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SEO and Google Analytics | What’s the strategy behind it?

seo and google analytics

Ranking high in search engine results is challenging. However, it’s significantly easier with Google Analytics.

Why? Because of how the tool works!

Put simply, Google Analytics (GA) is a piece of software that provides basic and advanced statistics to improve your website optimization and marketing. And because the world’s most popular search engine makes it, it’s ideal for getting to the bottom of your SEO woes and improving them.

For instance, Google Analytics 4 lets you:

  • Collect website visitor data
  • Spot patterns in user engagement
  • Find new target audiences
  • Retrieve demographic information
  • Evaluate the success of your marketing activities
  • Keep track of your ranking for various keywords

Most top brands track their SEO analytics weekly. You should copy them. This way, you can make micro-adjustments as you go along, benefiting your firm.

But how do you do this? Let’s take a look at some specifics.

Link Your GA Account To Google Search Console

Using only one tool limits the amount of data you can collect. Therefore, linking your Google Search Console and GA accounts gives a fuller picture. Once you sync them, you can improve keyword targeting on the pages you want to rank higher.

For instance, syncing lets you see which landing pages direct the most users towards your sales funnel. Go to Acquisition >> Search Console >> Landing Pages in GA to see a full breakdown. You can then use this information to determine the cumulative traffic from clusters of related search phrases.

Find New Internal Keyword Opportunities

You can also use GA to track internal keyword opportunities – phrases users type into your website’s internal search engine. You may discover they make different searches on your site from search engines.

Don’t ignore these new keywords. Instead, create landing pages for them and direct users toward your standard sales channels.

You can also use internal keyword metrics on GA to find out why users might be exiting your site without converting. Go to the Search Terms report beneath Behavior >> Site Search. Filter out longer keywords and then by “search exit percentage.” You can then see which search terms are yielding unsatisfactory results and causing users to click back to results.

Correct Slow Loading Pages

SEO and Google Analytics also come in handy for slow-loading pages, something Google now wraps under the Page Experience umbrella. Providing users with a good experience is now just as vital as getting backlinks and writing great content for ranking higher.

To find out how well you perform in GA, go to Behavior >> Site Speed Report. Then check your page-load times and execution speeds. Google should tell you if the experience is suboptimal. It will also let you know whether your site speed is improving from month to month or not.

Boost Your Traffic The Easy Way

GA’s ability to find easy ways to boost your website traffic is another strategy you should adopt. It lets you find poorly performing landing pages and quickly refresh them to provide maximum SEO juice.

To find pages you need to update, go to Acquisition>> Search Console >> Landing Pages. Then set up a comparison between pages, looking for differences between their traffic in the past and their traffic today. Pages that do not perform over time may have become irrelevant and require updating.

For example, a post entitled “The Best Accounting Software in 2018” is already five years out of date. Switching it to “The Best Accounting Software in 2023” is a quick and easy refresh.

You should also check if there were navigational keyword changes that led to a traffic decline on some of your posts. Users may change how they search for a topic, forcing you to update your content.

Use Alerts

GA lets you set up custom alerts to assist with proper SEO tracking. These can tell you whether your bounce rate is increasing or traffic is falling via email, eliminating the need to open your GA account.

Build Better SEO Dashboards

Finally, GA makes it easy to customize dashboards for the metrics that matter to you most. These let you see the bigger picture while getting specific about the areas that matter to your brand. For example, you can view the following:

  • The devices users are on to access your site
  • User locations
  • The channel they use to come to your site
  • The most popular URLs

You can then use this information to drill down into relevant data quickly.

In summary, adopting a better GA strategy can improve your SEO. You can see if you are on the right track, attracting the correct audience and optimizing existing pages.