One of the most useful tools that you can use to improve your SEO is Google Analytics. It can give you a lot of data related to the performance of your website in search engines. You can use Google Analytics to discover pages on your website that need to be improved, are working better than others, and those that need your immediate attention. Below, we will dive into how to use Google Analytics to boost your SEO.
The Benefits
Not having Google Analytics installed on your website is like driving with your eyes closed. Analytics is able to tell you many things about your website, including:
- How much traffic you receive and where it’s from
- What pages they visit and how long they spend on each page
- What pages they visit before they exit
- Which buttons get more clicks and what they do next
- Which portion of your traffic converts
- How many users are on mobile, tablets or desktops
- Where your users are located and what software they use to browse your website
We won’t cover all of the Google Analytics features. However, we will cover how to improve SEO with Google Analytics and a few key features to use.
How to Improve SEO with Google Analytics
One of the main reasons to use Google Analytics is to analyze your traffic and better make decisions that can improve your website’s ranking position in Search Engines. Google Analytics reports can answer the following questions, and each answer we go into will let you learn more about how you can improve your SEO.
- How much SEO traffic do I get from Search Engines?
- What are my most and least popular pages?
- Which pages are the Exit pages of my website?
- How much traffic is coming from Mobile?
How much SEO traffic do I get from Search Engines?
One of the metrics you need to regularly check is how much traffic you receive from search engines, particularly Google. You can find the answer in all traffic reports. As a first step, select Acquisition – All Traffic – Channels, and set the date range from the top right date dropdown. This report will show a summary of all the sources that brought traffic to your website. With this report, you can track how much traffic you receive from the various search engines and monitor your performance over time. If you notice any big drops in traffic, this means you lost part of your rankings. You can then do a deeper investigation to find out the reasons and exact keywords/pages.
What are my most and least popular pages?
Another useful metric that can help you improve your SEO is knowing what pages on your website get the most visits. You can view this by selecting Behavior – Site Content – All Pages. Aside from seeing the page views for each page, you can also see how much time they spend on your website, the bounce rate, and the percentage of users that exit your website after viewing the particular page.
Which pages are the exit pages of my website?
The exit pages report will show you the last page of the website users visited before leaving. This is important for SEO because pages with a high exit percentage can be revised by changing the layout or making the content more interesting. However, it’s important to note that before you make any changes, you should keep track of the values before. This will allow you to identify if the changes are truly improving your site or not.
How much traffic is coming from Mobile?
Now more than ever, it’s important to have a mobile friendly website. More users are navigating the web from mobile devices. To see if this trend is true for your website, you can view the Mobile traffic report by going to Audience – Mobile – Overview. This report is broken down into 3 categories: mobile, desktop, and tablet. If you find that the majority of your traffic come from mobile devices, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly.