SEO analytics is a method of collecting and analyzing data to gain a better understanding of your website's organic performance. An effective SEO analysis helps identify key areas to focus on when optimizing your site for search engines, as discussed on Hotjar's website, which is accessible by the link in this sentence.
Understanding how users interact with your website is key to refining your online strategy. Our analytics and measurement services go beyond numbers – we transform data into actionable insights. By leveraging advanced analytics tools, we track user behavior, measure engagement, and identify areas for improvement. This data-driven approach empowers you to make informed decisions, optimize content, and enhance user satisfaction. From initial setup to continuous monitoring, we provide the tools to shape your website into a dynamic and responsive platform that evolves with your business.
Why are SEO analytics important? If you can't track it, you can't optimize it. Two of the most helpful analytics tools, which are also free, are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both of these tools are chock-full of data for evaluating the performance of your website.
Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that offers basic analytical tools and statistics for search engine optimization (SEO). Page tags are used to collect data from each viewer by inserting the tag into the tracking code of each page. This tag collects data from each visitor's web browser and sends it to one of Google's data collection servers.
Google Search Console is another free tool that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's performance in Google Search results. Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.
So, what's the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
Google Analytics helps you learn more about your users, including who they are, how they found you, and how they interact with your website.
Google Search Console, on the other hand, helps you monitor your website's performance generally and in search engine results.
Each serves two distinct functions, which, if used collectively, can help drive users to your website and ultimately increase conversions and corresponding sales.
GTmetrix is a web-based tool I subscribe to that provides an analysis of a website's speed with a focus on a particular page(s). It analyzes a web page's load time, size, and requests, then generates a score with recommendations on ways to improve it. I use this tool to measure and monitor a site’s performance (link to discussion on Search Engine Journal website) and make changes when a site's speed is slow and not at an "A" ranking per GTmextrix's ranking system.
A fast page speed is critical for ranking and creating a good user experience for your website's visitors. Slow page speed translates into poor performance and a bad user experience. A slow website can impact key metrics, including Bounce rate (defined in our Glossary), Conversions, Traffic, Page View duration, and most importantly, your company's Revenues. We discuss this in more detail on our Page Speed Optimization webpage.
To illustrate, here are the results from GTmetrix for the home page of this website as of 1/12/2024:
