7 Must-Know Google Analytics Strategies to Measure SEO Success

Measurement is one of the crucial steps in SEO success. While keywords increase website traffic, reporting solely on keywords will devalue your marketing role. Moreover, it will not show the SEO's potential to the organization's management.

Going beyond keywords rankings will allow you to show how organic search brings revenue and profit to a company. Google Analytics is one of the best tools for measuring success of your SEO campaign , and it is free. Despite the fact that every business has different KPIs, we will look at the seven must know Google Analytics strategies to measure SEO success.

Check Your Organic Search Traffic

The overall data you see on your GA's dashboard is not enough to show if you are doing well in terms of organic search traffic. Go to Acquisition> Channels >Channel Grouping Report. Click on Organic Search to see a comprehensive report on your organic search traffic results.

The report will indicate the best performing keywords , landing pages, and more. You can then tweak your digital marketing campaigns to improve organic search traffic. You can also check if your target audience is clicking on your ads or if the guest post you published is generating relevant traffic to your site.

You can get the insights you need by looking into the Traffic Acquisition Report. It is usually the first step of the reporting process, and you can find it by going to Acquisition > Overview. It will give you a breakdown of the available traffic sources.

Measure Your Referral Traffic

One of the critical information for your SEO strategy is in understanding the turn over from outside sources. Referral traffic reports will tell you whether the posts you have published on social media are directing traffic to your site.

More importantly, it will tell you whether your digital marketing campaigns are performing as expected. In your GA account, go to Acquisition, click on All Traffic, then referrals. This will show you the referral traffic report. You could also go to Social and click on Network Referrals to see the metrics that will show you how important social media is to your business.

These reports will show the sources of all traffic, and you can then decide on which strategies are working best for your brand.  When you click on a referring website, you will see the exact page that led to a visitor finding your website.

Moreover, you will see the number of sessions that led users to your website, the number of new users, and the percentage of new sessions. This will help you in determining the next best path you should take with your SEO strategy and campaigns.

Verify the Quality of Your Traffic

Google Analytics can help you determine the quality of your results, but unfortunately, most people overlook this benefit. To help you verify the quality of your traffic, go to Conversions >> Multi-Channel Funnels and you will find the Assisted Conversions section.

Set the date range to 'Last Month' then compare it to 'Previous Period.' This will give you the data about the search traffic that converted on your website. This way, you will be able to determine whether your site traffic is valuable in regards to conversions or not.

With that said, visitors will come to your website from all manner of sources. Some will type in your website URL, while others will follow a link from social media or a search engine. Google Analytics will also give you a report of where the visitors are landing on when they enter your website for the first time.

With the information from the report, you can figure out how your visitors are interacting with the website and the content. For example, if the report shows that some pages have higher bounce rates, you can change the pages by including better engaging content as well as improving the UX. You can view this information by going to Behavior >Site Content>Landing Pages.

Identify Slow Pages

Slow loading pages lead to high bounce rates, and the chances are that your visitors will not come back to it. Unfortunately, your visitors will not tell you of the problem, but Google Analytics can help you out.

Bounce rate refers to the number of website visitors who do not take any action, and they leave your website without venturing further into the site. Exit rate, on the other hand, measures the percentage of site visitors who browse more than one page before leaving your website.

Go to Behavior then Site Speed, and then Page Timings. Ensure to set the middle button to Average Page Load Time and the one on the right to '% Exit.' You could also set a 'Secondary Dimension' of the Medium and ask Google Analytics to show you the traffic from organic search.

Analyze the data and ask your development team to diagnose the problem and optimize the page loading speed of your website, especially the slow pages. The report will also show you the pages that have low engagement, as well as help you detect user experience problems.

Attach a Monetary Value to Your Keywords

Google Analytics can help you attach a financial value to the SEO efforts and thus make a better case to the owners. However, you will need access to your Google Ads profile and the Google Analytics account synchronized to your Search Console account.

Go to Acquisition, click on Search Engine Optimization, and then Queries. The next step will be in creating a spreadsheet where you will make a list of all the keywords bringing traffic to the site, their respective click-through rate, and the cost-per-click.

Multiply the cost per click with the number of clicks and add the results in a separate column. This will give you an idea into the value of each keyword responsible for your organic search traffic. Moreover, you will be able to see the amount of money you are saving from your SEO efforts.

Set Your Dashboard

Most Google Analytics users do not know that they can create custom dashboards that bring together their favorite reports. You can print or share the panel with other interested parties. This eliminates the need to visit different report pages and compile them later.

Go to Dashboards, '+New Dashboards,' and then '+Widget' to choose the widgets that will compile the information to your custom dashboard. However, it will call for you to know which metrics and reports you want to track. You can also change the widgets at any time to reflect the information you need.

New and Returning Visitors

Getting new visitors is always a great thing, but getting them to return for more is the better achievement . The returning visitor mostly ends up becoming your followers, readers, and customers. Google Analytics issues a report showing the ratio between new and returning visitors to your website.

Go to Audience >Behavior> New vs. Returning. The metrics between these two types of visitors will be different. One of the tell-tale signs is that returning visitors tend to spend more time on the website than new visitors, and they have a lower bounce rate.

Conclusion :Google Analytics is one of the best tools and with the right strategies,you can measure the success of your SEO campaigns. With the above strategies, you will be on hand to improve your SEO and user experience for your website visitors.