The Art of SEO, 4th Edition

CHAPTER EIGHT

SEO Analytics and Measurement

An essential component of digital marketing is the tracking, measurement, and analysis of various data points via analytics and other data-oriented tools. These tools include traffic and performance analysis platforms, link analysis and discovery tools, keyword and topic research tools, and other systems designed to support your online marketing efforts.

Once you have selected the appropriate analytics and measurement tools to use in coordination with your SEO efforts, it is important to establish baseline measurements, with proper baselines accounting for as many variables as are applicable to your business and industry. These baselines can include metrics such as conversion rates by acquisition channel, conversion rates by content type, URLs sending organic traffic, indexing status, backlinks, and more. Benefits of these activities include:

• Quantifying organic search traffic by search engine

• Determining which site content areas are getting organic search traffic and quantifying this per area and per search engine

• Quantifying conversions, user behavior events, and other metrics search engines track

• Identifying poorly performing pages (e.g., low-converting, high bounce rate)

• Identifying best-performing pages (e.g., high traffic, high conversion rate)

• Tracking search engine crawler activity on the site

• Determining the number of indexed pages

• Determining whether the indexed pages are getting search traffic

• Determining ...