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.
If you're looking for a company online, do you hazard a guess at their domain and go directly? Or do you search them in a search engine? I'll hazard a guess that you'll turn to good old Google to point you in the right direction. Once I've visited a website once, though, I will then usually revisit as "direct traffic," typing the site straight into my address bar. But that woul...
Improving site speed is crucially important, Craig at Distilled recently wrote a phenomenal post site speed for dummies which really breaks down WHY improving site speed is a high ROI activity and there was a great Youmoz post recently published which explains HOW to improve page load speed: ...
Google In-Page Analytics is one of the most intriguing and impressive features of Analytics. Having been around for a few months in beta, now seems like a good time to take a look at the pros and cons of the tool. What's good about it? What doesn't work? What could be improved?
Imagine this scenario: It's Monday afternoon, you just spent the first half of your day wading through last week's stas, comparing metrics, data-mining for the greater good, and assembling it into an easy-to-digest summary that speaks to the stats of your company. You sit back, finish off your second (or fifth) cup of coffee, and hit "Send" on the all staff email alias. M...
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
As a data analyst tracking more than 300 websites, the numbers are simply stacked against me. It's hard to give each and every site meaningful attention. Thankfully, the vast majority of these sites don't require active analysis, but I still needed to devise some kind of system that would let me know when something was afoot. Enter Google Intelligence. One of the fabulous things about I...
Keyword rankings reports are information overload. As a marketer, they're of interest to me, but presenting them to clients, who are business owners, doesn't convey the value or success of your SEO efforts. I question the usefulness of keyword rankings. Let's get clear on the difference between impact and the actual fin...
Oh the New Year. How I love you so. There are so many reasons to love you. Let us count the ways:Those "Best of 2010" blog posts finally come to an end.We all have a great reason to buy more stuff than we need because the entire world is on sale.Everyone's energy is sky high. It's incredibly contagious. YES! LET'S DO THIS! WORLD DOMINA...
Google has gone to great lengths lately to incorporate local data wherever it can. Google Place Search rolled out in late October and services such as Google Tags and Google Boost offer increased visibility, for a price. It’s only natural that we would want to know if investing in these add-ons is actually worthwhile. Most of us naturally would turn to Google Ana...
You’re already familiar with the concept that 1 in 4 search queries have never been searched before but do you know how this affects your niche? My boss recently asked me to come up with an estimate for the total size of our market. I could ha...
If you use Google Analytics, you've undoubtedly seen a report like this: The problem is, there's no breakdown of "social media" in this view of traffic sources, and with the dramatic rise of social media marketing, marketers need an easy...
Today we're going to break down a number of different tools and resources for getting insights into competitors traffic data. We have looked at a handful of tools here and will break them down one by one as to their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the validity and usefulness of the data provided. Ultimately we just wanted to share with you some other information sources out there that you ...
1) Regex for Counting " " and "/" Regex is teh awesome. I don't claim to be amazing at it but there are a few common regex strings I use all the time in my analysis. Length of Keyword To quickly filter your keywords report by the length of keyword, I use some regex to count the number of spaces in the keyword like this: ^([^ ]+ ...
Accurate measurement and tracking is the foundation of every high-performing marketing organization and SEO campaign. You cannot maximize what you don't measure! Investing in SEO - or any other marketing strategy - without tangible goals and accurate tracking in place to quantify your results is like bowling blindfolded. You might knock down some pins, but you'll never refine and improve your t...
Alright fellow data crunchers, you ready for the final post in our three-post series, "So You Call Yourself an Analyst?" I was really hoping to get this post up last week but instead I was putting the final touches on our affiliate program (more on that very soon!). For those of you that missed the Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I suggest checking those out before reading...