SEO Data For Autopilot: Are you trying to keep track of SEO data to enhance your rankings, but you’re sick of updating spreadsheets by hand? To get more organic traffic, you need to keep your finger on the heartbeat of your SEO efforts. Because, as you know, SEO is full of parts that are always changing and need your constant attention.
When you’ve added key data from your current rankings to an SEO spreadsheet, it’s almost time to check all your metrics again. That’s why it’s important to find a fast, easy, and automated way to keep track of your SEO data. So, today we’ll show you how to let your SEO tracking run by itself. But first, let’s talk about why tracking your SEO data is important and what metrics you should look for.
The Importance of Keeping Track of Your SEO Data
If you read some marketing blogs, you might think that search engine optimization (SEO) is some mysterious, magical art. You choose your keywords, publish your content, and then wait for the random and sometimes cruel gods of search engine algorithms to decide if your content will be successful.
I can see why you might feel that way if you aren’t keeping track of your SEO data. If you don’t keep an eye on your key performance indicators (KPIs), you won’t know if your work is paying off or not. Because what you want to know is if the work I put into my content makes more money than it costs to make.
If so, we call that a good “return on investment” (ROI). Even though traffic from organic searches doesn’t cost you money per click as paid ads do, it’s not free either. Creating content that is optimized still costs a lot of time, money, people, tools, etc.
You have to be sure that the work is worth it. If you don’t keep track of your SEO data and compare it to your other digital marketing metrics, you won’t know if it’s giving you the ROI you need. And if you keep track of SEO data, you can also see if you’re focusing on the right keywords or what your audience likes.
You may have done everything right and gotten a high ranking for your content. But if the people who visit your site don’t turn into leads or sales, you need to rethink who you’re trying to reach. Your SEO strategy will improve once you track the right data about your content marketing’s return on investment (ROI).
Let’s look at two places you can get SEO data from:
- Analytics from Google
- Console de recherche Google
Then, we’ll show you how to set up an intuitive way to track this information weekly. Let’s now look at data from Google Analytics about SEO.
SEO Information from Google Analytics
Before we start talking about the KPIs you must include in your SEO reports from Google Analytics, here’s a quick tip. Link your Google Search Console acct with your Google Analytics account if you haven’t already.
Check out this useful page for a tutorial connecting Google Search Console and Analytics. It’s quick and easy, and you’ll get some extra data that will help you keep track of your SEO data. Let’s look at which Google Analytics metrics are the most important for tracking how well SEO works.
Natural Traffic
At the very least, you want your SEO work to bring people to your website. That means your SEO reports need to include information about your organic traffic. On top of the basics, like users and sessions from organic searches, you’ll probably want to track new and returning visitors to see if you’re reaching new audiences and keeping old ones.
Top-Performing Landing Pages/Blog Posts
In addition to giving an overview of your organic traffic, your SEO reporting should go into more detail about how those visitors use your site once they get there. One of the first things to do is to keep track of which pages they visit.
As part of your SEO monitoring, keeping track of how many times a page is viewed and how long a visitor stays on it tells you which pages are most popular with people who find your site through organic searches. It would help if you used the entrances metric to find out how people find your website in the first place.
This shows which landing pages and blog posts are getting a lot of traffic from searches. Once you know which content works best to bring in traffic from search engines, you can change your content marketing strategy and plan for the future.
Keywords
Assuming that your Google Analytics and Google Search Console are now linked, you’ll be able to see which keywords bring the most people to your website. It’s a great way to ensure you focus on the right keywords. If there are a lot of likely search terms in the list, you’re on the right track.
On the other hand, if you use a lot of keywords that have nothing to do with your site, you’ll get visitors who aren’t interested in what you offer. That means you’ll get a lot of dead leads or people who visit your website but don’t end up buying anything.
Rate of Bounce
The bounce rate for each landing page is another important KPI you can get from Google Analytics. This tells you how many people visit your site and leave without looking further.
A high bounce rate can mean your content doesn’t match what the visitor was looking for when paired with a short time on the page. Or it could mean that you aren’t pointing them to the right parts of your article or other content that meets their needs. It would help to track this metric as part of your SEO data.
Read Also: Top 8 Best Niches For Affiliate Marketing 2022
The conversion rate
The most important Google Analytics KPI is the one I saved for last. Obtaining people to visit your site is only the start. If you spend money on SEO, you want a decent number of those visitors to buy something from you when they get there.
Set up some conversion goals in Google Analytics before tracking your conversion rate. After that, you can compare the conversion rate from organic search traffic to visitors from other sources to see how well your SEO is doing. You can also see how many people click through to your site from each landing page.
Like the bounce rate, this will help you determine which content matches search intent well. It will also show you which landing pages aren’t working, so you know where you have to make changes. Now that we’ve gone over the most important SEO data from Google Analytics let’s look at what you should focus on from Google Search Console.
Data about SEO from the Google Search Console
Once you link your Google Search Console account to Google Analytics, there are certain metrics you can only see through the Search Console. Google Analytics tells you what people do on your site, while Google Search Console gives you key performance indicators (KPIs) to track how well your content is doing in searches. This is a key source of information that will help you track how well your SEO is working.
Performance of Keywords
If you know how well you rank for certain keywords, you can keep an eye on and change your content marketing strategy to bring more people to your website. Google Search Console allows you to monitor impressions by keyword, displaying how many times your content showed up in the SERPs for that search term over a certain period.
Of course, just because your links appear in search results doesn’t mean your content is high in the rankings. There is usually a link, but you can add to the impressions metric by keeping track of the average position.
This tells you where your content has been for each search over time. Because the position in Google can change, an average is given (instead of a range). So, for example, you could have been anywhere from the first to the seventh spot and ended up in the fourth spot on average.
When you put these two metrics together in your SEO reports, you can see which keywords you are ranking for and which keywords your competitors are ranking for better than you. Want to step things up a notch? With a tool like SEO Scout’s keyword rank tracker, you can get a clear picture of how your keywords are doing and how they compare to those of your competitors.
Clicks and Rate of Click-Through
People seeing your link is not the same as them clicking on it. And you need people to click on your ads to move them through your sales funnels. You can track clicks in a few different ways with Google Search Console. The first is a raw count, which can be shown as a total for your site or broken by URL.
This helps you keep track of website traffic and learn more about how keywords perform. You can also look at the average number of clicks for each search query. This may be more important for keeping track of your SEO, especially if you keep an eye on it over time.
You might find that the keywords with a high click-through rate aren’t the same as those with a high number of impressions. And a low click-through rate for some relevant search queries could mean that your content isn’t getting as much attention as it should. Okay, we now understand the SEO data you should track using Google Analytics and Search Console.
How to Create Automatic SEO Reports
Google does give you a few tools to use on your Google Analytics dashboard to make custom reports. These are easy to make and are sent by email with a PDF attachment. For a full guide on how to use Google Analytics to make reports.
But there are a couple of problems with doing that:
- Only Google Analytics data will be used in these reports.
- PDF attachments aren’t always the best choice for clients or teammates who are busy.
The first issue is a problem if you want to make marketing reports that are more than just SEO information. For example, if you need to send clients or team members information about email marketing statistics, paid ad platforms, and social networking performance. So on, you’ll need to make multiple reports with data that isn’t in your Google Analytics account.
The second problem is also a problem if you have more than one client. Sending PDFs makes it harder for people to read your SEO reports if they even take the time to look at them. When you add too many fields to an online store’s checkout page, people will leave their carts, and every step you add to report-sharing can cause your SEO data to gather dust in your recipients’ inboxes.
Metrics Watch is a simple tool that solves a complicated problem:
how to make global marketing reports that include all of your most important KPIs. This includes SEO, email marketing, social networks, and paid help.
- Analytics from Google
- Console de recherche Google
- Google Ads
- Mailchimp
With a drag-and-drop builder that doesn’t need any code, you can make complete marketing reports in just a few minutes, no matter how technical. This is also nice because the user interface of Google Analytics can be hard for many marketers (UI) to understand. Last but not least, the reporting feature of this tool is where it shines.
Instead of sending reports as PDFs, the data goes straight to the inbox of the person you want to send it to. Removing that small step increases the chances that the information will be seen (and used). Then you can set up these reports to be sent automatically every day, week, or month. This makes it easier for your team and clients to get the most out of the SEO data you’re keeping track of.
Conclusion
No matter what tool you use to collect and share your SEO data, one thing is clear: you need to know if your SEO work is paying off or not. If they aren’t, don’t worry about it! Not that you should stop working on SEO. It means the opposite, though. Because of this, the SEO Scout website is full of free SEO tools and resources. We assist businesses of all sizes to make content that ranks well so they can get better, more lead generation, and grow.
