Google Analytics is a web analytics provider that offers statistics and simple analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and advertising and marketing purposes. The service is a part of the Google Marketing Platform and is available for free to everyone with a Google account.
Google Analytics is used to track internet site performance and gather visitor insights. It can assist organizations to decide on top sources of consumer traffic, gauge the achievement of their advertising activities and campaigns, track goal completions (such as purchases, including products to carts), find out styles and trends in user engagement and achieve different visitor information such as demographics. Small and medium-sized retail websites frequently use Google Analytics to attain and examine numerous customer behaviour analytics, which may be used to enhance advertising and marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and higher retain visitors.
How does Google Analytics work?
Google Analytics acquires user data from every internet site visitor by using webpage tags. A JavaScript webpage tag is inserted into the code of every webpage. This tag runs withinside the web browser of every visitor, collecting information and sending it to one of Google’s data collection servers. Google Analytics can then generate customizable reviews to track and visualize information such as the number of users, bounce rates, common session durations, sessions through a channel, webpage views, goal completions and more.
The webpage tag functions as an internet bug or internet beacon, to gather visitor information. However, as it is based on cookies, the device cannot accumulate data for customers who’ve disabled them.
Google Analytics includes features that can assist customers to identify trends and styles in how visitors engage with their websites. Features allow data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting and integration with different applications. These features include:
• data visualization and tracking tools, which include dashboards, scorecards and motion charts that show changes in data over time;
• data filtering, manipulation and funnel evaluation;
• data collection application program interfaces (APIs);
• predictive analytics, intelligence and anomaly detection;
• segmentation for evaluation of subsets, along with conversions;
• custom reviews for advertising, acquisition, audience behaviour and conversion;
• email-based sharing and communication; and
• integration with different products, such as Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Google AdSense, Google Optimize 360, Google Search Ads 360, Google Display & Video 360, Google Ad Manager and Google Search Console.
The dashboard may be viewed on the Google Analytics website and is available through a widget or a plugin for embedding into different sites. Customized Google Analytics dashboards are also obtainable from individual vendors.
Everyone makes use of Google Analytics, however, hardly anyone is aware of how to use it to enhance SEO.
This isn’t surprising. Google Analytics is an effective tool, however extracting precious and beneficial insights can often feel like pulling teeth—mainly for beginners.
But it doesn’t need to feel this way. You simply need to understand what data to look at, how to interpret it, and after that take action.
In this guide, we’ll go through seven actionable methods to apply Google Analytics to enhance SEO and cover a few common errors to avoid.
7 Ways to improve SEO using google analytics:
Knowing the basics is great, but how do you simply move forward, achieve significant insights, and improve your SEO?
Here are seven ways:
1. Find low-hanging opportunities to reinforce traffic/revenue
2. Search for high-converting pages and enhance their SEO
3. Improve landing pages that contribute to conversions
4. Find key-word opportunities through monitoring internal site search
5. Automatically track organic traffic dips and spikes
6. Set up indicators and tracking for 404 pages
7. Use annotations to pinpoint problems and changes
Google Analytics is a superb servant however a terrible master.
Making setup mistakes, looking at the incorrect data, or misinterpreting what you see in reviews are just a few examples that lead to bad business and advertising and marketing decisions.
Here are some common Google Analytics mistakes that we should avoid:
1. Incorrectly set up Google Analytics tracking:
Most human beings make mistakes while setting up Google Analytics. While a few are more severe than others, even small ones can seriously affect the accuracy and usefulness of your data.
Here are a few of the most common:
• Missing monitoring code;
• Multiple monitoring codes on one page;
• Not using a referral exclusion list;
• Incorrectly set up interaction events;
• Tracking websites constructed on JavaScript frameworks with default settings.
If you suspect any of these troubles on your website or aren’t confident in your setup, there are lots of articles online to help. We’d also suggest investing in a professional consultation, audit, and setup if you may afford it.
2. Deriving insights from insignificant samples:
Don’t waste time trying to determine anything based on a statistically insignificant sample. Nobody ever controlled to optimize a Facebook ads campaign through analyzing 37 visits.
3. Obsessively looking at information without purpose:
We’ve all done it. You check one report, and hours later you’re deep down the rabbit hole looking at something different.
Know why you’re doing what you’re doing and how you may get actionable insights out of it. Don’t obsess over looking at records all the time.
4. Tracking for the sake of tracking:
Learning the way to track complicated custom events correctly surely feels like a win. That’s till you understand you’re now monitoring dozens of them, and not doing anything with the data. Been there, done that.
5. Not knowing what the data represents:
Eleven seconds certainly sounds bad. But no one aware of how this metric is calculated might say this.
Why? Because average time on the webpage is based on timestamps among GA hits. This means that any bounced session is calculated as 0 seconds long. On top of that, this metric doesn’t take into account inactivity, which skews the information a lot given the range of opened inactive tabs we all have. To be honest, that is a quite useless metric, yet it’s in many reviews through default.
Conclusion:
One of the most important SEO challenges is to show its price and make data-driven decisions. It takes more effort than let’s say search ads which you may directly track and influence the whole thing immediately.
For that reason, in case you only take one aspect away from this guide, it should be to apply crucial thinking while looking at data—always.