Tracking SEO success is quite possibly the most important element to know whether your SEO strategies are working or not. SEO company or newbies often seek to base the success of a campaign on surface metrics such as site rankings. High positions of the site in the search are good because they provide audience coverage, visibility and something more – traffic. Once upon a time, rankings and traffic were one of the main ways to measure SEO success.
Ranking and traffic is good, but if that traffic fails to convert, SEO becomes a source of negative ROI. You know this even if you haven’t tracked goals and conversions on your site.
What are your goals?
Goals in Google Analytics can vary. However, before you decide how to measure your goals, choose the goals that matter most to you:
- Conversions: sales
- Leads: applications (subscriptions), contact forms and
- User Behavior: Browsing Pages.
Think about what the task of your site is, why it was created. After you answer this question, you will have target indicators – KPIs .
Ecommerce Tracking
How to set up: Go to the Google Analytics interface by following the links Administrator- View settings- Ecommerce settings and enable tracking, then click the Next and Submit buttons.
Next, on Thank You Page – “Thank you for order” landing pages, it will be necessary to install an additional ecommerce tracking code.
For whom it applies: Mandatory for every site where there are transactions, it is important to track transactions and revenue growth. By digging deeper into the metrics, you can gauge successful transactions at the landing page or keyword level.
Understanding organic traffic, more than watching it perform well, is key to honing what helps you sell. Analyzing at a more granular level also allows you to look at landing pages in terms of conversion optimization.
Event Tracking
How to set up: additional code on text links, links in images and videos.
Who it applies to: Event tracking helps you get a better understanding of user activity/behavior on the site. Do you have a goal like a PDF download that you can’t track with standard tracking. Tracking events will help you understand how many of these goals are being achieved. Do you have multiple key call-to-actions and on your page that you want to track clicks? Are you participating in an affiliate program with an external site and want to see how many clicks are made on affiliate links? All of these situations are good for using event tracking.
Standard tracking targets
How to set up: This method is the simplest of the three to implement. Go to Admin – View – Goals in the Google Analytics panel, select the + PURPOSE button and just add the type of metric you want to analyze, whether it’s visitor-related goals or landing page URLs.
Who applies to: The goals above are the most commonly used values for this type of tracking. Do you have an application or subscription form on the site? Make sure you have a thank you page that can serve as a landing page. Do you have several different types of application forms? This is how you can use compound targets for complex forms if some types of leads have different values for your organization. Be careful because choosing the wrong target URL type can lead to inaccurate target tracking or be completely broken.
Do keyword analysis
A keyword analysis is another crucial step to SEO success in Google analytics. You can test each keyword ranking individually on search engine pages. With the help of Google analytics, you can examine the search market for your area by mapping keywords. What words and phrases do most people use when they Google for products or services that you and your competitors sell? This may sound impossible, but it is now possible with the help of Google analytics and other keyword tools.
Get started tracking!
This article is superficial – there are so many goals and conversions to track that once you learn the basics, the analytics options are endless for you. Hopefully all of this will help ensure that true securing your SEO investment has presented you with a new perspective on success.
I’ll keep here for myself a couple of useful links to articles that are more advanced and interesting than my clumsy translation.
