You’re already looking at organic traffic, open rates, and keyword rankings in your SEO analytics. You know that Google Search Console and your keyword research tool have many more capabilities than you’re using them for.
But at the rate your days fly by, going deeper with your analytics just hasn’t been a priority.
There are some simple, advanced SEO analytics techniques you can start using right away to tighten the ship and get more juice from all your SEO efforts.
Below, we explore several techniques in-depth and offer actionable steps for implementing your data.
Let’s get straight to it.
Set goals for your SEO analytics
Before you begin any SEO analysis, it’s important that you figure out what your goals are.
I’m not going to lie. It’s intimidating out there. Many brave marketers have lost their nerves clicking around the seemingly endless layers of data offered by Google, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and the like.
If you go in without a goal, you’ll start thinking, “We already know how to get the data we really need; we don’t need all this,” and back out.
Like any of your marketing efforts, good results start with good planning.
So take a few moments to ask yourself some questions before you go data deep-diving.
- What critical metrics are missing from our reports?
- How much time do I have to devote to analysis?
- What SEO analytics tools do I have available?
- What KPIs am I trying to move the needle on?
- What SEO issue am I trying to solve?
- What am I trying to achieve?
- What do I most want to know?
I suggest physically writing down these questions and your answers. Get a clear road map in your head. Then, hang it up in your line of sight for easy reference. When you feel like you’re beginning to lose your way in a sea of data, refer back to it to keep you on track.
Advanced SEO analytics techniques and data-driven solutions
Once you have your goals in place, you’re ready to start. As you begin sorting through data and learning more SEO analytics techniques, remember to filter the information through the lens of your goals.
Data is only helpful if you can use it to build roads to your goals, not to sidetrack you into a void.
With that in mind, let’s explore our first SEO analytics technique.
Analyze impressions vs. clicks
Analyzing impressions vs. clicks will help you see what content is being seen but not clicked.
This is a great way to see content that is currently underperforming but has the potential for more organic traffic.
To do this, navigate to Google Search Console. Next, select Performance. Scroll down until you see a table of keyword queries with “Clicks” and “Impressions” on the far right, as seen below.
Image provided by author
In this example, we’re looking at the performance of a website that sells books. When filtered by the greatest number of impressions, you’ll see the top query of “book date ideas” has about a 6.5% conversion rate.
However, if we filter by clicks, we see that the query “date night with a book” has 1,098 impressions but only 1 click.
Image provided by author
This tells us that people searching for books for date nights saw the blog post from our example 1,098 times, but only one user was compelled to click.
The most apparent reason for this is that the content’s title and metadata don’t contain enough information to suggest to 1,097 people that the blog post contained what they were looking for.
Adding this keyword to the body of the text and viewable metadata in search engines can close the gap between impressions and clicks.
Do the same for your marketing efforts. Dive into your top queries and filter by clicks. What long-tail keywords can you integrate into your SEO strategy for those pieces to boost your click-through rate?
Audit your backlink SEO analytics profile
According to Ahrefs, your site’s backlink profile is an important SEO analytics factor because a healthy backlink profile proves to Google that your site has authority.
The more backlinks you earn from sites with high domain authority, the greater the authority of your own site becomes in the eyes of search engines and the higher your ranking potential becomes.
Backlink checkers are a feature in most keyword research tools, but you can also use Ahrefs’ free backlink checker to analyze your website.
This report shows you key metrics like referring domains and site authority. You can also see more granular data like anchor text, decreased and increased links over time, and broken links.
Ideally, your audit will reveal your backlink profile is in good health. But there are several things you can do in places where it is lacking.
Make original images
Include original images in your content. Do not use illustrations. Instead, create data-driven, helpful content that is visually appealing and easily shareable.
The purpose of this is to earn backlinks. Say you have surveyed your user base and found several statistics that interest others in your industry.
For instance, you found that 42% of your users said they think they only use a small fraction of the power of their CRM platform.
You can visually represent this statistic and include it in a relevant blog post. You know you have a valuable, shareable marketing asset that others in your industry will gain from linking to (they build trust with their audience while giving you a backlink).
Track down unlinked mentions
Unlinked mentions are when publishers have mentioned your brand or service but did not link to your site.
This is a low-cost way to get backlinks from a warm lead who already likes your brand enough to mention you in their content.
The task on your end is simple.
Set up a Google Alert for mentions you want to be notified about. This can be your brand name, your founder’s name, the name of your product, etc.
Google will notify you whenever these topics are mentioned. You set the parameters of from where and how often.
Next, when you get a Google Alert, send a message to the publisher with a link to the webpage you were mentioned on and ask for a link.
Remove bad links
A “bad” link is a broken link or a link that leads to outdated or (worst case scenario) false information.
Bad links harm you as much as good links help you.
Run a report for broken links and anchor text during your link analysis. Remove any broken links and update the anchored text for relevance and optimization.
During content updates, make it a regular part of your quality checks to check every link to ensure the content it links to is relevant, timely, and factually accurate.
Scour demographic data
“A friend to all is a friend to none,” as the old adage goes. In marketing, this applies when you fall into the trap of being too much of a generalist.
This approach works if you sell something everyone needs, like food or toilet paper, things every human on earth needs to live a healthy life.
But digital B2B products are not very high on the hierarchy of human needs. So trying to appeal to everyone in your market is a big mistake.
Research shows that niche websites experience 35% more engagement than general sites, and 60% of users return to them because they find value in niche content. So, niche down.
The first step to doing this is scouring your demographic data.
You can drill pretty far into demographic data on Google Analytics. You can look at:
- Interests
- Language
- Country
- Region
- Gender
- City
- Age
Additionally, your CRM is a goldmine of leads, current customers, potential buyers, churned customers, and warm customers.
But just having this data and tracking it in a report isn’t enough to move your business forward meaningfully. You need to use this data to create niche content and a targeted user experience to move the needle.
Let’s look at an example.
Let’s say you’re a B2B company offering HR training and consulting services. Up until now, you’ve focused your content on general HR issues. You have a robust bank of content pieces using SEO best practices, but engagement is stagnant and not converting.
You dive into your data in Google Analytics and your CRM.
You discover that your average user is 30-45 years old.
You also discover that most leads come from businesses with under 50 employees in blue-collar industries.
Suddenly, it all makes sense. Your thorough blog posts on setting up an Applicant Tracking System and navigating complex video interview software aren’t going to appeal to these business owners. Their needs are smaller and more urgent.
So you change tactics. You start to focus on the HR needs of small blue-collar businesses in your content strategy by:
- Developing practical, easy-to-read guides on specific small business issues
- Creating a monthly newsletter called “Simple HR for Small Businesses.”
- Running Google Ads targeted to 30-45-year-olds with an interest in entrepreneurship
Suddenly, your content is converting! There’s a parade in the streets and fireworks in the sky! You’ve done it!
Making the data work for you, generating reports and extrapolating hypotheses on pitch decks may make marketing meetings feel productive. But until you apply SEO analytics to your content marketing strategy, conversion rates will stay low to non-existent.
Do a thorough content audit
You’ve probably done a content audit before with different goals. When doing an SEO content audit, look at more technical aspects of the data.
Here are some examples:
Keyword cannibalization
Export and analyze the primary keywords of all your content. If you find two or more nearly identical, combine the two. Focus on the piece with the best SEO performance, and add any valuable content from the others so that they are consolidated into one piece.
If duplicate content is published with the same keywords, they are fighting one another for traffic, hurting your rankings.
Metadata
A metadata “tag” is a bit of HTML used to tell Google’s crawlers what your content is about. The meta title and description tag are among the first things Google encounters. This means ensuring the optimization of each piece of metadata is precisely dialed in is essential for good conversion rates.
I have seen a piece of underperforming content improve its organic traffic by 30% literally overnight merely by optimizing its meta title.
In your content audit, ensure every webpage and post has a meta title and description, follows best practices, and is fully optimized.
Traffic drops
Analyze keywords’ historical search engine performance and note any traffic drops. Investigate why these keywords lost traffic. If the search queries have fallen, the keyword has simply fallen out of popularity, and you can research to see if an equivalent with a higher volume can be found.
If it’s because your competitors have taken them, you have some work to do. You need to outwrite your competitors by offering more value. Either way, this SEO analysis will show you how to stop the organic traffic hemorrhage of lost relevant keywords and restore previously high-performing ones to their former glory.
Make your data work for you
SEO analytics data is abundant and accessible to every modern marketer. However, understanding what to do with all of the information is often an obstacle.
Understanding your goals and what you’re looking for is the pivotal first step to deep-diving into SEO analytics. Next, use your goals as a roadmap for finding and interpreting your data.
Many aspects of SEO analytics can be overwhelming, especially for marketers who do not consider themselves analysts and struggle to understand how to implement data into actionable strategies.
That’s where we come in.
We are a #1 ranked link-building agency trusted by hundreds of brands like Preply and ActiveCampaign to reach their SEO goals. Our strategies are quality-focused, content-driven, and effective.
We’d love to chat and learn how we can best help your business succeed.
Book a call with an expert, and let’s get started!