As a business owner that believes in SEO, you want to do everything that you can to improve your visibility and reach potential customers. One way that you can achieve this is by using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you understand your website traffic and conversion rates. By understanding your online activity, you can make informed decisions about how to improve your website and grow your business.
When used together with Google Search Console, one of the most actionable insights that Google Analytics can provide is data about which keywords are driving traffic to your website.
This information can help you optimize your website content and strategy, as well as target future marketing efforts.
By using Google Analytics, you can gain a clear understanding of how people are interacting with your site, helping to drive growth and success for your business.
Now let us dive deeper into five key insights that Google Analytics can provide about your SEO efforts.
But before we do so, let us understand what is Google Analytics in a bit more detail.
What is Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics platform offered by Google.
It allows website owners to collect and analyze data about how users interact with their websites. This data can be used to improve the user experience and optimize the website.
Google Analytics is a free online tool that allows you to collect data about your website and your visitors. This data can help you to understand how your website is performing and how you can improve it.
When we speak about Google Analytics, we usually refer to the Google Analytics Universal and not the newer version GA4.
Though Google Analytics Universal will be sunsetting on July 2023, it is still imperative that we understand the fundamental features of the tool.
Some refer to Google Analytics as the insights for UX while Search Console is for SEO.
For us, the UX insights include geography landscape, session recordings, funnels, and user behavior reports while the SEO insights include search console, search impression share, pages indexed, visibility, and search queries reports.
Best practices from SEO and Website developers can help us understand ways to integrate these tools with the user data for improved user experience and higher conversions.
And that is why we are investigating GA for SEO purposes.
Let’s get started.
How Can We Use Google Analytics Insights into Our Benefits
- Understanding the visitor demographics to target your audience more effectively.
- Learning how your website is performing can help you to make changes to improve your site’s performance.
- Knowing how your visitors interact with your website can help you to improve the design of your website.
First, knowing where is your traffic coming from is crucial to understanding your audience better.
Location-based reports in Google Analytics provide insights about which countries/cities are driving traffic to your websites.
This data can help you shape your marketing strategy to reach the right audience who might be interested in your offerings and services.
For example, if you are an Indian brand that sells Indian products in the US, you will want to make sure that you target the US audience and not the Indians living abroad.
Location-based reporting can help understand which countries/cities are driving your website traffic so that you can target the right audience with the right messages.
Next, knowing how your visitors are interacting with your site can help you to identify the areas that need improvement.
For example, if you notice that your visitors are spending more time on a specific product page, you can optimize your product page to better engage the visitors and drive conversions.
By using the Engagement reports in Google Analytics, you can analyze how visitors are interacting with your website and content. These reports include pages per session, average time on page, and bounce rates. This allows website owners to understand their site visitors’ behaviors and measure engagement rates.
Finally, knowing how your website visitors are performing on your website can help you to optimize your website and improve your online performance.
Reviewing the Speed and Performance reports in Google Analytics can help you to see how your website is performing and how to improve it to increase conversions.
The data that is presented in these reports can help you to identify bottlenecks that are holding back your conversions and highlight areas that need improvement.
Key Takeaways: Understanding your Audience, Website Performance & Conversions.
Now that you understand some of the ways that Google Analytics can help you to identify how users are interacting with your website and content, let us now take a look at some key insights that can help you to learn more about your SEO efforts and how users visit your site.
Here Are The 5 Basics Of Analytics Reports In GA Can Tell Us
If you look at the GA reports, they had separated it into:
- Real-Time
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversions
Those listed above are the default view in GA.
But, if you are a GA beginner, those reports are sufficient enough for you to grow your understanding of GA functionalities and basics.
So, let’s dig into the details of each report, what are the variables such as page views, average time on page, and bounce rates mean, and how we can interpret those variables into SEO and UX insights.
1. Real-Time Report
So let’s start with Real-Time and Audience reports:
Real-Time Reports in GA are focused on giving you actionable insights about what is happening on your website in real-time.
Real-time is important for you to troubleshoot your UTM parameter, nothing gets worse when you thought you had set the correct tracking but you don’t track anything on the analytics side.
And if you are running some campaign, the real-time report will show you exactly how users are interacting with your website in real-time.
As your campaign runs, you can get actionable insights on where your traffic is coming from, and how they are converting to your campaign.
2. Audience
Reports in GA are focused on giving you insights about who your users are and where they are coming from. Understanding the demographics of your website traffic can help you to understand them and target the right audience with your content and offers.
For example, if you are an e-commerce website selling electronics goods, knowing your traffic’s age, gender, and location can help you to tailor your marketing campaigns to your audience’s needs and drive conversions. Understanding your traffic’s demographics can also help you to identify and modify your content to better resonate with your target audience.
3. Acquisition
The acquisition section in GA is focused on giving you insights into how your users are finding your website and your content.
Understanding how visitors find you and your content can help you to optimize your website and improve its performance.
For example, if you notice that most of your traffic is coming from social media, you can use that data to optimize your social media strategy to drive more traffic to your site and increase conversions.
Additionally, you can use that data to understand which channels best engage with your audience and target them with your digital marketing efforts.
4. Behavior
The Behavior section in GA is focused on helping you understand how your users are interacting with your content and your website.
Get into details on which page brings the most conversions and understand how your users interact with that page.
You can also use the behavior to identify the problematic pages on your website and troubleshoot those pages to improve the user engagement on those pages.
For example, if you notice that most of your traffic is landing on the product page but you are not converting traffic into customers, you can use the behavior report to analyze the users who are landing on that page and troubleshoot how you can improve your product page to drive more sales revenue.
5. Conversions
And finally, the conversion reports are focused on giving you insights into how your users are performing on your website and converting into customers or achieving the goals that you had set.
Having clear insights into how users are performing on your website can help you to optimize your website to drive more conversions and increase your business’s revenues.
Getting into details on which page drives the most conversions, and how long users are staying on a specific page can help you optimize your website to increase conversions and improve your business’s revenues.
You can also use the conversions to understand how users complete the desired actions on your website and troubleshoot any specific problem areas that might prevent users from completing the intended action.
The key to this is that you must determine what are your goals and how you can best optimize your website to achieve those goals.
How Should Google Analytics Be Used?
There isn’t a standard or universal way to use Google Analytics to measure visitor activity on your website.
There are dozens of ways to view and analyze data, and the best way to do this is by understanding and defining your goals for your website.
A goal might be as simple as “to sign up more users” or as complicated as “to increase customer satisfaction by 25%.”
Your goals should always be tied to a core metric and tracked through the Universal Analytics tracking code.
Once you’ve set your goals and tracked them through the Universal Analytics tracking code, you’ll be able to easily measure the performance of your website using Google Analytics.
These 5 pre-determined reports from GA will be a great start for you to get started.
When combining the use of GA with Google Search Console, we can further analyze the keywords or queries that are driving the organic traffic. Here are some of the free Google tools that we really should be optimizing.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is a valuable tool that can be used to improve the performance of your website and target your marketing efforts more effectively.
By using actionable insights from Google Analytics, you can improve your website’s growth and visibility.
Connect them with Google Data Studio, and you’ll be able to create awesome reports as well for free.
Note: If you want to improve your SEO and UX insights you really need to dig into details and understand the data not only from the view but from different variables such as page views, average time on page, and bounce rates altogether.
As we dig deeper into GA, realize the variables, and dig deeper into them will help you understand your user much better and understand what is driving or breaking your site.
JustRank is not an expert on drilling into Google Analytics, but it surely helps all of us to understand more about your website visitors and gain an upper hand from it.
Resources:
- https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/course/6
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics
- https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
- https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/google-analytics/
