When I started working with Nurture3, my previous role was that of a team leader which meant only executing the plan and strategies set by my manager or the client. Then I had the opportunity (and the challenge) of doing everything as an SEO manager.
When you’re heading an SEO department from the beginning, your major roles will include establishing procedures from keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and analysis.
Building the benchmark, a.k.a. KPI’s, for your SEO campaign is a process you should not miss. You can’t improve what you can’t measure – that’s a constant reminder by the analytics experts in the industry. With the onset of personalized search and now Google Instant, search engine rankings alone are not effective KPI’s anymore.
There are a number of KPI’s you can establish to measure your SEO campaign. We’ll start with organic traffic and conversions.
Luckily Google Analytics allows you to create custom reports according to your data needs. Let’s go through creating one step by step.
Custom Reporting can be accessed through the left side panel once you log into Google Analytics.
You can create / edit custom reports in this interface.
Once inside, there are 2 parts that you’ll have to fill in – Metrics and Dimensions. Metrics and Dimensions are the building blocks of every Google Analytics report. For those of you who are still new to these elements of Google Analytics, you can have a quick start guide here.
For the purpose of this post, we’ll go directly to the custom report for SEO analysis, here’s an example from one of my projects:
This report prioritizes goal completions (conversions) and organic traffic (visits). Although you can add as much data as you want (provided your dimension/metric combination is correct). For me, I’ve added conversion and bounce rates because it’s also important for me to know whether a certain traffic source is efficient or not for a given time.
You can drill down on your dimensions to view the sources for each medium and you can even view the keywords for each search engine source.
Once you have decided on your metrics and dimensions, please don’t forget to name your report and save.
With the settings above, you can have a report that would look like this:
I did a comparison between the previous and the current 3 months of our SEO campaign for this project and I can proudly say we have been successful!
One important reminder: before relying on the accuracy of your Analytics data, please tag your URL’s properly for each campaign, giving you the accurate categories (cpc, organic, direct, referral, email), for your traffic. Here’s a good post from Ian Lurie of ConversationMarketing.Com regarding Google Analytics Tagging.
If you have any other custom / special reports for your SEO KPI’s, give us a shoutout!
Measuring SEO Through Google Analytics Custom Reports is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO