How can Google Analytics help me improve my SEO strategy?

Google Analytics has many tools to help you decide if your SEO strategy is working, allowing you to decide the best way to move forward.

By researching organic traffic levels, finding out the demographics and interests of your visitors and identifying slow loading pages, you can help improve your SEO strategy. A good first port to make with Google Analytics is to look at the organic search traffic on your website. While this may seem obvious, companies regularly think that when there is a decline in overall traffic it’s because of a decrease in organic traffic, however, this is not always the case. Therefore, with Google Analytics you can look at organic search traffic levels only to see if there is any change and then you will know the reason for the overall traffic decline. This area of Analytics is a goldmine in developing your SEO strategy, you can find your top landing pages for search traffic, top exit pages, keywords driving the most traffic and much more. Google includes user experience (UX) as one of the hundreds of factors in its ranking algorithms; this means that UX now has significant influence over your SEO strategy. Quality UX is a combination of different design aspects, with one of the most important being page load times. Customers are fickle, 47% expect websites to load in less than two seconds, and a one-second delay means conversion rates decrease by 7% and page views by 11%. These startling numbers show that your load speed is an important part of your SEO strategy. Google Analytics can help as it allows you to see the loading speed of every page on your website, helping you identify the slow pages. The first time you look at these figures make a note of the search traffic levels, then try to improve the load times of the slow pages and check if the search traffic has increased. The decrease in loading times should help your SEO strategy and you will be able to use Analytics at every stage to make sure the pages are loading quickly and to see if there is any change in search traffic. Understanding your customers and who they are is a vital part of your SEO strategy and Google Analytics can help you solve this. Once you enable specific data tracking on your website you will be able to find out the demographics and interests of visitors. This information is hugely important and will have significant influence over your SEO strategy. Using Analytics you can identify the type of customer with the highest conversion rates, or those who visit your site but don’t purchase anything. Discovering the trends of different demographics will help you know who to target because they will bring revenue and who to avoid. Once you have identified a desirable group you can build your SEO strategy around this, using keywords they like and providing quick links to pages they are interested in. The final useful tool that Google Analytics offers is the ability to measure the quality of your SEO traffic. By using Assisted Conversions you can look at conversions directly from search or those in which search played a role. This tool is very flexible if a customer visited your website through search, then returned directly and converted you can still find out that they initially visited through search. Using Assisted Conversions you can compare your last months to the ‘previous period’, meaning you can discover improvement or decline in conversions from search. Assisted Conversions is a great way to test the success of your SEO strategy if you have tried out new keywords you can check if they are bringing in more conversions or doing the opposite. This will influence the next steps your SEO strategy takes. Do you need information on utilising Google Analytics for your website? Holograph is able to support and advice on integrating your SEO strategy with both your website and customers' behaviour data – contact us for more details.