There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy to optimizing SEO. Great SEO is built on implementation, data analysis, and iteration based on performance. That is why accurate measurement of relevant data is critical to building a strong, optimized, SEO strategy.  For our clients, our prefered platform for tracking SEO progress is Google Analytics. Most of the examples in this article will be based on our direct experience. We will discuss how we combine Google Analytics, RivalIQ, and MOZ to measure our SEO strategy, and will give a few tips on optimizing.

Track these 3 areas for better SEO

Types of traffic sources

• Direct Navigation

Direct Navigation occurs when a user navigates to a website directly through the browser address bar or bookmark. Unfortunately, Direct Navigation can occur any time Google Analytics cannot determine another referrer. Therefore, Direct Navigation data can be a really misleading metric. If a high amount of direct traffic is observed, I recommend reading this blog post on Megalytics, Understanding Direct Traffic in Google Analytics, for tips to help you clean up your Direct Traffic metric.

• Referral Traffic

As in, a visit that came to your site from sources outside of a search engine. Referral Traffic occurs when someone clicks on a hyperlink on another site, an email, or promotional links on ads.

• Search Traffic

A visit that comes from a user originating from any web search engine is considered Search Traffic. Wanting to optimize Search Traffic is usually what influences the decision to invest in SEO.

• Specific search engine terms and phrases

In order to identify new trends in keyword demand, we first gauge performance of our client’s current key terms, then we find terms that are potentially being under-optimized. As we pay attention to this metric, we keep track of keywords that send traffic to our client’s site on a regular basis.

If you would like to see exactly how how people are reacting to your site when it’s listed in search results, look at the Acquisitions section under Search Engine Optimization on Google Analytics.

We use the Queries sub-section to see what the top keywords are, and we highly recommend it. This will help you identify any key terms that are performing well on other sites that you may not be optimizing your site for. We use the search function to sift through the key terms section to find out if our clients are optimizing their sites by using the best key terms.

We stand behind the practice of using competitive analysis for digital marketing. It can be hard to determine benchmarks based on your own data, and most industries don’t publish their SEO analytics. Using competitive analysis is the best way to see if you are on track. One of the most useful tools for competitive analysis on the market is RivalIQ. Although they are known best for their social media competitive analysis, they are integrated with MOZ, a leader in SEO metrics.

Using RivalIQ’s landscape keywords metric gives us insight into areas where our client’s competitors are excelling, and it helps us determine where our clients may be falling behind.

Conversions and engagement

• Conversion rate by search query term/phrase

SEO isn’t just about driving more visitors to your website. Visitors don’t convert if they’re not the right visitors. It’s more important to drive quality traffic. You can measure quality traffic by reviewing your conversions and engagements.

It’s important to mention that a necessary part of measuring progress with SEO is having a conversion goal. Typical conversion goals include increasing sales, subscriptions, or downloads.

• User engagement

Using SEO tactics to increase search rankings should result in attracting more qualified engaged visitors. To gauge user engagement rates, measure the bounce rate, the average amount of pages visited, and how long visitors are staying on a page. If a user visits multiple pages and stays on your site for a significant amount of time, that is a good sign that your keywords are attracting the right visitors to your site, and that your site content is keeping them on your site. If you see a high bounce rate and low average time spent on your pages, that translates to low user engagement. If you have low user engagement on your site, that’s a sign that you need to optimize your search terms and/or improve the content on your webpage.

• Bounce rate

A high bounce rate can be due to poor website content, bad navigation and/or an overall poor user experience. Google pays attention to your bounce rate so it is an important overall SEO health metric to watch. Although your overall bounce rate is good to know (for optimization purposes) it’s important to determine your individual page bounce rates.

Tip: If you have a high bounce rate on a page (generally over 50%) here are a few recommendations to help lower it.

• Create a constant stream of fresh content on your site, optimized for relevant keywords.

• Use meta-data to accurately describe content for search engines.

• Address any confusing areas on the page by watching site heat maps. User heat maps will show you how your visitors are behaving on your site.

• Average time on page

It’s also important to review the average time spent on the page. It’s hard to make a blanket statement about what “good” or “bad” time on each page looks like, because individual websites and pages vary. Sometimes page content is really short because it addresses a very specific issue. If that’s the case, the visitor shouldn’t spend much time on that page. If your content is very long, like a long form blog post, the average time on page should be higher.

To get data for both bounce rate and average time on page from Google Analytics, go to the Behaviors tab. Drill down to Site Content, click All Pages, and view the full report to get the data you need.

• Pages visited

Focus your efforts on improving the visitor experience for the pages that are most often visited. If your key terms are performing well; make sure you’re not losing visitors once they land on your site! Optimize pages with high traffic by increasing site load speeds, cleaning up your site design, simplifying the content on these pages, as well as using the metadata on the page to accurately describe content.

Tip: You don’t have to undertake an entire website re-launch to refresh your high traffic landing pages, cleaning up the most-visited pages is a great first step. Pages that receive the most traffic can be edited on both the front-end and backend to quickly optimize them in their current state until more extensive edits can be made.

To determine what pages are receiving the most traffic using Google Analytics, find the subcategory labeled Landing Pages under Search Engine Optimization.

What is not measured is not managed

If you aren’t measuring your SEO’s performance and progress, it is impossible to know if it is or isn’t working. You can spend an extraordinary of time and money on SEO strategy for your site and see little to no return on your investment if you’re not accurately measuring relevant data and iterating accordingly. There are many more metrics that can be measured and countless ways to optimize your site, but we recommend starting with the basics. Measure and analyze the above metrics and you’ll be well on your way to optimizing your SEO.