Using SEO data in Google Analytics to develop useful web content

Google works by indexing your web-pages and then retrieving them when someone queries Google. Coming up on the first page of Google is Search Engine Optimization (SEO),very important in digital marketing.Thus, if you are a flower seller with a website and a lot of description of each flower bouquet, Google would index your content around these offerings.In addition, if you had a blog that, for example, talks about different offerings for the upcoming Valentine Day (February 14)  and later Mothers’ Day  (May 10)- your content would be indexed against queries like ” new flower ideas for Valentine Day.”

In other words, depending on the content and words in your existing website content, Google produces the best results it can. Sometimes the results can be funny. Google Analytics data of a website revealed that the search query ” (name of executive) wife” was returning results that combined (name of executive)+ wife  merely because the word “wife” appeared in an unrelated page of the website. The content had nothing to do with the combination “name of executive+wife”. However,results are always getting better with Google.

So how do you check what SEO is working for your existing web content? Login to Google Analytics and on the left hand tabs go to:

Acquisition–> Search Engine Optimization–>Queries

Within “Queries” you will find columns named:

|Query|      |Impressions|     |Clicks|     |Average position|    |CTR|

All of these columns can be sorted in ascending/descending order and a great first step is to sort the “Average position” column with minimum on top. If you have “1”  as average position then for that particular query on Google , if you have “2” then for that particular query your pages come in at no. 2 and so on. You can have fractions like 2.6 in average position, given that this is an average reporting column.

Upon sorting the “average position” column, you need to look at the impressions column. The impressions column tells you the number of times your page was shown by Google for that particular query. Why was Google trying to show your page?… well because your related content in the past was helpful to prior web visitors.

The final step is to look for queries where average position is up  (i.e. 2, 1,…ie. the lower the number better), impressions are high but clicks are low. It means that based on your current content Google thinks that you might have good answers to the queries. If people are still not clicking, your content development has some great opportunity.

Upon reviewing these queries, you should get a few pointers as to where your content needs to be strengthened from an SEO viewpoint. The additional content you develop should be more useful to your web visitors. About StratoServe Digital Marketing Services.