By: Pankaj Sakariya

October 27, 2017

5 Smart Ways to Measure SEO Success Using Analytics

Business owners who would like to improve their website’s ranking should learn more about how SEO works before hiring an agent for the task. It is one thing to have your site SEO optimized with keywords, backlinks, and META descriptions. However, if you don’t understand how these factors can take your website to the top of Google’s search results page, then how do you know if the SEO services you are paying for work?

Using Analytics to Measure Your Website’s SEO Success

In the world of SEO, measurement is the key to your website’s success. While keyword rankings can help you evaluate how much traffic your page receives, it doesn’t provide you with the full picture of your site’s success. By looking beyond the ranking of keywords and SEO, marketing teams can show how your website is performing using organic search. This method can quickly bring in revenue and profit to your business. And one of the best tools out there to assist with measuring this form of SEO is analytics.

5 Ways Analytics Allows You to See Your Website’s SEO Success

1. Analytics Help You See Your Organic Search Traffic

There is a difference between keyword traffic and organic search traffic. A keyword is a platonic idea of a search, meaning that it is an abstraction of our search that can provide us with multiple results.

An organic search is an actual word, or phrase typed into the search box using the combination of words that we would use in a normal conversation.

For example, if you were searching for women’s clothing in a specific location, a keyword search may look like “Women’s clothing Boston” or “Boston Women’s Clothing.” However, an organic search would look more like “Where to find women’s Clothing in Boston, MA.”

Why is it important to see your organic search traffic? Because the use of keywords is slowly fading away and more people are starting to use organic searches to find specific results. So, if you have noticed that your website traffic is down, it could just be due to the decrease in keyword searches which could indicate that your top keywords are not working and you need to tweak your keyword strategy. When you look at your organic search traffic using Analytics, it may surprise you to find out how well your website is doing.

2. Measure the Quality of Your Website’s SEO Traffic

Analytics allows you to measure the quality of your SEO traffic, and while that may not seem important, the experts feel that it is an excellent way to keep an eye on your SEO success.

The Assisted Conversions report allows the user to view the increase or decline in the quality of their search traffic. When you bring up this page, you can compare the quality from one month to the next that shows when you had the most visitors on your website, and if SEO contributed to the increase of visitors. If you notice that there is a decline in conversions from search engines, yet you still have steady traffic on your website at the time, that is a good indication that the traffic coming from search results are not of high-quality.

3. Check for Slow-loading Pages

One thing that many people overlook when they are optimizing a website for search engines is the loading speed of the pages. It is common for visitors to leave a page if it doesn’t automatically load. Therefore slow loading pages can decrease the amount of traffic your website receives.

Analytics can identify slow loading pages and measure the time it takes each page to load. Several filters and settings allow you to view an average page load time or only view organic traffic on slow pages. This information is vital because it can help the website owner to find problem areas and correct them to ensure they have fast loading pages.

4. Assign a Dollar Value to Your Organic Website Traffic

If you want to understand the overall value that SEO optimization brings to your business, you may assign a dollar value to your organic traffic results. To do this, you should compare the price of the keywords if purchased using AdWords.

Image courtesy – Neilpatel.com

You will need to pull up your AdWords account and select “Get Search Volume.” On the next screen click “Keyword Ideas” There will be a suggested bid amount on each keyword you enter. Use this information to estimate how much you are saving by using Analytics instead of paying for keywords.

5. Create Your SEO Traffic Dashboard

One of the best things about using Analytics is that you can create your SEO traffic dashboard that allows you to take a quick glance at how your site is doing each day. This tool is also very helpful to SEO agencies as it allows them to present their clients with a visual record of how advanced they are with their services.

Image courtesy Search Engine Journal

Website owners can use the built-in Dashboard interface to compile all their reports into a single interface that is easy for them to use, view, and print to share with others. It can be helpful to have a printable PDF of all your SEO traffic information to present to an SEO agency for review. Doing so will save you and the agency time on evaluating exactly where your problems are.

How to Benefit from SEO Traffic Statistics

Analytics programs may be confusing for first-time users. That’s because there are so many options to choose from on the screen. Fortunately, you can choose to only work with a few areas of the program until you get more comfortable with common web analytics jargons, settings and other SEO controls.

One benefit that you may find interesting from using analytics include checking the search engines sub section; this allows you to see which search engines brought visitors to your website. It’s likely that most of your search engine traffic comes from Google, which is a good thing.

If you notice that you are not getting as much traffic as you expected from the search engine giant, it’s time do some research on Google’s current rules for keywords and SEO.

Analytics programs can be a great resource for website owners who need to monitor their traffic regularly. If you don’t know much about using this type of program, you can always consult an SEO expert, or find tutorials on how to use the program on your own. As they say practice makes a man perfect, you can learn how to fully optimize your website and earn more revenue for your business.

Author Bio:

This guest article is a work of Sameer Panjwani, Founder & CEO of Mondovo, an online marketing toolset that helps you track your rankings, monitor your site stats and research your competitors’. A man of many talents, Sameer occasionally writes about social media marketing, content marketing and SEO. In his free time, he loves reading about the latest trends in SEO as well as spending time with his two little daughters. You can connect them on Facebook & Twitter