How to Measure & Improve SEO: eMetrics London 2010 Presentation
Rand's presentation from eMetrics London on analytics and metrics for SEO. Includes the embedded slide deck and a description of the topics covered.
SEO Analytics
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.
Most Recent Articles on SEO Analytics
Google Analytics Event Tracking to Monitor Calls to Action
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.
5 Simple Google Analytics Tips You Should Be Using
Last week, a few of us from SEOmoz attended WebShare’s Seminar for Success for Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer training. All of us who attended have a decent grasp on GA but really wanted to get some advanced information and gain a better understanding of GA’s potential. Plus, actually getting trained on something is always helpful, even if you feel you know it well!...
Facebook: Privacy at the Expense of Rich Analytics
As an SEO, it’s easy to get lost in a world of rankings and ranking factors when we really just want quality traffic. And the reason we get lost in rankings and ranking factors is because Google (and other major search engines) make it extremely easy to track and measure the ROI that they offer. Conversely, sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, have arguably suffered by not providing ...
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Statistics 101: Averages
This is my first attempt at a YouMoz post. I decided that given my background it would be a good idea to write about something I know – statistics. We are all familiar in the SEO world with statistics. We use averages, trends and split test results to make recommendations, justify oursel...
How to Determine Your Visitors Original Referral Source
Lets say you have a situation such as this one. A customer comes from a web site or search engine, leaves and then comes back from a different site or keyword search. How do you determine the original referral source? With a tool we have been using for the past several ...
Grabbing Your Traffic by the Long Tail and Other Reasons to Take a Deeper Look at Your Analytics
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!
When Conversion Rate Isn't Enough
The history of web analytics has read a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail. We've gone through a list of candidates searching for the one true metric: Hits, Page Views, Visitors, Unique Visitors...
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Why Google Analytics Opt-Out Won't Matter
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...
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Visualizing Keyword Data with the Google Analytics API
I was really interested in one specific metric that Rand discussed in the latest SEOmoz webinar on Actionable Analytics. He mentioned that the number of keywords sending search traffic measured in increments (monthly, weekly) could be an indicator of whether or not content development positively influenced search traffic. Unique keyword growth suggests that content development on a site or oth...
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Using Bit.ly URL Shortening For Traffic Analysis
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...
First Touch Tracking in Google Analytics
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:
Setup Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation
One of the best new features of Google Analytics is Advanced Segmentation and well I must say that of the recent features available to make an analysts job easier, this is it. The biggest advantage of advanced segmentation of profile filters is that you can use this to refine data captured within Google Analytics, and it doesn't change or affect your existing or future data captured. ...
Google Analytics Tracking Code Basics and Time Saving Plugins
This blog post is geared at the analytics driven, SEO savvy, search samurai looking to implement tracking code best practices and take advantage of some useful Google Analytics plugins. The focus of this post is on Google Analytics, but many of the concepts are also applicable no matter which web analytics platform you're using.