It’s often said that dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is part art, part sci­ence. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly true of SEO, which is why I think it is one of my big pas­sions with­in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Of course, SEO also has the poten­tial to dri­ve vol­ume traf­fic at low-cost while peo­ple are search­ing for your prod­ucts and ser­vices…

One of the best ways to show the pow­er of SEO is to take a look at the Cus­to­ra Pulse. It’s inter­est­ing since it’s one of the best, pub­lished bench­marks of what search mar­ket­ing can deliv­er in terms of sales. In past years, it’s shown that, for large retail­ers based in the US, that search mar­ket­ing deliv­ers near­ly half of all sales, with organ­ic search mak­ing up around half of this. As an aver­age, that should be con­sid­ered a min­i­mum bench­mark tar­get for your organ­ic traf­fic if you are seri­ous about it.

At SmartInsights.com, the dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing edu­ca­tion site I work for, we have worked hard on our SEO; organ­ic search now con­tributes over 80% of the half mil­lion unique vis­i­tors per month we attract each month. For us, this is very much down to both art and sci­ence. In this arti­cle I will main­ly explain the ‘sci­ence’ part of the equa­tion, review­ing some of the sim­ple analy­sis tech­niques we use from the tools Google pro­vides.

The potential of organic search

With­out hard graft, organ­ic search is untapped poten­tial. Since SEO is so com­pet­i­tive, you have to work at it to com­pete, and this requires a cre­ative approach in order to devel­op the right type of con­tent that will engage your audi­ence and attract the links which are still so impor­tant to increas­ing the author­i­ty of a site. This is the ‘art’ part, based on a sol­id con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy where we invest in a com­bi­na­tion of qual­i­ty arti­cles cov­er­ing the chal­lenges that mar­keters have with pay­ing for qual­i­ty info­graph­ics that are shared wide­ly.

For exam­ple, our con­tent mar­ket­ing matrix is a ‘mind-tool’ that has been wide­ly shared and copied. Yet this wasn’t a ‘me-too’ dig­i­tal stats info­graph­ic put togeth­er quick­ly using a free, online tool. It need­ed sev­er­al days of analy­sis and plan­ning and then brief­ing top design­ers in order to turn that data into top per­form­ing con­tent. Sim­i­lar­ly, our Essen­tial Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing tools wheel is anoth­er mind-tool which has worked well for us.

Yet, these aren’t our top traf­fic dri­vers, so I will now explain the analy­sis tech­niques we have used to review and improve our traf­fic.

Techniques we use to review and improve SEO using Search Analytics in Google Search Console

Those of you who are SEOs will know the sad tale of ‘Not pro­vid­ed’ and how, when organ­ic key­words were no longer report­ed in Google Ana­lyt­ics (GA) or oth­er ana­lyt­ics pack­ages, Google Web­mas­ter tools launched what was round­ly crit­i­cised by many SEOs to be a poor imi­ta­tion of pre­vi­ous organ­ic reports in GA with only a 90 day his­to­ry, not to men­tion numer­ous inac­cu­ra­cies.

Today we have what I think is a much improved Search Ana­lyt­ics in Google Search Con­sole (GSC, for­mer­ly Google Web­mas­ter tools report­ing) and while you can still ignore it as inac­cu­rate or incom­plete, I think you’re miss­ing out if you do. Here are 5 ways in which we use Search Ana­lyt­ics. Note that I don’t include link analy­sis in GSC here since it’s well-known that you get an incom­plete view of back­links with­in GSC. It is best prac­tice to include these links in link audits though, e.g. for a link detox project.

1. Using a Gap analy­sis to define oppor­tu­ni­ties to attract more organ­ic vis­its.

We use the SEO gap analy­sis tech­nique to define oppor­tu­ni­ties for tar­get­ing new search queries and review­ing improv­ing vis­it vol­ume from new search queries. An SEO gap analy­sis helps you review your audi­ence “share of search­es“ for prod­ucts and ser­vices you offer by com­par­ing the num­ber of search­es per­formed for the key­words you are tar­get­ing, against the num­ber of vis­i­tors you get to your site for these key­words through nat­ur­al search and paid search.

To per­form the gap analy­sis we export data from search ana­lyt­ics and com­bine it in a spread­sheet with key­word impres­sion data from Google Key­word Plan­ner. Although this tool also has its crit­ics and lim­i­ta­tions for low­er search vol­ume key­words, I find that for high­er vol­ume queries it’s a reli­able guide and shows rel­a­tive dif­fer­ences in search vol­ume for dif­fer­ent prod­ucts or ser­vices well.

Once you have the intent data from key­word plan­ner and actu­al vis­its from Search ana­lyt­ics you can then com­pare them using a VLOOKUP() for each key­word — I find it’s use­ful to com­pare both exact key­words and ‘con­tains’ key­words. ‘Con­tains’ reports are use­ful to see which qual­i­fiers you are attract­ing, e.g. for retail prod­ucts, these could include ‘cheap’, ‘dis­count’ and ‘reviews’.

2. Boost­ing the per­for­mance of your top rank­ing pages.

This is a well-known prac­ti­cal tech­nique which you can use with­in GA too when inte­grat­ed. Sim­ply review your top rank­ing pages which have the poten­tial to improve, i.e. posi­tion 2–10, posi­tion 10–15. Then review their click-through rates and see how they can be improved fur­ther by test­ing copy changes to the title and descrip­tion and re-pub­lish­ing.

As with the oth­er tech­niques here, you can break­out per­for­mance by geog­ra­phy if inter­na­tion­al mar­kets are impor­tant to you.

3. Under­stand­ing land­ing page effec­tive­ness for SEO.

See­ing the range of key­words each page is attract­ing is a real­ly use­ful tool for learn­ing how to get more vis­its to pages since you see the range of search queries you attract vis­i­tors for, depend­ing on page copy and off-page links to the page.

This infor­ma­tion used to be avail­able in Google Ana­lyt­ics search reports, but isn’t any longer, even with the inte­gra­tion. It’s not that obvi­ous how to set this up; first you have to set up a fil­ter for an indi­vid­ual page (or group of pages) with the Page fil­ter option. Then select­ing the queries option to show the range of key­words.

4. Under­stand­ing organ­ic effec­tive­ness on mobile devices.

With smart­phone key­word queries now being more impor­tant than desk­top in many cat­e­gories, it’s impor­tant to ensure you are vis­i­ble on both smart­phone and desk­top. This will be even more impor­tant once Google launch­es its ‘mobile-first’ index in 2017.

Google Search con­sole can help show the effec­tive­ness of your mobile key­words. You can also cre­ate a smart­phone-only seg­ment in Google Ana­lyt­ics to assess this. Speak­ing at Pub­con 2016, when Gary Illyes of Google announced the mobile-first index, he also dropped a heavy hint that pub­lish­ers should look to sup­port AMP (Accel­er­at­ed Mobile pages). Of course, there are tools with GSC to help you assess AMP pages too, we have imple­ment­ed this at Smart Insights and have some encour­ag­ing ini­tial results and have found the trou­bleshoot­ing infor­ma­tion use­ful.

5. Image search­es.

A blog post on For­rester once said that images or video were one of the eas­i­est ways to get a page one list­ing on Google. Well, I wouldn’t go that far since they only tend to work in some cat­e­gories, such as fash­ion, hol­i­day des­ti­na­tions or pro­fes­sion­al B2B ser­vices. We have found in the B2B cat­e­go­ry, that visu­als are a great way to attract vis­i­tors look­ing for visu­al expla­na­tions of con­cepts. Although it’s not well-known, GSC Search Ana­lyt­ics gives infor­ma­tion too on how impor­tant image search­es are — check how impor­tant they are for your busi­ness.

So, these are just some of the tech­niques we use when tak­ing time out to review the effec­tive­ness of SEO using Search Ana­lyt­ics in GA. I hope it encour­ages you to take anoth­er look if you don’t use these tools.