Once an American consultant said about SEO, “you cannot improve your work unless you measure them.” If you don’t have performance records or analytics, you cannot tell how effective your SEO strategies are. To see your progress and tracking your performance, make you motivated, and you are unbeatable. According to the research of HubSpot, 61 percent of the people say that getting more traffic is the most critical challenge. So now comes the point when everyone asks about the work on how valuable it is. It becomes difficult for digital marketers to answer these questions without having some measurement proves.
This guide will tell you about how Google analytics work, how you can use it for SEO effectively and helps to get the market advantage.
Setting the Google analytics account
If you already have the Google Analytics account, I will tell you how to use it effectively. I will also tell you the process, and you will see how this process works.
If you don’t know how to set up Google analytics, we will tell you in short steps. You should know that there are two types of analytics and those are explained under:
Server-side analytics
Server-side analytics are not very accurate all the time, and that is the reason it is less critical. These are taking care of the assets which server request.
On the other hand, it will tell you how many times the page of your website loaded and take an idea of the traffic on the website.
Page-Side analytics
The results are based on a smaller piece of data. These have the tracking codes on every page of the website. It will tell you that what everyone is looking for and at what time they are looking for it.
The result of Page-side analytics is more accurate, so everyone believes in page-side analytics. So now I will tell you about setting it.
Setup the account:
First of all, you need to make a Google Analytics account through the sign-up process. Now login to your Google Analytics account, and you will land to this page.
Now Google Analytics will ask you about some questions of your website. It will help in making the tracking ID of the website. Now I will tell you how you can connect the website with Google analytics. It is easier than your thinking.
Installation of Google Analytics
Now you get the tracking id of Google analytics. It is unique for every website. The data on this page is coming from the account. You will see a page with a lot of options now. Now I will show you the tracking ID.
It is the break down of the full page to tell you what is Tracking ID.
Content Management System (CMS)
Through the content management system set up the Google Analytics account is really easy as they also offer a lot of plugins.
Hosting website
Many hosting companies already have a solution to Google Analytics. You can check your company, whether it is supporting GA or no.
Installation manually
It is one of the older solutions which some people are still using. If you have a static website that has fewer pages, it is the best solution for you.
But this method fails when you have a more extensive website, or you need to update the website again and again.
You should install the tracking tag that will tell the GA that when the page is loading and pass other information about the visitor too.
You don’t need to pay extra to a developer to get the code of the tag, and you should check the tool Google tag manager for this purpose.
Your tags code will be grabbed from the account with every login you perform with that account. These codes look like this:
You can send some sample traffic to the website to test that everything is working correctly or no. Here is the button through which you can send the traffic.
Goals
If you have a small eCommerce website, GA is a powerful tool to set up the goals and increase sales. You need to select the new goal option and fill a form.
Now add a URL for which you want to set the goals, and it’s done.
Understanding about the account
It is difficult for every guide to cover the topic of the complex environment of the GA menu system. GA is one of the best combos of top navigation to gather account level information.
The reporting part where you can find the data of analytics side navigational bars is more options to dig more data on the website.
You need to tell each detail about the site to get the accurate results. You need to research keywords and also must have the knowledge of GA to get success.
It is the navigation that is further divided into small chunks of sections, which I will tell you in detail.
Dashboard:
If you want to make your own dashboard for dynamic reports. You need to make figures of what you want from the GA account. If you are not very familiar with the environment of GA, you cannot create a custom dashboard.
Shortcuts
A useful feature is making the shortcut. When you reach the result of your required data of the audience of your website, you can request for a shortcut quickly.
Overview of the audience
Intelligence Events
Automatic alerts are present by default, or you can make customized alerts. These warning signs will help you out when your SEO campaign is going wrong; it will tell you that what the problem is with your website.
These warnings will come in your email or on the GA account. These are helpful for you, and you will make fewer mistakes in SEO.
Realtime
Realtime data is more precise data through which you can check the incoming traffic on the website. Realtime will tell you how many people are on your website and how many times they are staying on your website.
What is the bounce rate of the website? Who is spending too much time on the website? In which regions are you getting famous? You can get a lot of information through the Realtime option.
Audience
Audience means who is visiting your website. You can see the demographic, location-wise, and technology-related data through it.
It will also tell you that in which region your brand and website are getting famous and for which keywords people are searching you.
Acquisition
It is the part which will tell you how your traffic is coming on your website. It will tell you all the details about the channel of the visitors. If you want to get the data of the section of SEO, you need to make a link to the Search Console account.
It is an easy and straightforward process.
You need to have a verified GA account for the linking procedure, follow some small steps and its done.
The top navigational menu is very simple. If you have more websites than one linked with the same GA, you can switch them through the home page quite easily.
Admin panel is little complicated with a lot of options broken down menus like this:
If you have more websites, then you should have different Google analytic accounts for every website. The data on the same GA will confuse your mind, so it is better to have different accounts.
You can apply the filters of different options according to what you want to see. For example, if you want to see that on which page how many visitors are coming, you can apply a filter of it.
If you want to use the data, later on, you can collect that data consistently.
SEO and Google analytics
In this section, I will tell you about easy stuff and what type of actions you can take. You will learn a little more about GA and some advance techniques you can do with Google Analytics.
My main focus now is SEO, but there will be a lot of information you will get from the user experience that you can get from the Google Analytics account.
Traffic on the website
The most important thing which you always want to know about your website is how much traffic is coming on the website? In it, our primary focus is on how much organic search traffic is happening on the site?
It is the traffic coming from the search engine, and it is always non-paid traffic.
You don’t need to do much, just go to the menu of acquisition and check the channel or medium of the traffic. When you click it, you will drill it into more information.
Important keywords for your website
Keywords are the heart of the SEO activity, and Google understands this; that is the reason they have added an option for this with the name of Queries.
You will see now how the screen look like when you press Queries:
Some essential terms which you should know:
Query: That means a keyword from which your audience will search your website.
Impressions: it is the time in which your website is ranking for the specific keyword.
Clicks: how many times your website is clicked after searching for the specific keyword.
CTR: it is the percentage of the clicks on the website page after searching for the keyword.
The process of search is very handy, and it helps you to check out more keywords through which traffic is coming on your website.
Google always shows the relevant terms which you must know to rank for more keywords.
Concentrate on the SEO effort
When you check the Search Engine Optimization, then you will see which pages of your website are performing well. Now you can look into these pages and drill down more details. Now we will see what type of information we want from this data so that we can sort out information.
Clicks
When you make sorting of the clicks, you will get to know which pages of the website are getting more clicks. It means to keep them updated with the information, so they remain to perform well.
Website pages that have fewer clicks you can also update them so they can start performing well in the future.
Impressions
If some of your articles are not getting much traffic, but those have the potential to have traffic. These topics can be checked here easily. You can apply little SEO effort and get more traffic on your website.
Make some content that can quickly get more impressions, or you can revise the content according to new trends if it got old.
Avg Position
Now in this section, you can quickly get more fruits hanging low. Check the pages on position 4 to 5. You can push these pages to 1 to 3 locations by putting little effort into the SEO portion. These will, later on, grab more traffic.
Combination of the three options
You can easily make a combo filter in advance section and set a metric so that you can get more traffic on the website. For example, you can go to the page with 1000 impressions but still on the average position and start your effort from there.
Important keywords for every single page
So now you have the idea of the whole website that how you can increase the traffic on the website. It is the best time to look at keywords on each page.
It can be quite tricky also because GA doesn’t have an option for a single page, so you can’t get the information on a single page.
You will go to the behavior to check the site content and landing pages. Now you will get the data of the page of your choice. You can also check the best-performing pages through it.
If you add some keywords as the secondary dimension, you will see how much traffic these keywords are driving on the website.
You can also use a short function to make a shortcut to this method of getting the data on the page.
Landing pages
It is best to combine metrics together to get into more insight into the website. For example, you can check how much traffic is coming on your page for which keywords by using a ranking check tool so that you can track keyword easily.
Google will never give you information about the exact position. But when you are doing SEO accurately, you will know that where you need to put the effort and what are the metrics you should consider for effective SEO.
You can also check our article Complete SEO checklist 2020
