How to use Google Analytics to Boost Your SEO?

One of the most valuable tools you can use to improve your SEO is Google Analytics. In addition to other things, Analytics can give you a lot of information related to the performance of your website in search engines. You can utilize  Google Analytics to discover pages that need to be improved, pages that are working superior than others and pages that need your immediate attention. If you are new to SEO, you will find the features of Google Analytics very useful and soon enough it will become one of your favorite tools. If you are utilizing Analytics for some time, it’s time to refresh your knowledge and utilize the power of its reports to improve your website’s SEO.

Analytics will tell you numerous  things about your website including:

• How much traffic you get and from where
• What pages they visit and how to what extent they spend on each page
• Which pages they visit before they exit
• Which catches get more snaps and what they do next
• Which part  of your traffic converts (performs an action that you want them to do)
• How many clients are on mobile, tablets or desktops
• Where your clients are located (countries) and what software they use to browse your website.

More advanced users can take it a step further and do customer segmentation, run experiments and a bunch of other things that the powerful Analytics platform provides to marketers. Google enables you to relate your Google Analytics account with your Search Console account. This is very helpful since you can see analytics data in search console and the other way around. Login to your Google Search Console account and snap “Go to the Old Version”, from the bottom left corner. You need to do this since this feature is not yet available to the new Google Search Console.


Select your website from the list and click the settings icon (top right) and select Google Analytics Property. Select which website to associate to the console account and click SAVE.

One of the primary motivation to utilize Google Analytics is to analyze your traffic and settle on choices that can potentially improve your website’s ranking position in Search Engines.One of the metrics you need to check normaly is how much traffic you get  from search engines and in particular Google. You can discover the answer in the ALL TRAFFIC reports. As an initial  step select ACQUISITION > ALL TRAFFIC > CHANNELS and set the date range from the top right date dropdown. What this report demonstrates is a synopsis of all the sources that brought traffic to your website. To visually observe the contribution of organic traffic to total traffic, check the box next to organic traffic and click PLOT ROWS. To drill down further and see from where exactly your traffic is coming from, select SOURCE / MEDIUM from the left menu . Next click on “Google / Organic”. This is how much traffic you received from Google Organic Search for the specified period.

Why is this report important for SEO?

You can utilize  it to follow on a daily basis how much traffic you receive from the various search engines and monitor your performance after some time. If you notice any big drops traffic it implies  that you lost part of your rankings and you can do a deeper investigation to find out the reasons and exact keywords / pages. Another useful metric that can help you improve your SEO is knowing which pages on your website get the most visits.

You can view this by selecting BEHAVIOR > SITE CONTENT > ALL PAGES. Besides seeing the page views that each page gets, you can also see the time they spend on your website, the bounce rate and the percentage of users that exit your website after viewing the particular page.

Google analytics is a must have tool for every seo expert. Regardless of whether you have a blog, corporate site or online store, Google analytics can reveal to  you a lot of things about your website that you wouldn’t know otherwise. Analytics is a free item  and the installation on your website is very easy. After you install it wait for a couple of  days to gather some data and then start learning more about your website by experimenting with the different reports. If you are a beginner to Analytics and digital marketing and find all the options confusing, don’t worry things will get much simpler once you master the essentials. Familiarize yourself with the reports explained above and then gradually try to explore more reports and options. Don’t forget to set up your goals so that you can use the data in the reports in a more efficient way, always having in mind that your ultimate goal is to grow your website’s traffic, increase conversions and improve the user experience.