Store owners take note: Measure SEO easily with Google Analytics!

Download our free SEO dashboard into your Google Analytics account!

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, has always been a very cost-effective traffic channel compared to other performance channels such as affiliate, Google Ads or even price search engines. Admittedly, the costs for professional search engine optimization have risen in recent years, because the simple and cheap SEO tricks of past years no longer work or have become too dangerous. Nevertheless, SEO is still very popular because you often get more qualified visitors for your budget than with other channels.

Anyone who wants to be successful and sustainably ahead in Google today relies on technical optimization of the website, relevant content and spam-free link building. Thus, despite increased costs, inexpensive traffic and sales successes can still be achieved through search engine optimization today and in the coming years.

However, SEO budget is not always used wisely or cost-efficiently. Mistakes are made in optimization and link building. Inefficient and costly measures are implemented, and the traffic effects fail to materialize. It is optimized on irrelevant keywords, whereby one then hardly makes more revenue despite ranking improvements. Therefore, it is important to regularly monitor the SEO success. This is where the popular web analysis software Google Analytics comes into play, with which professional SEO controlling is very easy.

Why Google Analytics?

Many typical SEO metrics like domain popularity or visibility index are actually uninteresting for store owners. Many new backlinks (= higher domain popularity) do not automatically mean better Google rankings, and a higher visibility index does not always mean more visitors and more sales. What counts is what effect SEO actually has on the store:

• Do enough new customers come via Google?
• Do they make enough sales in the store?
• Do the SEO expenses “pay off”?

These and similar questions should be asked by online merchants when they spend money on SEO. Therefore, you should not rely on the third-party data of SEO tools, but only on data that is collected directly on your website. This data is provided by Google Analytics.

The problem of Google Analytics & Co: too complex

Webcontrolling makes sense, everyone agrees. Especially to keep an eye on channels that require larger budgets, like Google Ads, Affiliate or SEO. However, the modern web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, econda, etracker, etc. have very extensive functions, which unfortunately makes them too complex for many laymen for a quick overview. In practice, many get lost in this complexity. Often it is not clear where to click to get certain information. This quickly diminishes the pleasure of web controlling.

The solution: Dashboards!

This can be remedied by so-called dashboards, which are also made possible by Google Analytics. Dashboards simplify the powerful and complex Google Analytics and make it usable even for the web controlling layman. A dashboard is an overview page that presents selected data without going into too much detail – perfect for a quick overview.

The free SEO dashboard: “eology SEO Monitoring“

At eology, we have designed a special SEO dashboard for Google Analytics, the “eology SEO Monitoring”. It enables this just mentioned quick overview of the most important SEO metrics that you can capture with Google Analytics. And the best thing about it: Anyone can import it into their own Google Analytics quickly and free of charge using the following link. With eology SEO Monitoring, you can quickly get an overview of current SEO metrics and their development over time. We have developed our dashboard especially for the needs of online stores. It breaks down e-commerce data to the SEO channel, such as sales.

Installation of the dashboard

The installation of the dashboard is quite simple. After you access the link, Google Analytics will ask in which profile you want the dashboard to appear. After selecting and confirming a profile, the dashboard will be installed in seconds, and Google Analytics will direct you to view the new dashboard.

What can the Google Analytics dashboard “eology SEO Monitoring” do?

The dashboard presents the most important SEO metrics that help you better evaluate the success of search engine optimization. In the standard view you get an overview of the status quo of these metrics (e.g. SEO turnover in the last month). A few mouse clicks even allow you to make a comparison with a previous period (e.g. compare SEO turnover from May 2013 with May 2012). This way you can quickly see how successful search engine optimization is.

The data is displayed within the dashboard in so-called widgets. These are small white boxes that you can see in the screenshot above. They contain tables, individual key figures or charts.

The widgets in this dashboard are configured to display only data from the organic area of Google. The positions in the unpaid Google search results, also called the “organic area”, can be influenced with SEO. That is why this area is so interesting for a pure SEO consideration. It would be misleading to look at the total Google traffic, because this includes clicks on paid search results (AdWords) in addition to clicks on organic search results. That’s why we have set our dashboard to count only SEO-relevant visitors.

The eology dashboard contains 12 pre-configured widgets that answer the most important SEO questions.

How many SEO visitors do I have?

A question that interests many website owners: How many visitors do I get through the unpaid Google search results? This question is clarified by our widget “Visitors organic”. It shows the number of SEO visitors.

In addition to this widget, we have created another one that lists only the number of visitors that came to the website with so-called non-brand keywords. These are visitors who came to the site using non-brand terms.

Background is that the “Visitors Organically” widget contains many visitors who searched Google with keywords that include the company name (e.g., in the case of Mediamarkt, for “LCD TV Media Markt”). A strong website would be found well on Google for many of these brand keywords even without major SEO measures. Therefore, you should evaluate the non-brand visitors separately to be able to estimate the SEO successes beyond the relatively easy-to-optimize brand keywords.

As the name of the widget already reveals, the number does not include visits with “not-provided keywords”. What is this? Google has not been passing its Analytics software information about keywords from logged-in visitors for some time. Keywords from logged-in Google visitors have since been marked as “not provided”. The problem with this is that it is not known exactly how many of these not-provided keywords contain brand terms and how many do not. This makes it impossible to differentiate between brand keywords and non-brand keywords.

This is why when looking at non-brand keywords, you should make sure that no not-provided-keywords are included, which is what we are doing with our widget.

Important note for all who want to use our widget: You need to enter your brand keywords here so that search queries that contain them are factored out. To do so, click on the edit icon in the widget’s box.

Then you can enter your brand keywords in the table.

How much revenue do I make through SEO?

Even more important than the question of organic visitor numbers is certainly the question of SEO turnover for store operators. Our dashboard tells you how much money the SEO visitors have left in your store. Provided that Google Analytics e-commerce tracking is running in your store.

Again, if you want to use the non-brand widget, you can store your brand keywords in the widget configuration.

What are the top SEO keywords?

Many websites are found well on Google for certain keywords, without the website owner knowing which ones. At this point, our dashboard should shed some light. It lists the keywords with which most visitors came to the website via the unpaid Google area and shows how much revenue was made in each case. Here, too, there is a separate analysis according to non-brand keywords. This is because for many websites with a certain brand awareness, it is mainly brand keywords that appear in the front search results on Google. Then it is interesting to see how many visitors came via generic keywords, because from this you can draw conclusions about the findability of the website beyond own brand keywords.

How successful are my SEO keywords?

Good Google positions are desirable, but only if enough visitors come to the store through them, which then provide sales. After all, it is of little use to spend a lot of SEO budgets for ranking improvements of individual keywords, if then the hoped-for turnover through these keywords fails to materialize. If you want to optimize your website for certain keywords, you should know how the number of visitors and the sales volume for these keywords develop. Our widget “SEO Keywords” helps with this.

You can insert your keywords via the edit function of the widget. Simply replace the term “KEYWORD” in the input field with your respective keyword. You can enter up to 12 keywords (Google Analytics does not allow more). In front of each keyword you have to put the roof symbol and after that the dollar sign, as it was already preconfigured by us. As separator, you use the pipe symbol. This syntax is necessary so that Google Analytics can process the specified terms correctly.

We have created a second widget for your SEO keywords, which additionally collects SEO-relevant usage data. These are the bounce rate and the visit duration on the website. In particular, you should keep an eye on the bounce rate from an SEO perspective. If the bounce rate is too high for one of your keywords, Google may never show your website in a top position with this keyword. This is because Google places a lot of emphasis on relevant search results. If a website visit is aborted by the searcher after entering a certain keyword, it looks to Google as if the website was not a relevant search result for him. If this happens to numerous searchers, the site has poor chances. Our widget therefore informs you about the bounce rates for your important keywords. This way, you can initiate countermeasures on the corresponding page if bounce rates are too high, by making it more relevant for the desired keyword or by questioning the keyword’s usefulness / relevance for your website. Also, the visit duration allows conclusions about the relevance of your target pages for the keyword and should therefore not be missing in the widget.

To see the bounce rate not only for individual keywords, but for the entire website, you can use the next widget “Bounce rate organic traffic”. Therefore, compare the current bounce rate with the help of our dashboard with a past value to be able to assess how it develops.

Is the bounce rate in the SEO area too high?

To judge the level of bounce rate, it is important to compare it with that of other channels. One channel that compares very well with SEO, although not 100%, is Google Ads (CPC).

Both channels (SEO/organic and Ads/CPC) deliver visitors who have searched for something on Google and then clicked on a search result hit. The main difference when looking at the bounce rate is that Google Ads visitors are usually more transactional, i.e. more interested in making a purchase in the store. In this respect, it is normal that visitors who come via the organic area leave the website again more often after viewing the landing page than Ads visitors purchased with consumer-oriented keywords. Nevertheless, comparing the organic bounce rate with the CPC bounce rate is useful. The difference should not be too large. If, for example, the organic bounce rate were twice as high as that from the CPC area, it would look as if a relatively large number of the visitors generated via search engines were irrelevant. The conclusion would be that the expectation of these visitors on the target pages is probably not fulfilled. In such a case, you should think about whether the landing pages are optimized for the right keywords.

SEO inspiration: ideas from internal search

With Google Analytics, you can see which terms customers search for using the search function in your online store. The prerequisite is that Google Analytics is configured accordingly. How to do this is explained here. If this so-called “Site Search” function is set up correctly, our dashboard provides the top keywords of the internal search. You can see the 10 most searched terms in your store. You may find one or the other keyword among them, for which there is not yet a separate store category. Here is probably SEO potential that you can use. Because your own store visitors tell you, by filling out the search box on the website, what interesting products / keywords are for you. You can be sure that these will not only be searched for at your in the store, but also at Google. Since more people use the search function of Google than that of your store, there is a significantly larger search volume for these keywords on Google than you can measure in the evaluation of your store search with Google Analytics. A good positioning on Google for such a keyword therefore usually means new and especially very interested visitors.

How fast does the website load?

Page load time is now a ranking factor for Google. That is, fast websites have ranking advantages, whereas slow-loading pages have a slightly harder time achieving good positions in the search results. Certainly, the page load time is not as important as the backlink profile, but you should still pay attention to it. So that you know the page load times of your website, we have configured a widget for it that shows the average page load time. The load time data provided by Google Analytics is very reliable because it is measured directly from the users of your website. To do this, Google Analytics randomly measures how long it takes for the website to fully build up for a user.

It is particularly exciting to compare the displayed page load time with a past value. A value of 5 seconds says very little on its own. However, if you realize through a comparison that the page load time was only 2 seconds a few months ago, you have uncovered concrete optimization potential. You can start looking for possible speed brakes on your website, eliminate them and then possibly use this ranking factor.

If you notice that loading times are too long, there are many ways to counteract this. The first approach is a free web application from Google. A tool called PageSpeed.

If you want to delve deeper into the topic of website speed, we recommend the comprehensive article by eology CEO Daniel Unger and our technology specialist Daniel Friedrich from Websiteboosting magazine #10.

Good luck with SEO controlling!

We wish you many enlightening insights that you will gain with our dashboard. Do you have any suggestions or ideas for improving the dashboard? Let us know very gladly. E.g. under the article in the comments. If you have problems with the installation and configuration of the dashboard or if you are interested in a Google Analytics seminar or web controlling consulting, we are looking forward to your request.