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.
Today I want to talk about tracking organic ranking in Google Analytics. Previously, we were able to determine the page from which a Google organic click was coming, but with a change to the Google referral URL it has become much easier to track exact rank. Combined with Google Analytics custom variables we have a powerful new way to pull exact organic rankings into GA.
Well here we go, you ready to jump into analytics, part deux? Just a heads, up this is the second post of a three post series. The first post, "So You Call Yourself an Analyst, Part 1: Asking the Right Questions, walked through ways in which you could reevaluate the questions steering your analytical efforts.
Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere--half baked analysis. It's something we've all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It's unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report tem...
Google recently released a new and incredibly useful featured called Weighted Sort. Here's how to build your own version (includes Excel download).
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As a consultant, I work with many In-House SEO teams with strategy and other issues that arise throughout the course of the year. One of the trends that we are seeing is that these In-House teams are having a hard time coming up with accurate traffic centered goals. Traffic is the base for many metrics measurements, so being able to semi-accurately predict that number in the coming year is very important for every business on the internet.
If you are unfamiliar with Heat Map analytics, please check out CrazyEgg, I'll be talking about them in this post.
This post is in conjunction with the recent post made by Rand: A Powerful Analytics Tip Every Website Should Employ. Now going one step further, would you be interested in segmenting your traffic data like th...
I'm a science guy at heart, and one of my favorite things about SEO is getting to play with Analytics data and using it to solve problems that my clients (and I) have. With all of the data that Google Analytics provides us with, it can become easy to get lost in all of the different ways to display, slice, and dice our data. However, if armed with the right ways to manipulate and 'massage'...
Tracking visitor analytics data across an entire site is great, but unless you're using segmentation, it can mislead you about what's working vs. not for your traffic. In this post, you'll find charts that help to illustrate the issue and a how-to guide that shows how to build them for your own site.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the newest darling of Internet Marketers, after all what good is traffic if it doesn’t convert. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending how you look at it), unlike Pay Per click (PPC) marketing, CRO isn’t a game of how much money you can throw. In fact, this field requires as much creativity, as it requires monetary investment. That’s wha...
We have a lot of changes going on at SEOmoz (feel free to get excited, we sure are!) and with all of these changes to the site comes the need to focus on tracking. Internally we have spent the last few months redirecting our attention to not only the best practices regarding analytics and data mining, but really pushing ourselves to revisit our analytical processes. You know what we real...
With the latest announcement of Coremetrics being sold (or resold if you want to be technical) to IBM, nearly all the major players in the Web Analytics industry are exiting as...
So, it’s time for my second swat-up on statistics. Last time we covered the different types of averages there are, and how you may use them. This time, we’re looking at how we can measure deviations from that. I know I said there would be a week’s wait, but I've ended up...
As recently as a month ago I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder. This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers. When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics wa...