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.
Probably the most fundamental shift in the business of baseball over the past 10 years has been the rise of "sabermetrics," as documented in Michael Lewis' Moneyball. The theory is that in an ove...
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.
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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.
Google Analytics data (or any analytics data for that matter) can be overwhelming. Getting the most out of Analytics software requires that you dive deeply into the numbers and find the actionable data within. As I have begun to familiarize myself with navigating the reports and segmentations that make GA so powerful, it occured to me that most of my "insights" were more obversvationa...
So I was reading the Google as I often do, and they have this awesome new tool for visualizing your websites analytics data and keywords. Let’s get into what these way cool tools do and how they can help us analyze what is going on with our sites in an easy to read visual way.
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...
While high level analytics reports are great for keeping tabs on overall site performance, finding actionable insights in analytics is where the real value comes in. Here are three of my favorite reports for finding opportunities to improve your site's SEO.Organic Keyword by Landing PageI know this report sounds a little complicated to set up, but 1. it's ...
A useful indicator of SEO success is the number of unique keyphrases that send traffic to a website. An increase in this number is a reflection of increased trust in the site by search-engines. Google Analytics can show you the total number of unique organic keyphrases at a glance, but this post will show you how to break that down to a more useful level of granularity.
Web analytics and attribution management have received more attention this year as companies look to measure results with greater accuracy. However, I have yet to come across a list of vendors that offer robust analytics platforms that measure beyond the “last click wins” reporting method. Based on my research these firms offer analytics reporting beyond th...
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...
This is a very straightforward and quick article in support of the recent Whiteboard Friday, which said very clearly that the long tail of search has greater volume, and is less competitive.Well, of course for the stats mad amongst us, that's just like an open invitation to go and delve into thei...
There is a weird kind of syntactic flow that pervades any industry in which the players all seem to converge on using the same words at the same time. Right now, no one "does", they "execute", and its been years since anyone had any "problems"; they're generally too busy handling "challenges" and "issues". But anyway, I digress. ...