Measurement & Reporting for SEO
If you are wondering how to measure SEO, you have come to the right place. I will explain here the tools and techniques you will require in order to measure the performance of your SEO well.
So I have spent years working for some of the largest companies in the world, designing and building various SEO reports (among many others). And let me just say this, majority of companies does not measure SEO well. Most of the time that is because they are simply not aware of the incredible value of good SEO measurement, and they often just don’t know better ways of reporting. Companies often assume that all that is available to them is the data available via Web Analytics tools (such as Google Analytics). And although Google Analytics may indeed be an important source of SEO data, on its own it is quite limited, and in fact it may often lead to wrong insights and therefore wrong business decisions.
SEO Measurement Tools
To keep things simple, let me just focus on the first two main sources of data that you will need to for reliable and powerful SEO measurement. Items 3 & 4 are relevant to just mainly larger, and more established companies. The tricky part here is not so much which tools to use, but how to use them well.
1) Google Analytics
2) Google Search Console
3) Competitor tracker (this is not as important as the former two items, but should you wish to monitor rankings of your competitors, you might even do that by simply setting up a tracker using Google Sheets in you are only interested in a free option)
4) Google Ads (you will only need this if you are concerned about your Paid Ads cannibalising your SEO clicks, which would only be the case if your organic rankings are very strong, and you do quite a lot of Paid Search).
Google Analytics for SEO measurement
There are a few things that Google Analytics is good for when it comes to SEO analytics. And of course there are some things that it is not so great for. The biggest issue with SEO data in Google Analytics is the lack of keyword level data (which is a limitation regardless of the type of Web Analytics tool you use). So what it means is that getting things such as Sessions by keyword, Revenue by keyword, Conversion Rate by keyword for your Organic traffic is not really an option. However, in most cases, as a workaround, companies can use Landing Pages dimension in Google Analytics instead. Landing Pages, even just on its own (i.e. without keywords), can give you a rather good understanding of the value of the various queries or topics. Then based on that, you will know what to optimise towards. And believe it or not, but many even very large companies do not even get to this level of insights, as they often report on SEO as a single large channel, with no further breakdown or deeper understanding of the type of SEO content that drives growth. So even just looking at your SEO performance by Landing Page in Google Analytics is a very good place to begin. Start for example from breaking down your SEO traffic into Brand and Non-Brand (typically majority of traffic to the homepage comes from Brand, i.e. navigational queries, while traffic to other landing pages typically comes from generic type of queries).
Landing Pages data from Google Analytics becomes even more useful once combined with keyword (aka query) data in Search Console. You might for example based on Google Analytics data identify a set of very high value pages (e.g. high Revenue per Session or high Conversion Rate pages). Then Search Console will tell you exactly the type of keywords that users type in on Google before eventually landing on those high value pages. It is therefore very helpful to have both data sources consolidated into a single report, so you don’t end up having to jump between the two platforms every time you are trying to get some insights. You can build such report for example using Data Studio (note that this may not handle very large volume of data, but can work really well for smaller websites). I have previously built such reports using a number of different tools, ranging from Data Studio, through to Google Sheets, Excel, Power Pivot, Tableau, to even Python and R. But regardless of the tool you choose to use, the end goal is the same. That is, consolidating all of your SEO data into a single, coherent report.
Search Console for SEO Measurement
Google Analytics is only useful for analysing traffic that actually reaches your website. Then, once combined with Search Console, your Google Analytics data becomes even more powerful. But what about all of the potential search traffic that never reaches your site? How do you know for which queries you rank well? How your ranking is changing over time? Which type of content there is demand for? Are any of your pages not ranking at all? Is your SEO traffic growing because of improved rankings, or maybe due to increased market demand? Search Console data will allow you to answer all of the above, any many more questions that will help your business grow.
From my experience, over 95% of companies does not use, or does not know how to use Search Console data to help them grow. Typically Search Console is only used by technical SEO teams (often outsourced), and hardly ever by the commercial and strategic teams. What they do not realise is that Search Console is an extremely valuable source of not just your business performance data, but also market demands data.
Search Console gives you metrics such as SEO Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Position (aka organic rank). It allows you to split all of those metrics by day, device, country, search query and page. Unfortunately a lot of the time this data is being not well understood, and therefore under-utilised by the businesses.
The Search Console interface isn’t very user friendly, has very limited features and is not well integrated with other Google tools.
I therefore strongly recommend storing all of your Search Console data outside of the interface, and building your custom reports “offline”. Once the data is extracted (for example using an API, or a Google sheet extension), you will be able to create custom page groups, keyword groups, country groups, group data into weeks, months, years, and so on. It will also be then easier to consolidate your Search Console data with other data sources such as Google Analytics, and even Google Trends (which is another useful source of Search data).
Once the data and the output is tailored to your specific business model and industry, measuring and understanding your SEO performance will become much easier, and definitely much more impactful to the business. And remember, SEO data can shape not just the future of your SEO, but also the future of your entire business, as it can give you deep & up to date understanding of the market demands.
Should you like to discuss with me ways in which I could help your business to do Analytics, then feel free to schedule a free consultation using the link below.
Author: Agnieszka Bungsy