Think you know all there is to know about your website? Wrong. If you’re a webmaster that is currently using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics (if you’re not, you should be!) then you are open to a vast amount of important data about your website to help you identify problem areas. If you’re very new to SEO or have been dabbling in SEO yourself for a while, your knowledge may be outdated and no longer useful, potentially causing you to damage your own success. The truth lies in the metrics!
Every business will have different KPIs and business goals, but no matter what your aims you should be monitoring these statistics to ensure you are getting the most out of your website and digital marketing efforts.
Site Speed Suggestions
Did you know you can see site speed information using Google Analytics? Sometimes we get focused on designing our websites purely for visual appeal when large images and other elements can be detrimental to site speed and performance. If you have created specific landing pages for SEO, PPC or other marketing activity that contain a lot of imagery and JavaScript elements then you will likely find that the speed of these pages will be a lot slower than basic pages such as your contact page. Under ‘Behaviour’ in Google Analytics, navigate to Site Speed Suggestions under the Site Speed drop down. This will show you your most viewed pages and their corresponding average load times as well as a score out of 100. You can find suggestions for each page by clicking ‘X total’ which will open a new window to Google Page Speed Insights.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console data is now fully integrated into Google Analytics. You can now see a combined set of data for your top landing pages of both Google Search Console and Google Analytics data! Four new essential metrics to give you all the information you need in one place. With the addition of impressions, clicks, CTR and average position you can see how your pages are performing organically and if any changes need to be page to encourage users to click through.
Assisted Conversions
If you have different marketing efforts, online, offline or both, it’s essential know where your traffic is coming from and if it’s converting. Seeing which channels are providing us with the most traffic and conversions will help you define the importance of each channel in terms of ROI and profit. Assisted conversions are commonly overlooked because in Google Analytics reports Google automatically assigns the value of a conversion to the last channel the user entered your site from. Which is great if you want to see which channel is closing the most leads, but what about which channel is bringing in the most leads? Whilst Google automatically reports last click interaction, you can also see the first click interaction i.e. the first channel which the user entered your site and started the buying process. For example, if an online user first entered your site directly, then visited your site via a PPC ad then finally converted on your site after clicking through from via social media, the attribution for that conversion in terms of first click interaction would go to Direct. In terms of last click interaction, it would go to social media. In the below screenshot example below we can see that Organic was the first channel users visited via which led to 1133 conversions, and 822 conversions also occurred from the Organic medium when it was the last channel users visited via.
Things to remember…
- Relying on outdated and incorrect knowledge of SEO and digital marketing can be damaging your online presence and putting you behind your competitors. We recommend hiring a trusted SEO agency that have a vast amount of knowledge and keep up to date with the latest developments in SEO.
- Google automatically reports conversions from the last click, if you’re looking to see which channels are bringing in the leads initially you will need to look at first click conversions
- Imagery and JavaScript can be detrimental to your site speed and should be used sparingly