Here's How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Search Results Appearance

Published July 25, 2016 | Categories: SEO

It's not everyday that the SEO world catches a break from Google, but they've recently connected two of their greatest resources for us. You may have noticed a new tool in the  Acquisition section of your Google Analytics reporting - the Search Console Beta. This report closes the gap between Search Console and Google Analytics, providing a new level of insight into what's happening with your SEO efforts. Now, in addition to seeing the typical behavior and conversion metrics next to your landing pages, you can see the information that has been siloed in Search Console for years:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• CTR
• Average Position
• Sessions

Now, how do you leverage this data to improve your visibility and organic traffic? The simplest thing you can do is identify pages that aren't garnering the amount of clicks they should be. In the video below, I use advanced filters to show only pages with an average position on the first page of Google (by selecting less than 11) and also have a click-thru rate of less than 1.5%. Of course, you can set these thresholds to whatever you like, but this is a good starting point. In my opinion, any URL ranking on the first page of search results should have a pretty good CTR. Once you've filtered out the better performing URLs, you're left with a list of URLs that need some improvements. Export this list and make updates to your title tags and meta descriptions. It's helpful to run a few queries and see what other sites are showing up on the search results pages along with your pages. There's clearly something better about their results, so take a close look and see how you can out-write them with stronger title tags and meta descriptions. Don't forget to come back in a few weeks, or however long it takes to collect significant data, and conduct a before and after analysis on those URLs. *Take note, that the first thing I do is set the date range to include 90 days worth of data, but not the 2 most recent days. Search Console data lags a couple days and only back-logs 90 days' worth.