What is Google Analytics And How to Use it to Skyrocket Your SEO

Time and time again, we get the same question: What is Google Analytics and how can it help us?

According to a recent content marketing study, 96% of active bloggers have access to web analytics, while 58% of them check their analytics reports regularly.

That should come as no surprise…

Web analytics is an invaluable component of any webmaster’s toolbox. It maximizes your online success by allowing you to track your growth and optimize it. 

Now here’s the thing:

There are many analytics tools that can help you monitor your site performance. Yet, Google Analytics remains the best option due to its cutting-edge features and ease of use.

So in today’s post, you’ll learn the easiest way to set up Google Analytics and how to use it to track your marketing progress.

Let’s get started.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA) is a free web analytics platform developed by Google to help webmasters monitor their online site or app performance. 

Via Wikimedia Commons

The tool works by collecting data from your website and turning it into detailed reports. Which you can later use to gain in-depth information about your audience.

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics is all about accurately tracking every aspect of user behavior.  It uses a combination of Javascript codes to collect visitor information from the moment they enter your website until they leave it.

After you set up GA on your website, a tracking code will return that user data to the platform. Which will then be used to generate analytics reports that you can access through your dashboard.

What Is Google Analytics Used For?

As a leading web analytics platform, GA allows you to identify your ideal customers and learn their preferences. It also provides crucial insights into your marketing efforts and how you can improve.

By installing Google Analytics to your website, you can:

1- Improve Your SEO Plan

There are endless ways Google Analytics can help you boost SEO traffic. 

For example:

It allows you to identify the best and worst-performing pages on your website. Using such reports, you can create more of what’s working while you improve your bad content.

Now, as you may already know…

Not every pageview you get is of high quality. Some of your organic visitors are irrelevant and will leave within seconds of landing on your website. So by setting SEO-related goals, you can measure the quality of your visitors and compare that to your other marketing mediums. 

2- Understand Your Target Audience

You’ll learn a lot about your target audience and their needs by checking the Audience or Behavior reports in Google Analytics.

For instance:

You can see user demographics (including age, gender, and interests) locations, devices, and even their languages. You can also track user behavior for various pages on your website and identify differences.

These are all essential details that’ll help you make your marketing more focused on serving a specific audience.

3- Measure Paid Ads Campaigns

Although not directly related to SEO, paid campaign tracking is one of the most useful features Google Analytics has to offer.

When running paid ads, you can monitor keywords and conversions by adding a tracking tag to your campaign links. That helps you save money by focusing your advertising budget on better keywords that attract better quality customers.

How to Set Up Google Analytics for Your Business

One of the most outstanding things about GA is how easy it is to install it on your website. In fact, you’re now a few clicks away from doing it yourself even as a complete beginner.

First:

Go to the Google Analytics login page — then click Start for free to create a new account. Enter your Gmail account details or create a new one if you’re not already a user.

An account on GA could have more than one property. So you don’t have to create a new account each time you want to track another website. 

Next: 

Enter a name for your Google Analytics account, and click Next. 

Enter your site name, then click Next.

Choose your business details, then Create.

You’ve just completed the first step — which is creating an account. Now you’ll add your property and get the tracking code to start monitoring.

Once you’re in, you have to choose the type of platform you want to track — so click on Web to continue.

Next:

You’ll be asked to enter your site details before you can link it to your GA account. Do that while you leave your enhanced measurement settings as they are, then click Create stream.

You’ve added your website to Google Analytics and generated the measurement ID that does all the magic! Now, it’s time to code the tracking code and install it on your website.

To do that, scroll below on the same page and copy the HTML code you find in the Global Site Tag section below Tagging Instructions.

Finally:

All you have to do is paste the HTML code into the <head> section in your header file — and you’re done!

How to Install Google Analytics on WordPress

Want an even easier way to set up Google Analytics on your website?

We’ll walk you through the process…

To get started, install and activate MonsterInsights for free via the WordPress plugins library.

Once done, you’ll begin the setup process.

Click on Launch the Wizard.

Choose a category for your website, then Save and Continue.

Click on Connect MonsterInsights to log in to Gmail and allow the plugin to access your account. Be sure to choose the same account you used to log in to Google Analytics.

Select your property from the dropdown list, and Complete Connection. Then click on Save and Continue for all of the remaining steps.

And you’re all set! 

You can now track all user activity on your website and gain valuable insight on how you can improve.

Google Analytics Dashboard Explained

If this is the first time you use web analytics of any sort, you may find the Google Analytics dashboard a bit complicated. There are too many sections to explore and a lot of metrics to understand.

So we’ll break that down into the four basic sections you’ll need the most:

Realtime

Realtime is the first report you can access on the left-hand menu. It focuses on users who are currently browsing your website and monitors their instant activity.

This is especially useful for companies with huge traffic who intend to make changes and see how they affect their site performance. It’s also an excellent way to monitor traffic coming from new direct links or social media posts.

Audience

The Audience section is the go-to section if you want to dig deeper into your target audience. It shows important data about your visitors — such as unique users, sessions, page views, and bounce rate. 

You can generate graphic reports of those metrics for any chosen period beginning from the day you installed GA on your site. 

Acquisition

The Acquisition report tells you every detail you need to know about how users are finding your website. You can use it to identify your biggest traffic sources and optimize your digital marketing strategy. 

For example, you can see:

• Channels generating the most traffic to your site
• Top keywords and web pages in terms of ranking and traffic
• Best performing paid keywords and ad campaigns

Behavior

The Behaviour section is where you’ll assess the performance of different pages on your site and learn how visitors interact with them. It features many SEO metrics — including page views, session duration, bounce rate, and more.

For instance: 

You can learn how search users flow through web pages, which pages are keeping your visitors the longest, and which sections on your website have the highest exit rates.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a free tracking tool that’ll help you monitor almost any SEO metrics on your website. As a beginner, you can stick to the basics and focus on what we covered in this guide.

The setup process is simple and can be done within a few minutes on any platform. So, we recommend that you don’t manually inject the HTML code into your file — but instead use plugins or tools to avoid any errors.

Ready to grow your online brand with content marketing and SEO?

Learn more about how your website is performing in Google by generating your free SEO report card.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us or give us a call today at (949) 354-2574. We’d be happy to answer your questions and discuss your project needs.