Using Google Analytics for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

For a lot of marketers out there, web analytics is something they do on the side to help them get more out of what they do. They don’t have web analysts around to tell them what works and what doesn’t,  so they get into the data themselves trying to figure out how they can measure what they do. Measuring keyword performance is an important part of an internet marketer’s toolbox, so here are a few pointers using Google Analytics.

Going deeper for SEO – Google Analytics and keyword targeting

If you’ve invested time and effort into building quality content, you’ll want to make sure that this content is paying off in terms of traffic and conversions (sales, registrations, sign-ups, etc.). There are a few things you can do to help you find the gems in your traffic-driving keywords.

The first thing you should do is find out which keywords are providing you with quality traffic - website visitors that perform the goals you set out for them, giving you good conversion rates. Go to Traffic Sources > Keywords, select non-paid in the top, select the tab Goal conversions and possibly order all data by the goal which is of most importance to you.

Check your highest converting keywords – Do you rank first in Google/Yahoo/Live? Select a particular keyword and segment by Source to find out more about how much each search engine provides you with traffic for the keyword in question, which you can then relate to the actual ranking you have for that keyword in each search engine.

Optimizing based on specific website pages / blog posts

You can also put things into a different perspective by using your site’s individual pages to measure which pages you should be getting good search engine traffic for, but aren’t.

To do this you go to Traffic Sources > Search Engines, select non-paid and in the segment menu select Landing page. Then select a large number of rows to show in the report and find out which pages get very little traffic.

Once you’ve pinpointed the low-traffic pages you can optimize accordingly. For starters, check Wordtracker’s free keyword tool to see whether you’re using the most popular search term for whatever topic you’re covering. You could have optimized your page for ‘antispam’, but ‘anti spam’ definitely has a much higher search volume – that’s a simple example of finding the best keywords top optimize low-traffic pages for.

Learn more about the long tail of search engine keywords

Tools like Wordtracker (the paid version that is), but also the AdWords keyword tool can show you keywords which are highly targeted for your site’s niche but which have relatively little competition in search engine rankings. Although you might not get an awful lot of traffic out of individual keywords, there’s a good chance it’s high converting traffic and once you get the hang of targeting long tail keywords you’ll definitely be able to increase overall traffic.

So enter a few of your site’s keywords in one of these tools and scroll down to the less popular (long tail) keywords to find those little gems!