UNIT V

SEO ANALYTICS
SEO Analytics, Monitoring & Reporting: How to monitor SEO progress - with Key Features of
GSC:Overview Performance - URL Inspection - Coverage - Sitemaps - Speed - Mobile Usability
– BackLinks - Referring Domains - Security & Manual Actions - How to do SEO Reporting.

Introduction:
The need for SEO measurement and reporting

You have a long term SEO project with overall results you’re proud of. But you experience
surprising fluctuations in organic search traffic volume.

You know your content calendar is on point. But it’s hard to defend your order of priority
when facing a stream of ideas from the client or boss.

You know the technical aspects of the website you’re trying to rank are lacking. But the
publishing routine doesn’t leave much budget for website back-end upgrades.

You have great ideas. Your team members also have great ideas. You struggle when
discussing what to act on next.

You need thorough SEO analytics.

Data from one of our long term SEO projects with focus on analytics
In this article, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about SEO analytics.

What is SEO analytics?

Definition of SEO analytics

We define SEO analytics as the methods that:

Collect own data pertinent to acquiring engaged organic traffic. This entails measurement
definition, implementation and updates.

Help act on the data in order to create growth of engaged organic traffic. This entails
visualization and reporting, analysis, task planning, execution.

Please notice that I talk about engaged organic traffic first, not ranking position. Search
engine results pages (SERPs) change quickly. The rising dominance of featured snippets has
created position 0, and made positions 1-3 less visible. Ranking positions do matter, of
course, so we consider them a stepping stone metric. But we don’t use them as a KPI.

Editor’s note: if you’re interested in monitoring your keyword ranking anyway, check out
these 8 SERP tracking tools .

Please also notice that I’m not using all organic traffic as a KPI, either. It is common to
experience spikes in organic traffic without a lift in conversion counts. The same applies the
other way around: a drop in traffic often happens more heavily on the side of low-quality
traffic, without conversions dropping as much.

What SEO analytics isn’t?

We do not include keyword research and other market research under the SEO analytics
umbrella. In SEO analytics, you use your own data about your own marketing. In keyword
research, you look at what users search for before your website starts ranking for it, or you
look at ranking positions of content published on websites other than yours. Those are two
distinctly different stages of an SEO project, and we’re going to keep this article focused on
SEO analytics.

How does analytics help improve SEO?

Analytics grounds decisions in your own data. It frees your search engine work from team
politics, client to provider hierarchy, horoscopes, and volatile opinions. It also frees the
process from my own ego and preconceived notions – I’m biased, too, director or not.
Having an effective SEO analytics process enables us, and the marketing teams we work
with, to:
 Know what’s going on

Know why it is going on

Find gaps and opportunities

Recommend how we want to act on the insight

Estimate the expected outcome of the recommended action

Phase #1 – Prepare & enable a strong start

SEO analytics is like a hearty soup that nourishes the entire body if cooked right. Seek out
the following ingredients for successfully integrating analytics into an SEO project.

Client types

It may be hard to convince someone that 10% of the budget will best be used on analytics,
instead of execution. And to be honest, it may not be worth convincing anyone about it.
Instead, you can seek out clients with backgrounds that gravitate towards data-driven
decisions. Some common traits of great clients for analytical SEO include:

High appreciation for data

Advanced marketing knowledge

Capacity and willingness to act on ideas

Long term focus

Some of the easily identifiable client personas, that we have great experience working with,
include:

Marketing agencies

Marketing teams with an online presence that’s decent or better

Directors with a background in finance, healthcare, or other industries where acting on data
is at the core of the service

Monetizing bloggers

Directors of e-commerce

Minimum budgets

Analytics is for taking marketing from good to great. That is something you can only achieve
if you create room to take a step back and analyze whenever you’re evaluating or planning.
From experience with our SEO projects, $3k/mo is the minimum monthly budget that still
enables leveraging data well. Analytics requires both a high level of skill and a fair amount
of time. So when you think about how new projects need major measurement implementation
or overhaul, $3k/mo is about as low as you can go while still creating effective feedback
loops.

Team roles & skills

We’ve hired and tested for different roles extensively. As a result, I wrote down this ideal
composition of a team for analytical SEO projects:

Project director – is much more involved than a stereotypical project manager , has their
hand in the project, executes some of the work, reviews everybody’s work, plans work based
on data and input from the rest of the team, has mastered data visualization and presentation,
understands data collection and processing, loves talking to the client.

Analytics developer – has a rich coding background and focuses on using it for marketing
measurement, is able to set up a wide variety of tracking and integrations, assists in deciding
what tracking will prove actionable.

Junior analyst or SEO – has skills in data visualization and measurement, understands
SEO, helps the team act faster.

Technical SEO expert – acts on SEO data by improving technical and structural aspects of
the website, sets up A/B tests.

Content lead – writes masterfully, incorporates SEO data into each piece of content, guides
copywriters, guides creation of visual assets.

Link builder – facilitating guest content and relationships to boost high-converting content.

Video editor – takes data guidance from the content lead, creates videos for better UX or
YouTube traffic or featured video snippets.

Illustrator – creates original visuals with value to searcher intent, helps foster higher content
engagement and presence in featured snippets.

In smaller projects, one person can cover more than one role. In larger projects, one role will
need more than one person.

Some other roles you may consider for teams working with SEO analytics include a virtual
assistant, designer, editor, marketing automation expert, or PPC expert.

Phase #2 – Set up SEO measurement & testing

MarTech for SEO measurement: our favorite tools

There are no affiliate links in this article – I wouldn’t be allowed to use our affiliate links in a
guest post even if I wanted to. We’re listing the SEO tools that we love using for our own
work. To underline the importance of an amazing stack of analytics tools, here’s a thought
from our friend, Dan McGaw, author of the ultimate book on building a MarTech Stack :

“All roads lead to Rome and all data leads to Revenue. Properly setup and connect your
marketing technology tools , so that you actually know how and why your SEO leads to
revenue.”

– Dan McGaw | CEO, founder, speaker at McGaw.io

Google Analytics (GA) for a data hub

We love Amplitude, we love MixPanel, we love Adobe. But because we’re trying to become
prominent on Google, it makes sense to focus SEO measurement around the Google Suite.
Google tools integrate very well with one another, which makes for actionable data. GA then
also integrates very well with a plethora of other SEO tools. Here are a few specific
examples:

Google Search Console shows you what happened before the organic click on Google.
Google Analytics shows you what happened after the click. Connecting the two (assuming
your GA goals and engagement metrics are tailored well), will give you the full picture.

Enrich the picture by plugging in keyword data from Keyword Hero, on-page SEO data from
On-Page Hero, engagement data from HotJar, or event data from anything that’s set up in
GTM.

Organic search, as well as paid search, doesn’t require custom channel definitions or UTM’s
in order to be accurately categorized in GA

Set up GA goal values to track the value generated by your organic search visits, instead of
counting all actions equally.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) for a one-stop tracking & tagging platform
This stellar tool has more and more implementations baked into it, so advanced tracking has
been getting quicker and quicker to set up. Beyond tracking tags, GTM allows you to add
code for on-page optimization. Sample uses of GTM for SEO include:

Record an interaction event in GA whenever the visitor spends more than 45 seconds on the
website. This way, visitors who took a little bit of time reading or watching on your website
will not be considered a bounce anymore. GA normally counts a bounce whenever the user
only views one page. But for blogs, for example, it is common that visitors leave the site
after they read one post only. These visitors likely found what they wanted, they tend to
remember you, and their likelihood of seeing you on Google again is high.

Implement GTM’s native scroll tracking or HotJar tracking for engagement metrics. They’ll
help you analyze how well the landing page matched the searcher’s intent.

Instead of paying for a WordPress plugin, implement schema markup for particular post
types via GTM. This will help search engines understand your content better, which can lead
to appearance in visual featured snippets the way it did for our client’s keto queso dip.
SEO Monitoring

4 Ways to Measure SEO Progress

From longtail keyword phrases to Google AdWords, your business follows a diversified strategy
for SEO success. But how do you know whether your SEO strategy is actually working? Sure,
you’re already tracking the results of your AdWords campaign and monitoring conversion rates,
but this information only gives you a partial snapshot of your SEO strategy’s successes or
shortcomings.

Whether you’ve noticed an increase in web traffic or a sudden drop off, the reason for this traffic
change is often complex: a competitor is more effectively optimizing for the same keywords as
you; your site has been slapped by an over-optimization penalty; or your latest content marketing
campaign is a success (or failure). SEO metrics track your website’s performance versus other
sites across all search engines, providing a more complete picture for your SEO strategy.

Every business website is unique, and a metric that is relevant for one website may mean nothing
for another. However, there are several key metrics that are universally important. Below, we’ve
listed four of the most critical tracking metrics and monitoring tools that are essential to measure
SEO progress.

#1: Search Engine Traffic: Find Your Website’s Market Share & Diagnose Potential Problems

Measuring search engine traffic is important because these metrics allow you to compare
performance versus market share. Understanding your traffic sources – referral traffic versus
direct navigation versus search traffic – is absolutely critical. Knowing both the number of
visitors and percentage of traffic from a specific source will help you identify weaknesses and
track trends over time. For example, if your search engine traffic suffers a dramatic fall off, your
SEO strategy may be in trouble. Conversely if you experience a bump in affiliate link traffic,
thank your latest content marketing campaign.

Understanding website market share is also useful should your website traffic suddenly drop off.
If all traffic from search engine drops equally, then you are facing an accessibility problem.
However, if traffic from Google drops dramatically while traffic from other sites holds steady,
then you may have been penalized for over optimization. Correct for over optimization and your
website traffic will return to normal levels.

How to find your website’s Market Share:

Google Analytics provides a breakdown of different traffic sources. Many SEO monitoring tools
also include these traffic sources, along with statistics on your website’s market share.

#2: Search Engine Traffic: Strategically Improve Your Website

A second – and equally important – use for the search engine traffic analytics discussed in #1 is
to strategically improve your website’s SEO based on specific search engines and landing pages.
Different SEO tactics are effective with different search engines. For example, thanks to
Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, organic link building efforts through anchor text and
content marketing are more effective with Google. In contrast, on-page optimization, such as
longtail keywords, is typically more effective with Bing.

Your analytics will also tell you the pages where visitors most frequently land when they visit
your website. Knowing which pages (and how many) receive search engine traffic is essential for
SEO success. These data points help determine which changes you make to your website’s
structure, keywords and linking system to improve search traffic. In a perfect world, we’d have
plenty of time and resources to tweak websites for SEO success. Sadly, that’s not the case.
Consequently, it is absolutely essential that you strategically choose which SEO improvements
to make – whether that’s an increased focus on crafting quality content and obtaining organic
back links or carefully combing low-performing pages for missed on-page optimization
opportunities.

How to find your website’s most popular landing pages:

Google Analytics is ground zero for determining which landing pages are most popular on your
website. Compare this information with your website market share analytics to make strategic
SEO improvements.

#3: Domain Authority: Measure Your Website’s Strength

How well does your website perform in search engine rankings? Domain Authority predicts your
website’s performance versus other competitor websites in Google’s search engine rankings
based on the strength of your website pages and link profiles. Domain Authority scoring is based
on a model created by SEOmoz that aggregates over 150 different factors into a unified system
for measuring domain authority. Scores are reported logarithmically on a 1 to 100 scale, with
100 being “ultimate” domain authority.

Domain Authority rankings are most useful for measuring your website’s strength versus other
sites. Since it is a predictive ranking system, it is less useful as an historic measurement of your
website’s own SEO efforts. Domain Authority also measures a website’s perceived “trust”
within the online community; websites that rank higher in domain authority also have a stronger
link profile, which means they are more “trustworthy”. Since the Domain Authority scale is
logarithmic, it is easier to improve from a 30 to 40 ranking than improve from a 80 to 90
ranking.

How to find your website’s Domain Authority:

Domain Authority rankings are incorporated into many common SEO metrics measurements;
they can also be obtained using Open Site Explorer.

#4: Keyword Rank Tracking: Keep an Eye on the Competition

Is a competitor optimizing for the same keywords or phrases that your company optimizes for? If
you are an affiliate management company, do you know how your trademarks and brands are
being used across the Internet? Keyword rank tracking is one of the most important SEO
monitoring tools for any business. Here at iSpionage, our keyword rank tracking tool includes
keyword monitoring and alerting functionality that can be used to track your company’s
trademarks and brands across the Internet. This keyword tracking service will also notify you if a
competitor begins to optimize for your same keyword terms.

URL Inspection Tool

About the URL Inspection tool

The URL Inspection tool provides information about Google's indexed version of a specific
page. Information includes AMP errors, structured data errors, and indexing issues.

Common tasks:

 See the current index status of a URL: Retrieve information about Google's indexed
version of your page. See why Google could or couldn't index your page.
 Inspect a live URL: Test whether a page on your site is able to be indexed.
 Request indexing for a URL: You can request that an URL be crawled (or recrawled) by
Google.
 View a rendered version of the page: See a screenshot of how Googlebot sees the page.
 View loaded resources, JavaScript output, and other information: See a list of resources,
page code, and more information by clicking View crawled page (indexed result) or View
tested page (live test).
  Troubleshoot a missing page: There can be many reasons why a page hasn't been
indexed. URL Inspection can help troubleshoot some of them.

Links, Mobile Usability, and site management in the new Search Console

Links Report

Search Console users value the ability to see links to and within their site, as Google Search sees
them. Today, we are rolling out the new Links report, which combines the functionality of the
"Links to your site" and "Internal Links" reports on the old Search Console. We hope you find
this useful!

Mobile Usability report

Mobile Usability is an important priority for all site owners. In order to help site owners with
fixing mobile usability issues, we launched the Mobile Usability report on the new Search
Console. Issue names are the same as in the old report but we now allow users to submit a
validation and reindexing request when an issue is fixed, similar to other reports in the new
Search Console.
Site and user management

To make the new Search Console feel more like home, we've added the ability to add and verify
new sites, and manage your property's users and permissions, directly in new Search Console
using our newly added settings page.
 Manual Actions report
See if your site has any manual actions issued against it and view the site's manual action history.

If a site has a manual action, some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results.

OPEN THE MANUAL ACTIONS REPORT

What is a manual action?

Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined
that pages on the site are not compliant with Google's webmaster quality guidelines. Most
manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will
result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual
indication to the user.

If your site is affected by a manual action, we will notify you in the Manual Actions report and in
the Search Console message center.

Why do manual actions exist?

Ever since there have been search engines, there have been people dedicated to tricking their way
to the top of the results page. This is bad for searchers because more relevant pages get buried
under irrelevant results, and it's bad for legitimate websites because these sites become harder to
find. For these reasons, we've been working since the earliest days of Google to fight spammers,
helping people find the answers they're looking for, and helping legitimate websites get traffic
from search.

Google is constantly working to improve search. We take a data-driven approach and employ
analysts, researchers, and statisticians to evaluate search quality on a full-time basis. Changes to
our algorithms undergo extensive quality evaluation before being released. More information
about our algorithm.

Our algorithms are extremely good at detecting spam, and in most cases we automatically
discover it and remove it from our search results. However, to protect the quality of our index,
we're also willing to take manual action to remove spam from our search results.
 SEO Reporting and Conversion

SEO campaigns offer an advantage over traditional internet advertising methods, such
as email campaigns, banner advertising or pay-per-click services. Search Engine
marketing offers a unique promotional advantage when it comes to overall return on
investment.

A well optimized page can typically deliver thousands of targeted visitors to your website
every month. Unlike purchasing mailing lists or other expensive website marketing methods
for higher search engine rankings, SEO allows you to deliver long term success and a better
ROI.

Most of the time confusion occurs because the success of the campaign is not clearly defined.
At the end of the campaign you should know that the performance would be measured on.
Number of visitors or the total number of conversion i.e. actual sales made on the web site.

First thing to keep in mind is that ranking is not the only parameter to measure the success of a
campaign. The success of a campaign needs to be measure on rankings, percentage of traffic
from different search engines, traffic from different keywords. All of this should be
considered while tracking ROI.

By measuring non-branded search traffic, we learn more about how your audience looks for
you, and can further refine your campaign. There are many search engines through which you
attract traffic. But most of the visitors come through big search engines like Google, Yahoo,
MSN and AOL. Therefore it is very important to know which search engine is generating the
kind of results you are looking for. The more traffic search engines are generating the more
the ROI. Let’s see how to calculate ROI for an e-commerce site.

Determining ROI for an e-commerce site is very easy as the aim of e-commerce is to make
actual transactions or sell. Generally e-commerce sites sell a variety of products, hence
calculate the average price of the sale, then calculate the total sales the web site is making
before optimization. After the search engine optimization calculate the number of items
sold. Again multiply it with the average price and you will know the actual sales figure.
After calculating the difference between sales pre optimization and post optimization, you
can calculate the increase in sales. Now look at the money you have invested in the SEO
campaign. If your sales figures can recover the investment in a short period of time, you are
generating a very good ROI, else not. I.e. Pre-optimization -- Average price is $100 and 100
units sold per month, the total sales are $100 x 100 = $10,000 per month. Post-SEO campaign,
if sales went up to 300 units, you are earning $100 x 300= $30,000 per month.

After the SEO campaign, you are able to increase sales by 20,000 and you have invested
50,000 for the SEO campaign, then you can recover it within 2.5 months. Many companies
develop different websites simply for lead generation. Not far behind from e-commerce
websites with regards to the simplicity of ROI calculations are websites developed to generate
leads. If the value of the generated lead is known then the ROI can be easily determined. If the
lead value is not directly linked to a dollar value, a dollar value will need to be determined.
Let’s assume a website generates 25 leads per month pre-optimization, and each lead is valued
at 50. The website was generating $1,250 per month before the search engine optimization
campaign launched. Now, the website increases its leads generated to 100 per month post-
optimization launch. We can then see that the search engine optimization campaign is
responsible for an additional $3,750 in leads per month. If the optimization campaign cost
$25,000, we can then estimate the ROI to be seen within 7 months.

Now let’s see how we calculate ROI for the corporate or information sites. These are sites
essentially created for information and not for generating leads or sale. Hence the
conversion parameters for these sites have to be defined. Here we consider value of a
customer not the money he is going to spend on our product/service.

Let’s assume the website had unique 2,500 visitor sessions per month before the search
engine optimization campaign was launched, and the website was converting 4% of its users.
Before the SEO campaign was launched, the website was converting 100 users per month.
After the campaign is launched, the website experienced increased visitor sessions up to
15,000 per month, with conversion rates increasing to 6% as a result of more targeted visitors
(a very conservative increase). We can then determine that the search engine optimization
campaign is directly responsible for converting an additional 800 users per month.

If we were able to determine a dollar value for each converted user, we could easily determine
the campaign ROI. Let’s assume that we have determined that each converted user is worth
approximately $10. Using this as a base, we see that the website was generating $1,000 per
month before optimization, and $9,000 post-optimization launch. The search engine
optimization campaign is responsible for generating an additional $8,000 per month through
converting website users. If the SEO campaign cost $25,000 for the year, we estimate that a
ROI will be seen within 4 months.
There are many tracking tools available to track the performance of the campaign. If a site
owner was determined to track all traffic and measure ROI, the solution would be quite costly.
First of all, you’re looking at a high end web analytics program such as Hitbox Enterprise or
Webtrends Live. These typically cost anywhere from a few thousand to several thousand
dollars a month.