More than ever, SEO has become so important. How do you make your website rank at the top of the Google page?  How do you raise your chances of driving more traffic to your Website? The truth is, there is no single route to achieving this.

While you engage in different ways to make it happen, you will also need to constantly check your stat performance on SEO, tweak it, and discover what is working and not. One way to track this is through Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can help you monitor and track your efforts on SEO. But before we delve into how, it is important first to understand what this tool is. Have an idea of how it works to take full advantage of its package.

Google Analytics is a Web Analytics whose job is to track, measure, and raise website traffic. It does this by helping you see your SEO effort’s progress, where and how to revamp it. It is currently a platform in the Google Marketing Platform brand. This service was launched in November 2005 by Google.

Google Analytics will help you to understand your audience and customers better. It gives you the tools you need to scrutinize your business data in one platform.

There are several SEO analytic tools to help monitor your SEO data. Google Analytics is one of such tools.

How Does Google Analytics Do this?

Valuable data is embedded in Google Analytics. Your Website can use the data to track and improve Search Engine Optimisation performance. It does this from relevant keywords to your site’s highest referrals, as well as via other mediums.

Below are ten practical ways to help you harness the value of Google Analytics in tracking your SEO efforts.

10 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Track Your SEO Efforts.

1. Create SEO-related Targets

It would be best if you always began SEO campaigns by first setting up Google Analytics. Secondly is by setting Targets along with the creation of corresponding conversation pages. This helps to track when a person views a page with a conversation element on it. It also helps to report to you when a form like a Contact Us has been successfully filled and submitted.

This page should have its personalized URL. It is also excellent to include the NOINDEX meta-tag. Including this helps not to display them organically. It ensures the reduction of false-alarm hits. It also reassures the person of accuracy in the report.

In other words, you don’t want the goal of tracking your organic traffic only. But to equally monitor organic visitors. This is an excellent way to compare SEO efforts in comparison with other marketing campaigns.

2. Find Your High-ranking Content

Another great SEO tip to draw traffic when using Google Analytics is to analyze your high-performing pages frequently. After getting the analysis, go further to update them.

You can do this by adding fresh and eye-catching content to your posts. High-rank the articles by including a stronger Call-to-Action. Whatever you can do to improve the ‘returns’ in the areas of your Website, do it. Work on the articles and help them stay at the top.

Where is this tip most applicable? It is applicable in pages that get plenty of traffic but drive little or no business value. This tip is also relevant in pages that once ranked high but significantly dropped in organic traffic. You can equally use it to track the potency of specific pages. You can track, say, Dwell time, and see which internal links get the highest number of clicks. This will help you better understand your content’s effectiveness by monitoring, making changes, and principally improving your content.

Aside from updating already existing top-performing content, you can create more content around the same topic. For instance, you made a post on The Top 10 Organic Hair Products to Try. And this post ranked so high. You have the option of either revamping the article or publishing another article on hair products.

3. Keyword Research and Tracking

Finding relevant keywords is one thing. Tracking them is another.  Keyword research is ultimate. Your customers use them in their searches to find you.

On the other hand, tracking keywords is possible in Google Analytics; however, the challenge with using it to track successes with SEO is that the keyword field is not given. This makes it hard to integrate the keywords used by people with the Website’s behavior.

One way around this is, integrating Google Analytics with Search Console. After that, looking at Acquisition, Search Console, and Landing Pages in Google Analytics. This will help to show you the landing pages people are clicking when coming from Google. It will yet give you a knowledge of the major search terms used to find you.

4. Correlate Organic Visitors to Non-Organic Visitors

Concentrate on a specific page and track the metrics for organic traffic. After that, exclude the organic traffic and measure the metrics.

Successful SEO efforts will reveal an increase in organic traffic and metrics. However, by excluding the organic traffic, you will be able to single out the poor user experience and just any design that needs improvement in general. This will help to extra boost SEO efforts.

5. Check How Google views your Website.

You want to occasionally view the category of your Website through the eyes of Google. You want to see if it is ranking on the first page. Google also wants this for your Website. It wants your site to rank on page number 1.

To use Google Analytics for this is simple. You can check the category of your visitor’s interest. To do this, go to the ‘Audience.’ after that, go to ‘Interest’ and finally, ‘Overview in Google Analytics.’ This will give you the results of Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments, and Other Categories.

The data can help you to see the major interest of the visitors to your Website. And eventually, give you a guide to planning content marketing in accordance.

Google will display to you the categories it deems necessary for your site.

6. While Optimizing, Track Results and Document them

A straightforward way to track and document the results while optimizing is to use annotations. This is done in Google Analytics. Using its annotations will help you to measure the performance of a content post-optimization.

Use annotations. Annotate every SEO optimization you make in Google Analytics. It gives you an evident standard to gauge improvements from your SEO efforts.

7. Create Notifications for 404 Pages

“Page Not Found – 404” error is unavoidable. It is something that you need to monitor with Google Analytics. 404’s are mostly caused by typos or either internal or external links pointing to the URL.

This can be done by first ensuring that all of your 404 pages have a harmonious page title as, say, “Page not found” or “404 – page not found”. After that, do not redirect them elsewhere. The URL should remain unchanged. Thirdly, proceed to set up an alert.

After setting an alert for this, the only thing you should worry about is working out what caused the ” 404 – Page not Found”.  Was it caused by internal or external links pointing to the URL? Was it a typo?

8. Create a Dashboard for Your SEO

This is one of the strategies in using Google Analytics to track your SEO efforts. Most times, your data is presented matters. Making your custom report is a great tip for measuring SEO. You can either save a custom report on a section of your Website or just pick certain metrics. These metrics could be the number of entrances made to your page or the average time spent.

Google Analytics and SEO data can be presented via the built-in dashboard interface. What it does is that it pulls all individual reports into one-view. This single view is easier to gain access to, share, and print out.

One of the importance of having a copy of your SEO metrics is that it will reduce the time spent reviewing Analytics. It allows you to give the time to pay attention to the SEO progress. This will also help you to see which of your content is the most popular on your site. Ultimately, it gives you an idea of how much organic traffic you’re getting.

9. Use Segments to Remove Spam Traffic

It is essential to use filters to eliminate spam traffic for correct reporting. There are various spam traffics. Two types especially can ruin your reports. These are Crawlers and Fake Referrers, and Ghost Spam.

It is also possible to get spam traffic through direct. In this case, you will remove traffic that mismatches your hostname.

Filters will prevent spam traffic from popping up in your reports. This will take effect from the moment you implement it. Where then does Segment come in?

Segment handles the work of removing non-useful traffic retrospectively. They are great. An easy step to tracking organic traffic using Google Analytics is to set a custom dashboard. This dashboard should be segmented for organic traffic alone to display all the important metrics to your Website.

10. Track Your Best Landing Pages

This is a great tip. It can help you increase the views on your page. It can help decrease the bounce rate and help you better understand your least and most converting pages. You can run through your top landing page periodically and optimize the top 5 or top 10. Optimize them for Conversion, Readability, and Google’s latest algorithm.

Optimizing them for Conversion can increase your income. For Readability, to increase the time we’ll have. Lastly, for Google’s latest algorithm, to keep your content up to date.

Conclusion

Tracking SEO efforts with Google Analytics is vital for all websites. Your traffic comes from all over. Some teams are professionals in helping businesses grow by optimizing their Websites. We at hopinfirst analyze your data to accelerate your growth and give your visitors what they want. For more SEO tips and answers, contact us at hopinfirst today.