After a year of SEO under your belt, including onsite SEO changes, link building, content marketing, social media marketing and so forth, it’s always a good idea to get a sense of what kind of impact your efforts have had on your website overall. That’s where your Google Analytics account comes in handy. Provided you know what you are looking for, the data in Google Analytics can tell you just about everything you need to know about how your site has performed year over year with a full SEO campaign working in your favor.
Here are three data points to start with when comparing year over year data:
Traffic Overall
This is the highest data point you should look at when comparing year-over-year data in Google Analytics. The All Traffic tab will pull visitors from PPC, direct, organic search, social sources, referral links and more giving you an end-to-end view of your site. If the overall traffic is up from year to year than congratulations! But if it’s down that doesn’t mean your SEO campaign has failed you. For instance, did you cut back on your PPC budget this year as compared to last? That could mean several thousand fewer visitors overall which would make it seem like the second year was a loss. In reality, if PPC traffic is down but organic traffic is up I’d say that’s a big win! Those organic visitors probably cost a lot less in the long run and you saved by cutting back on your PPC budget. When you pull data from the All Traffic Tab make sure you look at each traffic source individually to determine where the real loses and gains were. If you look at each month (as opposed to each day) in the All Traffic tab you might also notice traffic trends. For instance, the year before one of my clients started investing in SEO their traffic would trend downward starting in August and then pick back up around January. But those same months a year later, thanks to SEO and content marketing, their traffic actually trended upward! In January of 2013 their traffic overall was up over 100% when compared to January 2012.
Organic Traffic Overall
If you’re looking to see the true impact of your SEO efforts, the place to look in Google Analytics is the Organic Search tab. This pulls data from Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and dozens of other smaller search engines people use. Again, if organic traffic overall is up congratulations! But if it’s down, then you have to drill down into the keywords. For instance, the same client I mentioned above had over 20% increase in traffic overall, but according to Google Analytics their organic traffic dropped 2% year over year. Does this mean their SEO campaign didn’t work? No necessarily. By looking at the keywords that drove traffic to their site I found that many branded keywords took a slight dip year over year, but the number of non-branded keywords and the number of searchers using those non-branded keywords to find their site had actually increased substantially. For instance, one branded keyword may have decreased -18.64% year over year but one non-branded keyword increased 199.12%. Another non-branded keyword increased by 1,020.00%. This tells me that although fewer people might be searching for their brand directly (resulting in that overall organic traffic loss), more unique visitors are finding their site organically and through many more non-branded keywords, which is exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with SEO.
Sometimes true SEO success isn’t obvious at first glance, which is why you have to actually interpret the data and not just print off reports for your managers without determining what those numbers really mean.
You can also hone in each individual search engine to see how Bing, Google, and Yahoo compare with each other. Maybe your site lost some ground in one but gained traction in another year over year.
Social Sources Data
Social media and SEO go hand in hand and social sources can provide just as targeted traffic as organic search can when handled properly. Under the Social Network Referrals Tabs in Google Analytics, you can get an idea of which social sites and communities send the most traffic to your site, as well as what pages they are landing on. What social sites send the most traffic to your site? Which social sites send the best traffic to your site? The two may not be the same. And if you promote your blog content heavily in social media don’t be surprised to see your social traffic spread out among across the blog and less concentrated on your homepage (which is the primary link for most of your link building activities).
For instance, year over year my client saw a 2,189.01% increase in traffic from LinkedIn, jumping from about 200 visitors to over 4,000 over the year. When I start digging through the analytics data from LinkedIn I can see exactly which blog posts were the most visited, the average time spent on site, average pageviews and so forth. This gives me a good idea of the kind of content that my client’s audience is looking for and responding well to, which can help me craft a more focused content marketing campaign in the coming months.
It’s very easy to get lost in Google Analytics if you aren’t careful, but it is also important that you take the time to go beyond the surface level of the data if you really want to understand the impact your SEO campaign has had year over year. Remember, the data is only as valuable as the person interpreting it so be sure you don’t take the numbers at face value without figuring out the whole story.