Optimize your SEO with Google Analytics

Search engine optimization is an important term for marketers and business owners. Gone are the days when executing SEO was effortless but today SEO is entirely different and difficult. You need to put a lot of effort into getting that high rank on the website. Once you have achieved the same, it’s time to track the results and see how your website is doing. Now there are lots of ways to track your search results but the most effective of all is Google Analytics or also known as GA.

GA is the service from Google that enables you to get updated data about your website and lets you take your next step. It helps to see how your strategy is working and what kinds of results are obtained from it. Google Analytics is a good tool and reliable too, this is the reason that it is the first choice of marketing professionals and the business owners too. 

The best part is that even the non-technical people can get started with it thus taking their business to the new level.

In this article, we will not talk about the features of Google Analytics or how it can prove useful to the website but we will focus on ways to optimize your site using the same. Many of my followers wanted me to take this topic in detail and so here I am talking about it.

So let us get started with how optimization can be achieved and how it can make a difference to your business, its ranking and the overall results.

SEO Check

Before you go for anything else, you need to check whether your website is doing well or not. Now there are numerous aspects you need to look into so that you can carry out SEO checks for your website. These are as follows:

Check your SEO report

For this, you will have to go into the “Acquisition” section where you will find “All Channels Report”. Click on “Organic Traffic” and you will see a graph of your SEO activities. It will tell you how things have been in the past and will show both the ups and downs. If your graph is showing an upward trend it is definitely a good sign for your business.

Analyze the pages indexed by Google

The next is to check which pages of your website are indexed by Google. This can be easily accomplished by typing “site: your website name”. Once you enter this you will see all the pages which are being viewed by Google. In case it is quite low you need to understand the reason behind it. One needs to investigate the same, check the content of the pages, usage of the keywords, the title of the page and other factors that influence indexing. In this way, you will be able to get complete information and can make the changes accordingly.

Check the speed of your site

If your website does not load quickly it is sure to have a low ranking on the search engines and you need to make efforts to improve the same. But before that, you need to check the speed using Google Analytics. For this look for “Behaviour” and then find “Site Speed”. There are a lot of options like page timings, user timings, and speed suggestions. From here you can easily get the loading speed of your website along with the time duration for which the users stay on the different pages of the site. All this information can help to boost the speed and optimize it correctly.

But how will you decide whether the loading time is more or less? If in case the website takes around 3-5 seconds in loading it is a clear indication that you need to work on it. Not only you need to optimize the different elements but ensure other features as well.

Search console feature

Setting up the search console feature for your website is important. With the help of this tool, you can easily enhance the performance of your website and make sure it ranks high on the search engines. When you enter into the SEO reports, you will find the data sharing option disable. Your task is to enable the same only then the console will be set up. For this, you need to go into the “property settings” and click on “enable”. To enable this, the site has first to be connected with Google Console and then you need to perform this step. Using this feature you will be able to attain optimization of the website and ensure that the site is healthy.

In the first step, you have performed the SEO check and have analyzed the different factors associated with it. Now it is your turn to get the SEO reports which will help in better optimization of the website.

SEO Reports

The SEO reports can easily be generated from the “Acquisition” section of GA. These reports are highly useful and provide the correct data about the traffic, from where it is coming, how it is affecting the search results and more. Thus based on this data you can make the desired changes and your SEO strategies working in the right direction.

Treemap report

This is one of the best ways to generate SEO report. Treemap report gives you a visual idea about how your site has been performing in the given time period. You can check the traffic, the sources of the traffic, compare the different sources and lots more. The traffic can be seen in the form of rectangles which means large the size of the rectangle, higher will be the traffic.

Thus you can visually see everything and make changes in the SEO plan as per the requirement. Getting used to this form of representation will take some time but slowly you will start understanding everything and will find it really easy. All the data generated in the report can prove helpful in your marketing.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate of the website depends upon the loading time of the website. If your websites take longer to load, definitely the bounce rate will be high. Now the bounce rate is based on three different factors, landing page, keyword, and source. If the rate is high it means the users are unable to get to your website or the content is not appealing enough to grab their attention. So the effort should be made to keep the rate as low as possible as this determines the success of your SEO strategy.

Also, a low bounce rate will also improve the rank of your website which in turn is a benefit for you. For more information, you can check out the treemap which provides all the details you are looking for. Work on the pages which have a low bounce rate as it will be easy to achieve the target and optimization can be seen.

If you want you can also compare the traffic from the different sources to see what search engines are doing to your website. Thus you can see whether the keywords are used correctly or not, whether the pages are limed properly or not. All this together can definitely help in making the most out of your SEO strategy.

Check the click-through rate

This report shows how many times the search engine has landed on your page. But this is only possible if you have set up the Google Search Console on your website. Here you will get to know the pages of your website which show when people are searching for the related keywords, the rank of the pages and the click-through rate too. The main motive of using this report is to get an idea of what kind of content is generating the traffic so that you can try something similar to the other pages.

For the more specific reports, you can compare the landing page report of two different time period and you can see the difference yourself.

Go for “queries” view rather than the data view

Under this section, you can get information about the keywords which are actually getting you traffic towards the website along with the click-through rate and the keyword rank. Sometimes you will find that a few keywords will show “not set” and this means that it might be similar to another one or is a long tail keyword which is being hidden by Google.

Hence you can rest assured that you can find the correct data related to the different keywords.

There is no denial of the fact that Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools of all. Though implementing SEO is not easy but these tools definitely give you an added advantage to track your strategy. There is no other more effective tool that you will come across as it covers a lot of metrics and SEO dimensions that you would like to ponder over.

SEO is a very wide field and is growing day by day so it is tricky to say that you have mastered the art. There are still many tools you would not have used or integrated. But still, everyone lures for success and tries their level best to reach the aim.

Google Analytics is surely that one tool that can lead to complete optimization of your website which improves the rank of your website and offers the desired outcome as well.

So why keep yourself aloof from it but integrate it well to see how your SEO plan is doing or what changes need to be done for top class results.