How do you do to detect leads and sales initiated and finalized thanks to the natural traffic of your site? Do you know how to use the data provided by Google Analytics to increase the share of sales generated by SEO and optimize your marketing budget and return on investment?
According to a survey published by
Google, 61% of marketers say they have difficulty using analytics data to
optimize marketing decisions. 26% attribute this difficulty to the lack of
skills to manipulate and interpret data from different traffic sources. In this
post, I explain how to use Google Analytics to identify sales and/or leads
generated by visitors who came through search engine optimization (SEO). This
information makes it possible to distribute the marketing budget in an
optimized way between the different sources of traffic.
What Method Do You Use to Analyze Your SEO Performance?
On the occasion of the online
publication of the new version of the guide to the 20 natural referencing techniques,
we conducted a survey of visitors to our site to find out "How do they
know the natural ranking of their site?”50% responded" I search my
keywords in Google "while the other half share the other two
responses:" I use Google Search Console "and" I use Google
Analytics ".
The method used by the majority is
to search for their keywords in Google to discover the natural positioning of
their site. This method is the least precise and the least reliable to check
SEO performance, for two main reasons. Google personalizes search results based
on browsing history. Therefore, your own hits to your site will artificially
increase its ranking because Google uses your browsing history as a ranking
factor. On the other hand, the ranking of your site in the natural search
results is not a relevant criterion for evaluating the achievement of the
objectives you are aiming for. Just because your website ranks # 1 for a
handful of keywords doesn't mean it will generate leads and sales. Ranking can
be a good measure of SEO progress over time, but it shouldn't be viewed as an
end goal. The goal is to generate more traffic and more conversions.
How to use Google Analytics to measure the part of SEO in the achievement of the site's objectives?
One of the optimization techniques
and best practices is to develop the content of each page of the site with
keywords associated with a unique theme. As a result, each page is identifiable
by a specific segment of keywords (long-tail terms from the single theme). The title and URL of the page also reflect the main theme of the page. This
information is useful in a context where Google hardly provides the keywords
that generate natural traffic. So to deflect this lack of information, we have
a solution. It consists in using the traffic arriving from natural sources
towards the pages of the site. This is where the use of Google Analytics
becomes useful and relevant.
To do this, you must first report
the natural SEO traffic to the landing pages. You can use the following frame
to extract the personalized Google analytics natural traffic report. You must
be logged in to your Google Analytics account. You will then have the option to
incorporate the report into the view of your choice of the property in question.
Create segments to identify sales
initiated and achieved through natural referencing of product pages. One of the
possible customizations of the natural traffic report that you just installed
using the link provided in the previous section is to create segments. Here are
some uses:
Segments allow us to group our
content based on a particular theme, and observe the performance of each group
or theme. For example, imagine that I want to know the performance of a
particular product category, such as "backpacks", or of a more
general category, such as "bags" in the case of the site whose data I
am studying. I can create precise segments very refined at a particular product
level or at the category level, depending on my need.
For this post, I chose to create a
custom segment to visualize landing pages through the natural traffic that
generated the viewing and purchase of "Bags" category products.
Here is the result I get. A first
interpretation can be expressed as follows: the home page, here identifiable by
"Home" is one of the landing pages of the traffic sent by the natural
results of Google. During the period concerned, It received 4304 visitors of
which 198 continued their visit to see and buy products contained in the
"Bags" category.
This type of analysis raises
questions about the natural visibility and the performance in terms of
conversion of the category page of the products concerned in order to optimize
natural referencing and, if necessary, intervene in other parameters related to
ergonomics and customer experience, for example.
Indeed, the declaration of the site
in this tool is one of the 50 essential steps of SEO optimization. It allows,
among other very useful features to comply with the site's optimization
criteria recommended by Google, to know the natural positioning of landing
pages in relation to the keywords for which it is optimized. Another advantage
is to be able to associate Google Search Consoles with Google Analytics and to
follow the details of natural traffic performance such as positioning, click
rate, number of clicks ... to improve the contribution of this channel, by
definition free, to conversions.