When you’re working on your site SEO, one of the most important aspects (often forgotten) is to continually measure, analyze and fine tune your work. Firstly, to make sure you’re not wasting your time by not having anything to show for your efforts and secondly to ensure you haven’t done more harm than good. Good SEOs will often use analytics to measure the result of their work so using your Google Analytics account here are some ways to measure your SEO:
1. Compare total organic traffic of similar dates - Google Analytics has a fantastic feature which allows you to compare similar dates.
- Enter your main Google Analytics profile and click on the date range button
- Now tick the option ‘Compare to past’ and select two similar dates (for example May 2008 Vs. May 2009)
- Now head to traffic sources and click on Google Organic to see if your efforts are working
- Click on ‘google (organic) to see which keywords are driving more or less traffic
2. Compare brand Vs. generic organic traffic of similar dates – Use the compare similar dates above
- Head to traffic sources and click on Google Organic – Under the ‘Filter Keyword’ option leave ‘containing’ and type your brand names for brand SEO results, for example conversion counts|conversioncounts|conversioncounts.com etc (use | to separate your keywords)
- Now change the ‘Filter Keyword’ to ‘excluding’ to see generic SEO results
3. Compare how many unique pages got at least one visitor from the search engines – an indication of more pages indexed and ranking well
- Switch off ‘compare to past’ option, head to traffic sources then ‘google organic’
- Now open the ‘Dimension’ drop down box and pick ‘Landing Page’
- You’ll now see how many unique pages received at least one visitor from Google and are therefore indexed
- Repeat the same steps for another date range to compare the two (compare past option won’t work here)
There are more indications in Google Analytics that your SEO work is paying off as you can also look at avg time on site (which should increase once quality content is added), avg page view etc, but the keywords and landing pages are a great start.