In theory, you could do SEO without measuring and reporting, but a solid grasp of analytics is essential to success. SEO analytics covers a wide range of topics, but often focuses on performance metrics around traffic, keywords, URLs, page speed, conversion rates, and more.
Beyond performance metrics, research metrics present another focal point of SEO analytics. This includes topics like keyword analysis, backlink research, and other areas to inform your SEO strategy.
Here, you can browse our top resources on SEO analytics, as well as find the most recent blog posts on the subject below.
SEO Analytics and Reporting : Check out our free SEO Learning Center where we've collected the top resources on analytics and reporting.
The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics : The most popular website analytics platform in the world, Google Analytics is a must-know platform for all SEOs.
A Beginner's Guide to Google Search Console : A companion to any web analytics platform, Google Search Console offers a wealth of SEO information to webmasters.
When and How to Use Domain Authority, Page Authority, and Link Count Metrics : SEO metrics have a special place in analytics. Rand Fishkin shows you how to use these popular metrics correctly.
The Complete Guide to Direct Traffic in Google Analytics : This article covers a very specific niche topic, but also an important one! Learn why that direct traffic in your analytics platform isn't what you think it is.
Analytics is one of those things that hasn’t always been at the top of my priority list until recently. Google Analytics has many features I’ve never used before because I haven’t had the time to sit down and really investigate what they can do for me and my clients. A few months ago, in one of my late night GA adventures, I found a section on event tracking, a small love soon formed.
We all know that there’s gold in the long tail. We know that there are huge numbers of searches, many of them completely unique, in the long tail. It provides an average of seven times the data of short tail metrics. Excuse me? Seven times? We are definitely not focusing enough attention on the long tail!
As you probably heard, Google announced last week that they are working on a browser plug-in to let users opt-out of Google Analytics tracking. But th...
If you’ve not used it before, bit.ly is a URL shortening service which is popular with Twitter. Due to the 140 character limit in tweets, characters are a premium so services such as bit.ly, goo.gl, etc provide an easy way to shorten lengthy URLs.So, you’re probably wondering what relevance this has to SEO? Well after using bit.ly for a while, I’ve com...
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It's time for a quick mid-week geek-out - I wanted to collect together a bunch of resources I have written on first touch tracking in Google Analytics including (for the first time that I'm aware of), the technical implementation details:
How many pages has Google indexed? This question and the problems surrounding it run rampant through the SEO world. It usually arises when someone starts doing searches like this: ...
One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say 'invisible', I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results.If you can find those pages, you can decide:To keep them, but work to raise their organic search profile;To keep them, but use more of their link juice to help other, higher-profile p...
In last week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand and I started by discussing how to gain true insight into what kind of keywords are leading people to discover your brand and ultimately driving conversions for your business (clue: it's probably not branded search phrases, despite what your analytics reports are telling you). Today, I'm going to demonstrate one way of measuring this more accurately in Google Analytics.
SEOmoz shares internal traffic statistics from 2009, as well as conversion rate mistakes and opportunities to apply in 2010. In addition to analytics data, the post also has 11 actionable conversion takeaways.
In my previous post titled "Top 15 Web Metrics" I wanted to share with you some useful web metrics which should be tracked for a classified (e-commerce) site with a free analytics tool such as Google Analytics. This time, I'd like to fo...
I noticed some months ago that SEOMOZ was having more and more web analytics/conversion rate related post, so I decided to give it a shot and talk about segmenting your traffic data in order to have a better understanding of your traffic. For this post I only use the Advanced Segments Tool from Google Analytics. Segmenting by location:I used to work fo...
Effective SEO requires us to see the big picture, and I'm calling that picture the 4 R's: Robots, Ranking, Relevance, and Results. For each of the 4 R's, I'll provide some tips and tools for how to measure your progress in that area.
Howdy Folks, Unlike most of the posts that I've put out recently which are more strategy based this post is a from-the-trenches-tip which I've recently come across that I thought I'd share. I'm going to talk all about using the Google Analytics API but I'll show you how anyone can do it, you don't need to be a developer! All you need is a Google Analyics account and Excel.... ...
In present times when the word “crisis” is repeated so often, tracking the performance of the website is getting even more important. Working a lot on SEO & web analytics of different classified businesses all over the world, I try to sum up what web metrics are really crucial to evaluate website properly. The advantage is, you can also measure them with free tools such as ...