.

Bhaskar adds that they go through their “top landing pages a month and optimize the top 10 for:

Readability and user intent (increases dwell time, decreases pogo-sticking)

Conversion (helps me make more money)

Google’s freshness algorithm (Keeping the article up to date)”

Zivadream‘s Lynell Ross explains: “This report shows which individual content pages are driving the most sessions and the source of the traffic (social channels, Google searches, etc).”

“This allows you to evaluate the content on your site and make changes to underperforming pages. It also allows you to see which types of content are the most successful so you can adjust your strategy moving forward.”

Plus, Netpaths‘ Cayley Vos says: “This will give you an idea of what problems your customers are looking to solve And the questions they have. Use this data to optimize your pages to provide answers to their questions.”

Use the Content Drilldown report

Shaan Patel says that Prep Expert‘s “best tip for measuring SEO using Google Analytics is breaking down your non-sales page impressions and clicks via the Content Drilldown tool.”

“We use this especially to track our blog content pages to see what topics are trending well, so we can further optimize them with FAQ schemas and other lead magnets.”

Add annotations to track content updates

“For a company like [G2] in the midst of pruning and optimization, it’s important to track the results and document them,” writes Hannah Tow.

“An easy way to do this in Google Analytics is to use the annotation feature on a specific date. Using the annotations in Google Analytics, this helps us benchmark the performance of an article post-optimization.”

Brooke Logan of Sagefrog Marketing Group adds: “This can help you determine in future metrics if these changes helped with SEO improvement.”

Brian Jensen of Congruent Digital summarizes: “Most SEO changes take days, weeks and sometimes months to bear fruit which can make impact difficult to evaluate.”

“Utilize annotations and annotate each SEO optimization you make in Google Analytics – you’ll have a clear benchmark to measure improvements from your optimization efforts.”

Use the multi-channel funnel report

Earlier, we mentioned how you can break down your organic visitors by the Organic Traffic segment. But ScienceSoft‘s Liubou Zubarevich shares a word of warning: “Your organic users might be not so organic. GA’s source can’t be overwritten.”

“If a user came to the site by an organic search, and then came back later directly, GA remembers that they came via search and leaves their source as organic. Therefore, you should remember that traffic source is a characteristic of a session, rather than a user.”

Ana Kravitz of Mixed Analytics shares a smart workaround: “By default, Google Analytics attributes conversions to the most recent traffic source (except in the case of direct traffic, in which case it will look back for a known traffic source).”

“To better measure the full effect of SEO, check Assisted Conversions in the Multi-Channel funnel report. This will show you when SEO played a part in driving conversions, even if it wasn’t the last click.”

How do I track keywords in Google Analytics?

“The biggest problem with using Google Analytics to track success with SEO is the keyword field is largely “(not provided)” so it’s difficult to combine the keywords people use with behavior on the website,” says Brandon Howard of All My Web Needs.

“While this is certainly not a perfect solution, I suggest integrating Google Analytics with Search Console and looking at Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages in Google Analytics.”

“If you have proper on-page SEO and URL architecture, this will at least show you the landing pages people are hitting when coming from Google and that will give you an idea of the top focal search terms people are using to find you.”

Julien Coquet also recommends “getting a premium solution such as Mangools to get more useful data about SEO performance.”

Mangools is one of the several SEO tools that our experts use in conjunction with Google Analytics:

“Total all the traffic coming in from related or longer-tail phrases that contain the optimized phrase. We refer to this as “halo traffic.” It’s important to look at the fuller picture of what’s being brought in on an optimized term, rather than just looking at traffic on the exact phrase. The value is higher than you think!”