The Power of SEO Analytics | My Site Auditor

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What is SEO analytics?

SEO analytics is the process of analyzing and interpreting raw data points related to the performance of an SEO strategy. With this data, webmasters can get a better understanding of the effectiveness of their SEO strategies. It helps to highlight any shortcomings, which then presents an opportunity to plug the gaps and make the website’s SEO credentials more robust and watertight. There is SEO analytics software you can use to measure the website’s performance

You don’t necessarily need to know about SEO analytics and reporting, but it is recommended. Digital marketers consider SEO analytics reporting to be as important to a website’s digital health as the SEO strategies it’s analyzing. After all, without SEO analysis, you can’t be sure whether your website is as strong as it could be or whether you need to make some adjustments.

Why is SEO analytics important?

As we’ve said: search engine optimization is important. In an age when there are more websites than ever before, it’s essential that webmasters ensure that web users can find their websites. And in the current climate, that means making sure that they’re appearing high on Google’s search rankings.

While it’s relatively simple to give a website the basic SEO treatment and get it appearing somewhere on Google’s results list, websites looking to appear towards the top of the results — which is essentially every website — need to go above and beyond to ensure that their SEO is as strong as possible. And that’s only possible with SEO web analytics, which will help reveal much-needed, highly-valuable information about the strengths and weaknesses of a website’s SEO credentials.

For example, with an SEO analytics tool, you can learn the answers to the following key questions:

How are your high-value customers finding your website?
What web pages are attracting the most customers?
Which of your SEO strategies is working well?
Which SEO strategies are not working well?

How SEO Analytics Can Maximize Website Potential?

You can think of SEO analytics reporting as the key to the information you need to make your website — and, most likely, your business — better. The bottom line of SEO reporting analytics is that it allows you to make informed decisions about your SEO strategies, which in turn allows your website to reach its full potential.

Take a look at just a few of the benefits that a well-rounded SEO analytics tool can do for you.

Data-Driven Insights

You can make judgments on what you think will improve your website’s SEO without data, but it’s much more difficult. With the analytics data available from measurement tools, you’ll be able to make informed decisions based on clear-cut data and insights. Armed with key information, you’ll be in a strong position to make results-focused adjustments to your website’s SEO.

Performance Evaluation

Put a new SEO strategy in place? You’ll need to know how well it’s performing on Google. With analytics for SEO, you can keep tabs on your organic search traffic, see the impact of your SEO steps on your site’s search engine visibility, monitor your high-performing keywords, and much more. You might have a sense of how well your website’s SEO is performing, but it’s much easier — and more accurate — when you’re using SEO analytic tools.

Optimization Opportunities

There’s a long list of SEO tactics you can incorporate into your website, but even the most thorough of individuals is unlikely to uncover all such tactics without a little help from an analytics SEO dashboard. That’ll help to reveal some SEO-boosting techniques that you may have overlooked, such as suggesting areas where your website’s SEO could be improved, strategies that help to elevate the user experience and increase engagement, and unveiling the right keyword selection based on your specific sector and objectives.

Competitor Analysis

You’re trying to make your website’s SEO the best that it can be. But in more direct terms, you’re trying to make your website’s SEO better than what your competitors are doing. SEO and analytics reporting allows you to see how your rival websites are ranking on Google and see which techniques they are deploying. Once you’ve got an understanding of your competitors’ strategies, you’ll be able to improve your own, plug any gaps, and give yourself a competitive advantage.

ROI Measurement

It takes time and energy to bring a website’s SEO credentials up to standard — and not to mention, plenty of money, too. SEO web analytics allows you to measure the ROI of your SEO optimization. You can use the measurement tools to track a whole range of important data, including the conversion rate, revenue reports, and how your strategies are working in line with your overall objectives. If your ROI isn’t as high as you’d like it to be, then you’ll have the opportunity to make adjustments.

Continuous Improvement

SEO and analytics aren’t one-time things you add to your website. They’re dynamic and forward-thinking. With tools such as Google Analytics and other analytic tools, you can monitor the state of your website’s SEO and make adjustments as and when necessary. This allows you to keep your website’s SEO high, ultimately improving your site’s visibility and all-around performance.

Understanding Important SEO Metrics

Your website’s SEO can feel like one, all-encompassing metric. But actually, it’s made up of many smaller SEO metrics which, when they all work together, help to create the landscape of your website’s SEO. Below, we’ll run through the most important SEO metrics that all webmasters should keep an eye on, all of which can be monitored with the best SEO analytics tools.

Organic Search Traffic

There’s a strong correlation between the strength of a website’s SEO and the number of people who reach the website via organic search traffic. The word ‘organic’ can be thought of as ‘natural’ or ‘unpaid’; it’s the traffic that comes from people clicking on your website via its placement in the search engine results list, rather than via a paid, promoted link. By keeping a close eye on this metric, you can make adjustments to your SEO strategies as and when the numbers begin to drop off, which would indicate that the ranking position is slipping.

Keyword Rankings

Understanding your targeted keywords is an essential part of putting together an SEO-friendly website. However, it’s important to keep in mind that keyword rankings do change from time to time. A targeted keyword that was successful last year may be less effective today. There are tools, such as Moz and Ahrefs, which will allow you to monitor the performance of your keywords, as well as make recommendations on how you can further optimize the keywords you already have on your website.

Backlinks Analysis

Link building has long been recognized as a highly effective way to boost a website’s SEO. These links, which point to your website, are placed on external websites and indicate value to Google, which in turn promotes your website even more. However, while this method can be effective, it’ll only be so if the linking domains are reputable; if the website’s authority is low, then it may actively harm your SEO efforts. Moz, Majestic, and other tools allow webmasters to see where their backlinks appear on the web as well as other features that allow you to have a total grip on this crucial part of your SEO strategy.

On-Page Optimization

On-page SEO functions as the foundation of a website’s SEO credentials. These elements include things like URL structure, meta descriptions, content quality, headings, and keyword usage. By staying on top of this crucial metric, you can ensure that your website’s SEO isn’t inadvertently harmed by elements that are easy to incorporate. There are various tools available that can analyze the current state of your on-page optimization and make recommendations for improvement.

Conversion Tracking

Companies don’t invest heavily in their SEO just for the fun of it — they do so with the end goal of attracting visitors and winning customers. With conversion tracking, you can keep tabs on the actions that your visitors are taking, be it subscribing to your newsletter, making a purchase, or anything else. You’ll be able to see which of your SEO strategies lead to which action, which in turn helps you to focus more of your energy on incorporating techniques that are in line with your goals.

How to get started with SEO analytics

As we’ve seen, web SEO analytics are essential for ensuring that your website’s SEO credentials are as robust as possible, and for ensuring that you can generate as many visitors — and as much success — as you can. It should form part of any webmaster’s website management. Getting started with web analytics and SEO will take a little time, and you’ll also need some tools, too, but there’s nothing overly complicated required. Below, we’ll run through some basics that’ll help to get you moving in the right direction.

Plan your work

You’ll need a solid plan before you get down to work. Depending on the type of website you run and your objectives, you may not need to monitor every metric. Before starting, think about your current SEO strategy and the metrics you need to observe/improve. Once you have that information, you can begin identifying the measurement tools you’ll need to track, analyze, and optimize your SEO efforts.

Set up the right measurement tools

There’s a sea of measurement tools that can help you to keep track of your website’s SEO performance. Some of the most popular — and effective — on the market include:

Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides a wealth of information about how your webpages perform on Google. It can help identify crucial metrics such as page load times, crawl errors, and other aspects of technical SEO that should be healthy. In addition, you can also see site-specific details such as which countries and devices are clicking your links, and the average CTR (for pages and the site as a whole).

Google Analytics

Google Analytics shows you how people are interacting on your website. The tool will provide a breakdown of how many visitors the site receives (plus new visitors v returning visitors), how much time they spend on each page, referral traffic, bounce rate, and more.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs has established itself as the leading tool for backlinks management. With this tool, you can check where backlinks appear, the anchor text used, referring domains, and much more.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a powerful tool that offers a large suite of marketing tools that webmasters and marketers can use to turbocharge their marketing efforts. It’ll provide valuable information such as organic visibility, organic volume, top positions, AdWords visibility, organic volume, and much more. It’s intuitive to use and presents information in an easy-to-read chart.

Moz

Moz has long established itself as one of the leading tools in the SEO world. It classifies itself as a tool that allows you to ‘do it all,’ and once you’ve seen what it can do, it’ll be hard to disagree. With Moz, you can perform detailed keyword research, analyze backlinks, perform site audits, and also offer special functions for websites that want to focus on local SEO.

Majestic

Majestic is a backlinks tool that allows webmasters to get a detailed understanding of where and how backlinks to their websites appear around the web. It’ll provide information that outlines the trustworthiness of the backlinks, as well as the quantity and quality. You can also see the history of your backlinks and see how your competitors are using backlinks as part of their SEO strategy.

Screaming Frog

A website crawler, Screaming Frog is a useful tool that can uncover crucial information about your website’s on-site SEO, including how your internal links, URLs, headers, meta tags, and other on-site elements impact your Google ranking. It’ll also highlight any missing information, broken links, and duplicate content, among others.

Sitebulb

You can use the Sitebulb tool to get a detailed understanding of your website’s SEO credentials. It’ll provide insights into your page speed, crawlability, mobile responsiveness, and site structure, among other technical details. The detailed reports the tool generates come in order of priority, so you know which areas to focus on first.

My Site Auditor

With My Site Auditor, you can get a detailed report about your website that will outline the SEO and technical mistakes the tool found when scanning your website. You can also check how optimized your website is with a particular keyword in mind.

Set up dashboards and reports

The tools outlined above will help get the raw data you need to know about your website’s SEO. From there, you’ll need to present it in easy-to-understand reports for use by you and your team. The amount of detail you include in your reports will depend on your needs; in some cases, a flood of data will be suitable, whereas in other cases, the key information and comments for improvement will suffice.

Review and act on the data

It’s one thing to know what you need to do to improve your SEO. It’s another thing to actively do it. Once you’ve got the crucial data you need, it’ll be time to get to work on making changes to your site.

The first step will involve reviewing the data. Here, a little bit of analysis will be required; the data you’ve collected will be accurate, but you’ll need to figure out the value of the data. You don’t necessarily need to take action for every data point your measurement tools push your way. In some cases, you may take a ‘wait and see’ approach rather than making changes straightaway.

But for certain, you will receive data that forces you to act. If you see that your keywords are problematic, then using the relevant keywords recommended by the tool will be the way to go. If your page load times are impacting your SEO, then making changes that speed up your site will be necessary. What you do will depend on the data you find. Once you’ve made the changes, you should notice an improvement in your SEO soon.

Conclusion

We all know the importance of SEO, which can make or break a websites’ success. With SEO analytics, you can take a deeper dive into this crucial aspect of your digital footprint. If you need to jumpstart your SEO strategies, then check out the tools outlined above.