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.
I've just been shopping around for a Heat Map tracking software and stumbled upon those two, which looks good to me: CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?...
In continuance with trust post I did few weeks ago, I decided to rant about backlink statistics various search engines so generously provide. Without further ranting and blathering, let’s see some statistical tables!Lies… ...
Sorry for my non-existance lately, I'm back for good now! I've been playing around with this tool - Web CEO Pro, for a while and I've seen Rand mention he was a little bit tired of it because it was expensive, but I'd like to say that for a couple hundred dollars a year (if you don't get into their monthly fees), it can do a pretty goo...
Last week I wrote a piece offering a free linkbait idea on web analytics. Incredibly, several folks responded, indicating they'd give it a go. Yesterday, I sat down with two of the frontrunners - Eric Enge from StoneTemple Consulting & Jonah Stein of ...
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
I should be eternally castigated to the fiery furnace for spoofing a Devo tune, but hopefully redemption can come in the form of this post's value. We've been spending some time in analytics programs lately, both for our own in-house projects and for some clients. In every instance, the addition of action tracking makes a huge difference to how well we can optimize and make changes to internal ...
Over the last week, we've collected visitor traffic data from 25 popular websites in the search and online marketing space, including: Brian Clark from Copyblogger Aaron Wall from SEOBook Matt Cutts from MattCutts.com ...
Some folks have been asking for my opinions of Hitwise & Alexa data recently, and I figured the best I could do would be to illustrate the sampling problems of both with some real life data. First off, let's look at SEOmoz's traffic levels over the last few months. This comes courtesy of our Indextools stats program + Feedburner data for RSS. You can see more on our ...
I recently had the opportunity to renew 1000 of my spam domains.Since the domains only cost me 99 cents each when I bought them and renewal was nearly $6 at the time, I decided it wasn't worth it.In fact, my evil plan was that I was going to simply let these sites expire and then buy them back once they expired and went into the domain pool...Imagine my surprise...
I'm an analytics junkie. Along with my constant monitoring of email and the blog tracker, I have to admit that I watch referring URLs, unique visitors and Feedburner stats like a hawk. Sometimes I'm on it several times before lunch. This unhealthy obsession has lead to some valuable discoveries over time, including one that I discussed during my sessions in San Jose called "the linkbait bu...
Have you ever looked at a set of search results and scratched your head in disbelief? If so, you're like me - occasionally, I'll at some search results at Google and have no comprehension of why one site is ranking in front of another, or why it would rank in the top 10, period. This blog post is an open call - feel free to list keywords and search results in the comments that simply make no se...
At nearly every SES conference, I hear it mentioned that analytics must track 60-90 days out in order to maintain a close watch on latent visits and conversions. In a meeting I had today with a large non-profit based website, the issue of latent tracking over the longer term came up... My question is - is it valuable to track via IP address over the long haul (100-300 days) or are the changing ...
You may already be familiar with eye tracking, a technology used to conduct marketing and usability tests for websites by examining the vision patterns of users as they view a page... but have you seen it in use? Etre, a company specializing in usability, offers an eye tracking service for clients, and feat...
Quick one - Visits vs. Visitors is a great piece on why the first matters more than you might think and why the second is less accurate than you might presume. Good read: Here are my top reasons for using visits:1) Visits are more accurate than Unique ...
I was digging around in our IndexTools account today for the SEOmoz site and came across a nifty column that I had previously ignored called "browse rate". It shows, based on the entry page the visitor came to the website on, how many pages (on average) they browsed. This metric is great for determining how effective your pages...