If you know a little about content marketing, then you know that the more relevant content you provide to potential customers, the more likely they are to find your site in the searches.
But how do you know what content is important to your target market?
The answer: look to Google Analytics.
If you aren’t currently taking advantage of this free website tool, it’s time to get started. It’s easy to set up and the amount of information it provides about how your website is performing is invaluable.
If you do have GA set up on your site – good for you! You’re one step closer to pinpointing keywords and content areas that your prospects are looking for.
So how can you give your SEO a boost? By paying attention to a few key reports.
Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages
Note: You need to make sure your site’s been added to Google Search Console in order to view this report. Read our post on powerful SEO ranking factors to find out how to do this.
What is it?
This report shows the top pages through which visitors entered your site, as well as how many impressions (the number of times they appeared in a search) they received.
Why is it important?
- Find out which of your pages are ranking well in the searches. Try to figure out why and then use the same tactics on other pages that aren’t ranking as well.
- It’s likely that you’ll notice trends in the subject matter or type of information most frequently accessed on your site. Hone in on popular topics and focus on producing and promoting more content in these same areas.
- Discover which of your pages are viewed the most infrequently, and either weed them out, or make content or keyword improvements.
Acquisition > Search Console > Queries
What is it?
This report can be extremely eye-opening as it displays the actual search queries that users plugged into Google to trigger an impression on your site’s pages. It also shows the click-through rates for those particular pages and the average ranking position they held in Google search results.
Why is it important?
- If your average position is pretty high up on the list but the click-through rates are low, this could be an indication that you need to focus on rewording your meta descriptions to better engage users to click.
- Perform your own searches with these terms and do a little digging on your competition. Figure out what the highest ranked pages are doing to achieve their position.
- Now that you know what terms people are searching for, make sure you’re incorporating these terms into your content to boost your SEO in that area.
Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
What is it?
This report ranks the pages of your site by the number of times they’ve been viewed. Since one visitor can view a particular page more than once, the second column shows the unique pageviews, meaning it only counts one pageview per user.
Why is it important?
- Find out what the most popular pages are on your site and then make sure you take advantage of that prime real estate with your most important calls to action.
- If your most popular pages are blog posts on a particular topic, make sure to produce more on that same topic. And be glad to know that your content marketing is paying off!
- The average time spent on page is a helpful metric to use in order to determine if people are reading your content.
Of course, there are loads of other worthwhile reports available within Google Analytics. The beauty of it is that you can set up your own custom dashboard so that when you log in, you see all the data that’s most important to you.
Get all the important information you need, with no set up!
