Using Google Analytics to Assess and Improve SEO

As all online retailers know, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for attracting traffic. More traffic leads to more sales, which makes SEO a worthwhile investment for all retail florists. But how do you know that your SEO strategy is working as well as it could?

Google Analytics can help you to assess your SEO campaign and work out how to improve it. Here is your guide to using Google Analytics to get your SEO strategy working as well as it possibly can to bring customers to your site.

SEO Reports

Google Analytics prepares SEO reports to help you assess the impact of SEO on your site. You can find SEO reports under the Traffic Sources tab on the left side of your dashboard. These reports use the following four metrics to tell you about how your site is performing.
  • Impressions: This metric tells you how often the various pages that make up your site appear in user-generated search results, letting you know how visible your site is to people searching for florists using your targeted keywords.
  • Clicks: This metric tells you how many people clicked on search results to reach your site.
  • Average Position: This metric tells you how highly your webpages are ranking in search results for your keywords. The lower this number is, the more visible your site is in Google’s search results.
  • CTR – The clickthrough rate is the number of clicks through to your site divided by the number of impressions, multiplied by 100 to express the CTR as a percentage.
So how can we use this information to improve SEO for a retail florist website? One good strategy is to identify the keywords that give the highest clickthrough rate, and focus attention on improving the average position of those results. This approach is efficient because it ensures you are optimizing your pages to target keywords that will deliver in terms of traffic and sales.
Keeping an eye on the SEO reports in your Google Analytics account also gives you early warning of your site slipping down the search engine rankings. Google loves fresh content, so you need to update the text and images on your site frequently. Adding a blog can be a great way to regularly add fresh content to your site. Use your blog posts to target keywords for which your site’s average position in the search engine results page is starting to slip.
Using Google Analytics to assess the impact of your SEO strategy is a smart move for your retail florist business. Google Analytics SEO reports deliver useful information that can help to move your site up the search engine results page so that more people can find your business.

15 thoughts on “Using Google Analytics to Assess and Improve SEO”

  1. vida_llevares

    Which metric do you think would be most predictive of traffic or success of a site?

  2. Good post. Google analytics is a great way to help you with SEO. Probably one of the most useful tools you could use to help with an online business.

  3. This is critical information. It’s actually pretty remarkable how many businesses (both large and small) don’t put in the time to maximize their SEO. By tracking some of the reports you outlined above, a company can learn where it needs to focus its efforts. The difference between #2 and #1 in Google’s rankings could be a major difference in revenue.

  4. I think you provided some really good tips to take advantage of the information that Google Analytics provides. If you take the time to study your statistics, you can use that to your advantage and make changes to your site and new content that you add. It’s not hard to install Google Analytics on your site, so I recommend it to all site owners.

  5. I do like the clickthrough rate count, thanks for letting me know how the algorithm works. I wonder how the metrics would be rated in order of importance?

  6. I agree that Google Analytics is great for checking how you’re doing, but I find their keyword tools and Google Trends better for improving SEO; you can keep up with recent search data, and then apply it to your ongoing campaigns, diversifying your keywords etc. I don’t like to stay too focused on an old set of keywords etc, since the market changes so quickly.

    Nice summary though.

  7. Google analytics is not only great for seeing which keywords provide the higher clickthrough % (the so called “buyer keywords”), but also discovery for new areas to focus on future campaigns by studying the long tail traffic.

    With enough digging, aggregation of data and synthesis into a usable campaign, you can have a data-driven content strategy that actually shapes your client’s site based on their niche’s demand.

    We always have to remember that the true value of SEO is never the volume of traffic, but that people using Google as a mechanism to achieve the purchasing goals it has already become short hand into the purchasing process in and of itself.

  8. This is very helpful information. In a way, it feels like you’re trying to move forward while looking in the rear-view mirror. However, the truth is, with the help of Google Analytics, you already know what keywords have successfully brought you visitors. Now all you have to do is expand on that. Genius.

  9. Great post! I don’t know were I would be without Google Analytics. I find this information very useful, thanks. I never really understood the clickthrough rate before. Your post has really helped me understand what Google Analytics is all about 🙂

  10. Great post! One tip though, just don’t go overboard with SEO tactics otherwise your website could be in trouble with Google and other major search engines that are starting to crack down on too much SEO used websites.

  11. Thanks for opening my eyes. I realize now that I haven’t been using Google Analytics to its fullest. Heck, I haven’t even used ten percent of the options available to me with this software. 🙂 I can’t wait to put to use some of these tips.

  12. RomanAnthonysMama

    You know, I’ve never even thought about using Google Analytics, but you may have sold me on it! I’d love to keep better track of who is viewing my writing and accessing it through search engines, so this seems like a great way to see where my activity is coming from!

  13. The thing with SEO is that newbies do it blindly. They start to build links and they cannot track what they are doing. They just blindly follow what the experts are telling them to do. Google Analytics is a nice tool that it can prepare SEO reports to help assess where you stand in your SEO campaign. This will give you an idea which keywords are working and give you a basis on how to proceed to maximize conversions. Overall, great article. Thanks you!

  14. Yes, this is a very good overview of Google Analytics and its capabilities. We really have no choice but to pay attention to the metrics to make sure we continue to rank well in the SERPs for the keywords we are targeting.

    I also find Google Analytics helpful to keep tab on the bounce rate. If a high percentage of visitors are leaving the site immediately — and even worse, hitting the back button and going back to the SERPs — this is actually detrimental to rankings. So it is good to monitor this and to keep working to increase the amount of time a visitor spends on the site. Offering engaging content, and interlinking — so as to increase page views — is a good strategy to use. But, as with everything, you don’t know if it is working unless you check the data.

  15. If you are targeting a specific location, it might also be a good idea to register a Google Webmasters account, and set a geotarget filter for your website.

    Also, while I agree with the fact that adding a blog to your florist business website can result in an increase of traffic as well as sales, it’s not true that Google likes fresh content and you need to update and edit the text and images on your site constantly.

    Matt Cutts, the head of the webspam team at Google, actually talked about whether freshness is an important ranking factor in one of his video, and he said that while there are search inquiries that deserve freshness (e.g. earthquake), there are other types of search inquires where freshness doesn’t matter at all. For an example, if you rank high for “florist in New York”, you don’t have to update your site to keep your site ranking high as that search inquiry doesn’t necessarily deserve freshness.

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