SEO Analytics - Tracking Search Engine Optimization

April 16, 2008

SEO Analytics is a term that has to first do with the optimization of a website so that search engines can “crawl” the web pages in the website making them “search engine friendly”. Tracking how people come to a website, understanding their behaviours and developing based off of factual results is the main idea behind Analytics.

If you put the two terms together then you get “SEO Analytics” which is the combination of optimizing a website for search engines using both on-page factors and off-page factors combined with reporting of how the optimization is affecting the customers, viewers or whoever makes up your audience that comes to view your website and in turn creating an intelligence about the efforts of SEO and the facts of Analytics.

So what are some ways to track SEO Analytics?

Internal Site Search (aka “Site Search”) – This can show you how your customers search your website once they are on, what they are looking for and how long they spend looking for it. If you’d like to have a look at what kind of metrics are tracked by Internal Site Searches in Google Analytics, feel free to write my article about this.

Referring Sites - Tracking where traffic is being referred from can help you develop new areas of inbound links to your website.

Comparing Natural (Organic) vs. Paid search – This provides you a benchmark to see how your Search Engine Optimization compares to that of your paid efforts.

Keyword Lists – This is helpful because the keywords are provided from search engines like Google or Yahoo! And show you the terms, queries and phrases people use in finding a page on your website.

All of these areas are covered when you install a tool like Google Analytics or Microsoft AdCenter Analytics to track visitors that are coming to your website. They can influence the design, layout and flow of the website and allow you to see opportunities for your business just so long as you are looking for them.

Luc

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Posted by Lucas | Filed Under General, Google Analytics, SEO / SEM, Site Optimization, Web Analytics, Web Intelligence