Google Analytics SEO
Senior SEO-specialist
Google Analytics is an important topic within SEO. It is a powerful tool that helps you optimize your website.
It helps display key KPIs within an SEO journey. To measure is to know. In this article, we’ll take you through what Google Analytics means for your website’s SEO.
Viewing organic visits
Google Analytics consists of 4 components:
- Target group (audience): who visits your website?
- Acquisition (acquisition): where are your visitors coming from?
- Behavior: what actions do your visitors perform on your site?
- Goals (goals): what conversions do visitors yield?
Find out how many organic visits your site gets with Google Analytics. This way, you look at the cold numbers when it comes to your success within the search engines.
To view your organic visits, walk through the following steps:
Channel grouping → Acquisition → All traffic → Channels
Here you view all channels in 1 overview where your visitors come from. In addition to the absolute number of visitors, you also have insight into what percentage this is relative to your total number of visits.
You can also find here important data such as the bounce rate or how long on average the visitor can be found on your website. With this data, you will know which parts of your SEO you need to further optimize. You get to know your visitors better and can build a solid SEO strategy on this.
How do I use Google Analytics for SEO?
Google Analytics is a very valuable tool that can help analyze a website’s performance and optimize SEO efforts. Here are some key insights that can be gleaned from Google Analytics, their benefits to SEO, and their priority within an SEO campaign:
| Insights from Google Analytics | Benefits for SEO | Priority in SEO campaign |
|---|---|---|
| Organic Traffic | Helps determine the effectiveness of current SEO efforts. | High |
| Visitor behavior | Provides insight into how users interact with the site, which can help improve the user experience and lower the bounce rate. | High |
| Sources of Traffic | Identifies which channels drive the most traffic to the site, which can help align SEO and marketing efforts. | High |
| Page Performance | Provides insight into which pages are performing best and which need improvement. This can help prioritize SEO efforts. | High |
| Conversion Rate | Helps identify pages that effectively lead to desired user actions, and thus can help improve the site’s overall conversion rate. | High |
| Site Speed | Slow site speed can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings. Understanding site speed can help optimize load times. | Medium |
| Target paths | Identifies which paths users take to convert. This can help optimize the user experience and improve conversion rates. | Medium |
Combining the insights from Google Analytics with other SEO techniques results in a more effective SEO strategy.
SEO dashboard download
With the SEO dashboard, you keep an eye on various KPIs at all times. You don’t have to be technically inclined for this. Someone has already done the work for you, all you have to do is download it.
Follow the steps below to download an SEO dashboard within Google Analytics:
Customization → Dashboards → Create → Import from gallery
When you click on this, it is easy to search and download dashboards. Type in ”SEO” and you get several options for SEO dashboards. Choose the one that fits the KPIs you value as a company.
Reading on about Google Analytics and SEO?
Reading on about Google Analytics and SEO? From my experience, I am happy to tell you more about it. See the links below for all my articles on this subject.
- The different goals within Google Analytics
- How to leverage Google for the purchase funnel
- Leveraging Google Analytics 4 for SEO
- Adding Google Analytics to WordPress
- Granting access to a new account in Google Analytics
- Create Google Analytics account
- Google Tag Manager and SEO
Keywords in Google Analytics
We ourselves use Google Analytics on a daily basis for our clients. In fact, I see in Google Analytics pages that score for specific keywords and vice versa. This reflects well on which keywords our visitors are coming in on. I can also see which pages score less well and need improvement.
By using Google Analytics as a measurement tool, you can continue to make optimizations to get the sites more and more to perfect.
Why Google Analytics for SEO?
Google Analytics is a useful tool for gaining insight into your website’s results. To optimize SEO, it is crucial to keep measuring. By continuing to measure, you find out what is going well and where there is still work to be done.
In addition, it is a convenient way to keep track of whether a Web site has received a penalty. You can recognize this by a sudden drop in organic visitors.
The opinion
Implement Google Analytics immediately when building your website. This way, you can collect data directly and see where areas for improvement and opportunities lie. You can see which pages are scoring well and which pages need improvement to attract more organic visitors.
Take advantage of implementing Google Analytics and improve your website.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Google Analytics?
Within SEO, Google Analytics is of great importance. It is therefore seen as a powerful tool which in turn can help you optimize your website. Actually, Google Analytics consists of four components and they are:
- Target group (audience): who visits your website?
- Acquisition (acquisition): where are your visitors coming from?
- Behavior: what actions do your visitors perform on your site?
- Goals (goals): what conversions do visitors yield?
You need a good idea of who is landing on your website, because then you can respond to their needs. If you know what they are doing on your site, then you also know if that matches what you want visitors to do. What is the result of visitors to your site, does that match your goal?
It will give you good information about how you are doing now and whether that matches your goals. This will give you a good idea of whether you are on the right track and what areas of improvement, opportunities and possibilities there are for you to further optimize your website.
What is the impact of Google Analytics on SEO?
You get to know your visitors better thanks to Google Analytics and can then act on them and thus better optimize your website. This also allows you to develop an SEO strategy and stick to it. To measure is to know. If you keep measuring it then you will know what is going well and where your areas for improvement are.
So it can be said that Google Analytics has a big impact on SEO. In fact, by using this tool, you can quickly see your areas of improvement and also know how to optimize your website. Are you capitalizing on customers’ keywords? Where are your opportunities in this? Do you know the right target audience and where are they coming from? Maybe they come from a certain angle that you haven’t discovered yet.
All opportunities that will therefore allow you to score better on SEO if you act on Google Analytics results. Very valuable information that you should therefore work with. You want to be easily findable in the search engines and this research is definitely going to help with that.
How do I install Google Analytics on my website?
To use Google Analytics, you first need a Google Analytics account. If you don’t already have one, create one first. If you are using WordPress then I recommend setting up Google Analytics as well, you can do this with a plugin, for example:
- You first log in to your WordPress website.
- You then go through the menu to plug-ins and then choose add plug-in or add plug-in.
- Then choose the name of the plug-in you want to add and then choose install and activate plug-in.
- The next thing to do after installation is to navigate to the plug-in, and you can do that through settings.
Which steps to take then depends on which plug-in you chose.
In any case, I recommend using Google Analytics. This will give you even more insight into the number of visitors to your website. You will learn how visitors arrive at your website, you will see the behavior of visitors on your site, and you will see which pages rank well in Google.
Do I need to understand data analysis to work with Google Analytics?
It is not necessary to be technically minded to get started with Google Analytics. Just use SEO dashboard, then you can always keep an eye on your KPI. If you want to use that within Google Analytics, you choose customization, dashboards, create and then import from gallery. Then type in SEO and you will get several options of an SEO dashboard. You then have to choose which one fits your KPI, that is, what you value as a company.
Actually, Google Analytics works, very simply. But you may be short on time and that may be the reason you can’t get the most out of it. This is obviously a waste and my advice then would be to hire an expert to support you in this. Even though you may not need a savvy of data analysis, it can be nice to know a little about it to interpret the data properly.
As an SEO specialist, I am happy to help you further with this and can analyze the data for you and also apply it in practice so that your website is better optimized.
Is it wise to hire an SEO specialist if I use Google Analytics?
If you don’t have the time or experience to get started with Google Analytics yourself, you can hire an SEO specialist. Working with this tool will give you insight into the results of your website. Of course, you may have little time to improve information yourself or to analyze everything extensively. Fortunately, then, there are SEO specialists who can support you in this. For that, you have come to the right place.
I can comprehensively analyze your website and go over all the data with you. If you wish, I can also optimize everything for you, this way your website will quickly be more findable in the search engines and that is often the goal clients have in mind and want to achieve. You won’t spend any time with this yourself, I can take care of this completely for you for a fee of 75 euros per hour.
A good SEO specialist will pay for itself, because if your website is more findable, i.e. properly optimized, you will automatically attract more visitors who proceed to take the right action on your site.
