Today we're going to talk about Google Analytics and its use for SEO.

Contents

Google Analytics: what is it?

To begin with, remember that Google Analytics is nothing less than THE official free service Google offers to analyse a website’s or an application's audience. It collects information about users and their actions thanks to a small code added on the site's pages. And this information is crucial to understand what works or not on your site!

Its use has now become necessary as Google has and still continues to work tirelessly to make new improvements. You can find many online training courses for Google Analytics, however, try to choose the ones certified by Google.

Google Analytics

How to use Google Analytics for SEO?

From an SEO point of view, several relevant information can be found on Google Analytics about:

Audience

How did they find you? What keywords did they search for? With your Google Analytics account, you can also see the number of unique users who visit your site, the total number of logins on your site (and thus how many times on average users come back), the average time spent on each session, the volume of organic traffic...

You can even access some demographic data such as age and gender. This will be very useful to segment your audience and thus perhaps adapt your editorial line or the format of your articles. Be careful though, you'll need to have a significant amount of traffic before you can have sufficiently reliable statistical estimates.

Google Analytics

Acquisition channels

What is the breakdown of traffic on your site? What are the respective shares?

  1. Organic traffic, i.e. traffic from your SEO.
  2. Direct traffic, which is the traffic generated by Internet users typing the URL directly into the search bar or clicking on their favorites tab. These visitors are the ones who like you the most!
  3. Referral traffic, which is all the visits obtained thanks to links on other sites pointing to yours. This is excellent news.
  4. Social traffic, composed of visits generated from your social accounts.
  5.  And finally email traffic, generated by links to your site in your email campaigns.

Google Analytics

Website performance

On the tabs "Behavior" and "Conversions" you will find all the information necessary to analyze the actions that visitors take once they are on your site. How long do they stay? How many leave before clicking on another page? How many subscribe to your newsletter or check your price list?

You will be able to verify that your commercial objectives (defined beforehand) are well and truly reached. Thus, you will be able to better understand where your traffic comes from and so that you can fine tune your marketing actions.

Google Analytics

All these KPIs are very useful to refine your web marketing strategy and justify the massive use of Google Analytics by the whole world. Some SEO solutions even plug into Google Analytics in order to provide the most reliable elements possible.

What's next ?

Find out now how to add a user on Google Analytics to optimize your natural SEO.

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   Article written by Louis Chevant

Further reading

The complete guide to using the Google Search Console

Google Search Console: free tool provided by Google to analyze the SEO performance of your website.