How SEOs Should Use Google Analytics

Key Takeaways

google analytics has dozens and dozens of reports but as a seo what reports should you be looking at hey everyone i'm neil patel and today i'm going to break down the basic reports that you should be looking at as a seo now before we get started make sure you subscribe to this channel and if you're on youtube click the alert notification now of course the first thing that everyone knows to look at if your seo is your conversion rate if you have goal tracking setup in place great if you don't no worries you can always end up setting it up but all you do is go on the left side you click on conversions you click on overview and boom you can end up seeing your conversions for whatever you may be tracking or you may not be tracking and i recommend just set it up and you can end up seeing what's converting what's converting by channel what's working what's not um here's the example of goal completions that's idea of hey what's working what's not what pages are and what you need and fixing that's great for seo but what most people aren't looking at and this is where i would start off with in your google analytics account is your week over week results so here's what i mean by that right so if i click on real time overview you'll end up seeing all right how many people are coming to my website right now if i end up clicking on the home button you'll see a screen like this which has a combination of real time and your traffic more so week over week and you want to see how you're doing week over week and don't just look at it as pure traffic look at it from a country specific traffic or or seo specific sort of traffic and here's what i mean by that so i get traffic from all around the world just like i'm assuming you do as well whether your website's just in english or multiple languages like mine you can still get traffic from all over the world for example in english there's people who visit my site from the uk or from the us or from india for example or even canada or australia now my ad agency neil patel digital at the moment we don't have offices in all those countries so for example if we get more uk traffic although i love it and eventually we'll expand there it doesn't necessarily really help us so one thing i like doing is looking at how i'm growing or not growing week over week within the specific regions that i'm targeting so i'm going to compare march 18th to march 11th as you can see i'm getting more traffic seven point twelve percent so not too bad but if i scroll down and i click on country under demographics you can see all right united states great i'm getting more traffic this is one of the main areas that i want more traffic from and i then go back i change the march 11 date which i selected to compare to and then i'll click on the fourth right so i'll just go up and i want to see how i'm trending seven percent more traffic united states a little bit more traffic not much more and i'll go and do that and i'll start going you know week over week that specific day and you'll notice a trend here down 5.18 percent right in the united states traffic even though total more traffic down the united states 17 up 9 but down again in the united states right and i'm going to keep going back and you'll notice that over the last 30 days i'm starting to lose more and more traffic from the united states now you know at first you may freak out and he was like wait what that's something's going wrong because what most marketers do is they just look at the total traffic and they're not looking at the total traffic that they can convert or qualify traffic so i'm getting more traffic from brazil we do work in brazil so that's great but i still generate more income from the united states due to the currency exchange so i want to focus on the regions that are making me the most right which would be in this case united states i'm not saying that other countries aren't amazing i'm just saying it happens to be where we tend to just generate more revenue from the united states if you have access to multiple google analytics properties which i do and if you don't you should talk with other members within your community this is one of the big things that people should do is they can go look at other sites or talk to other people and see how they're doing week over week so here is me comparing my site march 18th versus february 10th i'm going to do the same thing for crazy egg in which i click the compare button right in the date range so 18 to february 11th um and let's see if i click the 18th to february 11th you want to make sure it's the same day week over week so if it's a thursday you need to compare to thursday and if you look at that the united states down 12 down for me six percent on both sides uh and when i do this for crazy i'm gonna compare you know even like the 25th to the 18th 25th is a thursday just making sure down 12 uk 11 this has been happening for a lot of the sites in the marketing niche and i know a few other players in the marketing niche some are not direct competitors some are just software solutions or you know in other verticals marketing or just blogs that just give you information but by asking people this and comparing that's one of the first things that you should do to see how you're growing week over week because it's deceptive if you look here at needlepotential.com you see a total number of users increasing which is great but if i'm losing traffic in the main region that i care about you know most markets report hey we're up 12 well you're kind of down in the main region that makes you money so that's kind of all that matters the next thing i want you to look at is your overall search traffic and i want you to do it in two ways so the first is i want you to just go to acquisition campaigns organic keywords and you can see how your search traffic is doing again on a regular basis and the higher it goes the more up it goes the better off you are that's a good trend to look at and i recommend looking at this over time and extending it out so let's say look at it for you know the last six plus months i recommend you look last year so and you just want to make sure overall you're increasing which seems pretty healthy in a positive direction but as you scroll down and i want to do this on purpose and i added a lot of dates or a long date range because you can see there's a lot of junk traffic this really isn't search traffic so another thing that i recommend that people do is go to their search console and i'm loading it up here may take a little bit just because of a lot of data and see how you're performing within search console so let's say i do last 12 months because as i mentioned i recommend that you check out the last year and you can see this you know similar to what i ended up showing in analytics it's increasing which is good search console tends to remove all that junk bot traffic but i also recommend you filter by the country so you click on new click on country and you click on united states or any country that you're targeting typically that list that's ordered the ones at the top is where you get the majority of your search traffic as you go down on the list you'll get less and less as you can see here my united states traffic you know for the last year or so it climbed up but this was during you know when kovid was really booming um or first coming around so it was during that down period if i extended a little bit more out you can see how during that coveted period i started losing a little bit of traffic um and i'm just extending it a little bit so you can end up seeing but yeah so a little bit better than kovid then uh once everyone started working from home traffic boom then started flattening out started going up and then started flattening out again i do think some of the reasons why my decline right now is industry related uh and some of it is not really seasonality but quote unquote external factors that i can't control like a lot of people staying at home due to coronavirus um so those are some of the reports that i would first look at another report that i like looking at is real time and if you have enough real-time traffic you can click on real time then content you can see where majority of the people are spending their time another report that i like looking at is as a seo is your overall traffic if it's coming from desktop or mobile because if you're monetizing your traffic and you have elements for conversion optimization you have to check to just make sure that you're doing it for all the mobile stuff as well because on my mobile site i had conversion optimization elements but then when i was looking at my real time i realized that most people are actually looking at my amp pages look at this slash amp slash amp slash amp and i didn't actually monetize my amp pages because here's what they look like i'm going to pull up my this is my desktop device but i can show you what an amp page looks like by just putting slash amp on the end of my urls so here's example of one of my blog posts and here's what i look on desktop with amp though which is where a lot of people were coming to it was just basic and there was no monetization it was just the content so i wasn't actually making much money from my mobile traffic even if it was coming from the united states and from that i learned that hey i should put some top bar to monetize so i put that call to action that slides with you and i put a bottom one and this says click to get more traffic and if someone clicks it just takes them to my consulting page but i did that and i started generating more conversions from mobile as but specifically my mobile seo traffic but those are some of the places i would start off with within your google analytics conversions everyone should already have set up if you don't have that setup i recommend that you set it up and then the rest you can check out and start looking at some of those reports the big one to really check out as a marketer and seo is the week over week and specifically how you're doing week over week during that same day and how you're doing so you would compare let's say thursday to thursday and you look at it based on regional based traffic which is where you're making your money from if you need help with your analytics check out my ad agency neil patel digital if you enjoyed this video like it share it tell the people about it and sorry for the background noise i have a baby and during covid uh i don't want to tell my baby to be quiet because i would feel that's a little bit rude on mine and i love my child so thank you very much and again if you have any questions leave a comment if you enjoy the video like it share it thank you for watching