How to Carry out SEO Analysis Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console
SEO Analysis is important to keep your digital marketing strategy on track and returning the best results.
SEO analysis is an essential component of the successful strategy of any online business and allows you to monitor the performance of your website and any marketing campaigns you might be running. Google offers two powerful tools that can help you analyse SEO for your website and, the best part is, they are totally free.
In this feature, we give you quick rundown of some of the best features in both Google Analytics and the Google Search Console that will give you some great SEO analysis and insights.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an ideal tool for measuring both your current and historical performance in terms of some basic metrics such as number of sessions, page views and average session length. It also offers some powerful insights into the audiences you are attracting including detailed demographics such as age, geo-data, interests and on-site behaviour.
However, there are some other very helpful analytics which can help inform your overall SEO strategy too, including:
- Bounce Rate – A useful metric to use when considering the overall performance of your website, the bounce rate indicates how many visitors to your website venture beyond the initial landing page which brought them to your website. How this changes in response to any tweaks of your SEO strategy could give you valuable insights into your web design, how engaging your content is and how effective any calls-to-action are.
- Popular Landing Pages – Google Analytics provides you with a ranked list of your landing pages to show you how you are acquiring traffic. By applying some basic SEO analysis on well performing pages you can audit those pages that aren’t faring so well.
- Acquisitions – The Analytics tools shows you just where you are getting your traffic from and differentiates between direct visits vs those acquired from an organic search. Organic traffic acquisition is one of the most important metrics used in SEO analysis to determine the success of your online visibility strategy. You can also set up goal reporting to analyse social network traffic and, importantly, goal conversions.
Google Analytics offers a diverse way to anaylse SEO performance.
The Analytics tool is pretty detailed and allows you to drill down a lot of this information into which pages are driving your acquisitions and what keywords you are ranking for.
By navigating to Behaviour > Site Content> All Pages, you can quickly see a breakdown of your site’s pages.
The data is informative and by analysing those pages with the most traffic, longest average session length and lowest bounce rates you could gain important insights into what your audience are looking for, and engaging with, on your website.
Google Search Console
So, what extra information can you glean from Google Search Console to help you perform an effective SEO analysis? Another feature-rich tool, you can use Google Search Console to check:
- Mobile Usability – Google Search Console provides you with instant feedback about any pages that may have usability issues on mobile devices. With Mobile-First Indexing now making this a key priority when it comes to SERP results, it is a key step to check during any SEO analysis.
- Average Ranking Position – You can view the overall average position for your website with accompaning queries as well as by individual page.
- Featured Snippets – Discover which URLs contain rich data which may be resulting in sitelink searchboxes.
- Backlinks – As well as displaying top linked pages (internal), you can find out those sites that are linking to your own as well as other relevant data such as anchor text.
Combined with reporting from Analytics, Google Search Console can provide great SEO insights.
And finally, Google Search Console provides some vital feedback on manual actions which need to be taken to keep your site working at optimum performance.
Opace and SEO Analysis
Opace is forward-thinking and intelligent digital marketing agency that focuses on delivering an SEO strategy where results are measurable. From on-page and technical SEO to off-page SEO and much more, our efforts are to make your online business stand out from the crowd and engage your target audience.
Experienced, results-driven and with transparent working practices, we know that we can deliver SEO success for your business. Contact us today to find out more.
Image credits: Mohamed_Hassan/pxhere, Google Analytics
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