SEO analytics tracking is crucial for analyzing your website’s overall success.
Creating and implementing an SEO strategy requires data & performance analysis & the simplest way to do it is by leveraging tools like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics offers tons of information on website performance. And by evaluating this, you’ll always be clear on the direction of your SEO campaign or if you need to modify your strategy.
It’s one thing collecting data, but understanding how to leverage it to make business decisions is where you get the most value.
In this article, we’re going to breakdown analytics & SEO tracking & the 5 metrics your business needs to be monitoring.
1. Organic Search Traffic- SEO Analytics
The main performance indicators of any SEO campaign is an increase in organic traffic & the easiest way to track it is by using Google Analytics.
To check organic search traffic reports, you can check “Channels” underneath “Acquisition” in the Google Analytics page to view all total sessions against other channels. You can also change the time-period to see how organic search results have performed compared to past weeks or months.
2. Conversions (Leads or Sales)
You’re driving sufficient organic traffic to your website, what next?
You need to check if that traffic is converting or not. Measure what percentage of the overall organic search visitors take action and turn into a lead or a customer. To measure this, set Conversion Goals in Google Analytics. Once you do, you can track how the call-to-actions are performing.
Furthermore, if you have got a multi-step checkout process, you can view your Goal Flow reports to check how far your organic search visitors go in the process.
Conversion rates can be affected by various factors. Some factors revolve around the intention and awareness of the user. If your traffic is coming from early research keywords, they might not convert immediately. However, this does not mean that it is not working. Try to understand how organic search works in combination with other traffic channels to boost the conversion rate.
Start with exploring the “Multi-Channel Funnels”, “Assisted Conversion” and “Model Comparison Tool” to know how you can use the organic traffic to increase conversions that usually show up as coming from other channels.
3. Page Load Time
Here’s a fact– user experience plays a crucial role in your website’s ability to rank higher and convert your visitors into leads. And one of the factors impacting user experience is page load time. Even a delay of 100 milliseconds can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%.
So when you optimize your website, you must check how the changes have affected your website’s page load time.
Luckily, you can easily monitor your website’s load time using Google Pagespeed Insights. However, boosting page load time might need some technical support. So you can consider hiring an SEO agency in Sydney.
If you want to speed up your website by yourself, here are a few tips to help you:
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
- Reduce redirects.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
- Improve server response time.
- Use a content distribution network.
- Optimize images.
- Enable compression for JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
4. Bounce Rate
Simply put, bounce rate is the measure of the percentage of sessions in which a user loads the page but exits immediately without taking any action.
You can calculate it by dividing the total number of non-interactive sessions by the total number of sessions.
As search engines like Google prioritize satisfying the user-intent, bounce rates show if the website is relevant to the user search query or not. And that makes the bounce rate an important KPI.
Therefore, if a website has a high bounce rate, Google might think that it isn’t satisfying the user intent, and hence it shouldn’t be ranking high.
Now to rank higher in the SERP, you should consider regularly checking the bounce rate of each page of your website and optimize the pages accordingly. Here are a few ways to decrease the bounce rate of your website:
- Improve your content’s readability.
- Avoid pop-ups.
- Add compelling call-to-action.
- Improve your brand storytelling.
- Keep updating your blog with fresh content.
- Target keywords with high-value traffic.
- Attract the right visitors.
- Write attractive meta descriptions for search users.
- Create multiple landing pages for high-volume keywords.
- Speed up your page load time.
- Make your website mobile-friendly.
Need help with this? Hire the Digital Marketing Agency Sydney to help!
5. Time on Page From Organic Traffic
Last but not the least, time on page from organic traffic is another important factor that you should consider. The easiest method to track time on page is by checking “Average Time on Page” and “Average Session Duration” reports on the Google Analytics page. You can check the total organic traffic for all pages or check for individual pages.
Usually, the more time a user spends on a webpage, the better it will be for the SEO of that page. But there are exceptions. For example, the contact form page should be easy and quick to fill in by the user. If the user is spending a lot of time on that page then you might need to optimize the form or shorten it.
Every page on your website serves a different purpose, therefore, you should identify and optimize the pages with problems.
If your visitors are leaving your website immediately, audit your website and see if you’re providing your visitors with the solutions they are looking for through your content. To make your visitors stay on your website, add more relevant content, links, videos, etc.
6. *BONUS* Branded vs Non-Branded Keyword Traffic
If you’re running an online business, this metric is crucial for you to track. Branded keywords refer to queries that include your brand or product/service name, as well as related terms. For instance, Samsung phone, Samsung smartphone, or Samsung Galaxy Note are all branded keywords for Samsung.
Now keywords that are not related to a brand particularly are called non-branded keywords. If your content is ranking well, it means that you’re ranking well for both kinds of keywords.
It can be a strenuous task to track branded as well as non-branded keywords for organic search using Google Analytics as the tool doesn’t provide much data about organic keywords. If you look at the keywords report in Google Analytics, you’ll see that most of the clicks fall under one category, identified as “(not provided)”. It means all those clicks from organic search are encrypted to protect the users’ privacy.
To check the branded and non-branded keywords using Google Search Console, go to the “Performance” page and then click on “Queries” to check all the keyword queries that generated impressions and clicks for your website.
To Conclude
Now whether you’re just starting your business or have been running it for quite some time, tracking the right SEO metrics is essential. These were the 5 major SEO analytics that you should measure to track your online growth. Without these metrics, you won’t be able to understand if your SEO strategy is on the right track or not for SEO Analytics.
Focus on the right SEO metrics and dedicate the rest of your time to improving your website content. And if you think that you can’t do it yourself, you may hire SEO services in Sydney to get the work done by experts. We are a full-fledged SEO and Facebook Ads Agency in Sydney that can help to improve your SEO strategy and rank higher on the search engine results page.
