SEO analytics: a step-by-step process with tools, examples, and resources

Introduction: the need for SEO measurement and reporting

You have a long-term SEO project with overall results you're proud of. But you experience surprising fluctuations in organic search traffic volume.

You know your content calendar is on point. But it's hard to defend your order of priority when facing a stream of ideas from the client or boss.

You know the technical aspects of the website you're trying to rank are lacking. But the publishing routine doesn't leave much budget for website back-end upgrades.

You have great ideas. Your team members also have great ideas. You struggle when discussing what to act on next.

You need thorough SEO analytics.

In this article, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about SEO analytics.

What is SEO analytics?

Definition of SEO analytics

We define Search Engine Optimization (SEO) analytics as the methods that:

1. Collect own data pertinent to acquiring engaged organic traffic. This entails measurement definition, implementation and updates.
2. Help act on the data in order to create growth of engaged organic traffic. This entails visualization and reporting, analysis, task planning, execution.

SEO analytics is a crucial component of marketing analytics, helping businesses understand organic search performance within the broader context of their overall marketing strategy.

Please notice that I talk about engaged organic traffic first, not ranking position. Search engine results pages (SERPs) change quickly. The rising dominance of featured snippets and AIO in Google Search has created position 0, and made positions 1-3 less visible. Ranking positions do matter, of course, so we consider them a stepping stone metric. But we don’t use them as a KPI of SEO performance.

Editor’s note: if you’re interested in monitoring your keyword ranking anyway, check out these 8 SERP tracking tools.

Please also notice that I’m not using all organic traffic as a KPI, either. It is common to experience spikes in organic traffic without a lift in conversion counts. The same applies the other way around: a drop in traffic often happens more heavily on the side of low-quality traffic, without conversions dropping as much.

What SEO analytics isn’t?

We do not include keyword research and other market research under the SEO analytics umbrella. In SEO analytics, you use your own data about your own marketing. In keyword research, you look at what users search for (using keyword research tools) before your website starts ranking for it, or you look at ranking positions of content published on websites other than yours. Those are two distinctly different stages of an SEO project, and we’re going to keep this article focused on SEO analytics.

How does analytics help improve SEO?

Analytics grounds decisions in your own data. It frees your search engine optimization efforts from team politics, client to provider hierarchy, horoscopes, and volatile opinions. It also frees the process from my own ego and preconceived notions – I’m biased, too, director or not. Having an effective SEO analytics process enables us, and the marketing teams we work with, to:

• Know what’s going on
• Know why it is going on
• Find gaps and opportunities
• Recommend how we want to act on the insight
• Estimate the expected outcome of the recommended action within our SEO strategy

Phase #1 – Prepare & enable a strong start

SEO analytics is like a hearty soup that nourishes the entire body if cooked right. Seek out the following ingredients for successfully integrating analytics into an SEO project.

Client types

It may be hard to convince someone that 10% of the budget will best be used on analytics, instead of execution. And to be honest, it may not be worth convincing anyone about it. Instead, you can seek out clients with backgrounds that gravitate towards data-driven decisions. Some common traits of great clients for analytical SEO include:

• High appreciation for data
• Advanced marketing knowledge
• Capacity and willingness to act on ideas
• Long term focus

Some of the easily identifiable client personas, that we have great experience working with, include:

• Marketing agencies
• Marketing teams with an online presence that’s decent or better
• Directors with a background in finance, healthcare, or other industries where acting on data is at the core of the service
• Monetizing bloggers
• Directors of e-commerce

Minimum budgets

Analytics is for taking marketing from good to great. That is something you can only achieve if you create room to take a step back and analyze whenever you’re evaluating or planning. From experience with our SEO projects, $3k/mo is the minimum monthly budget that still enables leveraging data well. Analytics requires both a high level of skill and a fair amount of time. So when you think about how new projects need major measurement implementation or overhaul, $3k/mo is about as low as you can go while still creating effective feedback loops.

Team roles & skills

We’ve hired and tested for different roles extensively. As a result, I wrote down this ideal composition of a team for analytical SEO projects:

• Project director – is much more involved than a stereotypical project manager, has their hand in the project, executes some of the work, reviews everybody’s work, plans work based on data and input from the rest of the team, has mastered data visualization and presentation, understands data collection and processing, loves talking to the client.
• Analytics developer – has a rich coding background and focuses on using it for marketing measurement, is able to set up a wide variety of tracking and integrations, assists in deciding what tracking will prove actionable.
• Junior analyst or SEO – has skills in data visualization and measurement, understands SEO, helps the team act faster.
• Technical SEO expert – acts on SEO data by improving technical and structural aspects of the website, sets up A/B tests.
• Content lead – writes masterfully, incorporates SEO data into each piece of content, guides copywriters, guides creation of visual assets.
• Link builder – facilitating guest content and relationships to boost high-converting content.
• Video editor – takes data guidance from the content lead, creates videos for better UX or YouTube traffic or featured video snippets.
• Illustrator – creates original visuals with value to searcher intent, helps foster higher content engagement and presence in featured snippets.

In smaller projects, one person can cover more than one role. In larger projects, one role will need more than one person.

Some other roles you may consider for teams working with SEO analytics include a virtual assistant, designer, editor, marketing automation expert, or PPC expert.

Phase #2 – Set up SEO measurement & testing

MarTech for SEO measurement: our favorite tools

There are no affiliate links in this article – I wouldn’t be allowed to use our affiliate links in a guest post even if I wanted to. We’re listing the SEO tools that we love using for our own work. To underline the importance of an amazing stack of analytics tools, here’s a thought from our friend, Dan McGaw, author of the ultimate book on building a MarTech Stack:

“All roads lead to Rome and all data leads to Revenue. Properly setup and connect your marketing technology tools, so that you actually know how and why your SEO leads to revenue.”

– Dan McGaw | CEO, founder, speaker at McGaw.io

Google Analytics (GA) for a data hub

We love Amplitude, we love MixPanel, we love Adobe. But because we’re trying to become prominent on Google search results, it makes sense to focus SEO measurement around the Google Suite. Google tools integrate very well with one another, which makes for actionable data. Google Analytics then also integrates very well with a plethora of other SEO tools. Here are a few specific examples:

• Google Search Console shows you what happened before the organic click on Google. Google Analytics shows you what happened after the click. Connecting the two (assuming your GA goals and engagement metrics are tailored well), will give you the full picture.
• Enrich the picture by plugging in keyword data from Keyword Hero, on-page SEO data from On-Page Hero, engagement data from HotJar, or event data from anything that’s set up in GTM.
• Organic search, as well as paid search, doesn’t require custom channel definitions or UTM’s in order to be accurately categorized in GA

Set up GA goal values to track the value generated by your organic search visits, instead of counting all actions equally.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) for a one-stop tracking & tagging platform

This stellar tool has more and more implementations baked into it, so advanced tracking has been getting quicker and quicker to set up. Beyond tracking tags, GTM allows you to add code for on-page optimization. Sample uses of GTM for SEO include:

• Record an interaction event in GA whenever the visitor spends more than 45 seconds on the website. This way, visitors who took a little bit of time reading or watching on your website will not be considered a bounce anymore. GA normally counts a bounce whenever the user only views one page. But for blogs, for example, it is common that visitors leave the site after they read one post only. These visitors likely found what they wanted, they tend to remember you, and their likelihood of seeing you on Google again is high.
• Implement GTM’s native scroll tracking or HotJar tracking for engagement metrics. They’ll help you analyze how well the landing page matched the searcher’s intent.
• Instead of paying for a WordPress plugin, implement schema markup for particular post types via GTM. This will help search engines understand your content better, which can lead to appearance in visual featured snippets the way it did for our client’s keto queso dip.

To give you a head start, here’s our GTM container. It is packed with goodies and copying it over saves us several hours on every new project. It contains tags-triggers-variables that you can use to measure a variety of engagement metrics, to track a set of conversion actions to be recorded as GA goals, to add schema markup, to implement no-index tags, to integrate 3rd party tools.

DOWNLOAD THE GTM CONTAINER

This is a product of repeated GTM implementations for SEO projects that first started during our collaboration with MashMetrics. Have fun implementing it – I recommend light tailoring to your website's SEO focuses after you import. I’ll then be excited if you leave comments about how you tweaked it for your own projects.

Google Ads for a source of actionable data and boost for organic rankings

About a half of our SEO projects use Google Ads, too. The ads show on the same real estate as organic results, and they look very similar. Here are some of the ways in which Google Ads creates synergy with analytical SEO:

• Keyword, ad copy, and landing page performance data from search ads can be directly used for growing organic search traffic via optimization of focus keywords, meta text and content engagement.
• Paid search results can show up within a few days and rank for competitive terms that you don’t have enough organic search authority for yet. Applying long term thinking, you can use data about those paid keywords to eventually rank for them organically, too.
• The cost of your paid search campaign can be used for evaluating the cost of your content efforts that aim to get traffic for the same topic.
• Ad copy experiments in Google Ads are a very quick way to test copy changes before you do the same for organic search.

Keyword Hero (KW Hero) for full keyword data once again

We were beta testers of this SaaS product when the company was starting up a few years ago. Now I’m excited to see that they’ve become a Google Analytics Technology Partner with an endorsement from Rand Fishkin (and me!). The tool uses semantic algorithms to truly shows you 95% or more of your keywords. During the initial setup, KW Hero helps you create a new property in your GA account. It then creates a custom keyword dimension and pulls one goal of your choice from the main GA property.

Seeing most of the keywords your clicks came from is like going back to 2012, before Google stopped sharing the data with everyone except search engines are more mature now, and so are we the marketers who work with them. In the screenshot below, showing GA of one of our clients, please notice that:

• (not provided) keywords from the three big search engines only add up to about 5%. True story.
• You can tie keywords to goal data in the far right columns.

On-Page Hero for optimizing pages based on engagement

This tool is Keyword Hero’s little sister and another way to bring more data into GA. Useful on-page SEO data, that is. Go here to see all of the data points, it’s a loaded list. To exemplify how we use it:

• Look at the number of links on the different pages to see if we overdid it somewhere
• Compare the number of words to time spent per page
• On-Page Hero data lives in Google Analytics, which means you can easily pour it into a Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) analysis

Semrush for market values of keywords & additional ranking metrics

We primarily use this tool in keyword research and competitor analysis. Semrush and Ahrefs are our two favorite tools for that research phase. But both the tools can be used well for data about your own site, too. Moreover, you can use Supermetrics for Looker Studio to easily pour Semrush data into the same live Looker Studio report as all your other SEO data.

Two instances from our work where Semrush has proven actionable:

• After a Google update rolled out, traffic volume to one of our client’s websites halved. The Semrush traffic cost decreased as well, but less so – we lost a third instead of a half. We used that as the first clue in looking for landing pages that bring high-value traffic.
• Semrush ranking reports showed us that despite the major drop in organic clicks, our rankings stayed almost even. We only lost a small share of our page 1 rankings, and our page 2 rankings actually went up. Upon closer look, we noticed that a loss of positions 1-3 was where the biggest drop happened. This helped confirm our assumption of that with featured snippets becoming more prominent on Google, organic positions 4-10 are much less lucrative than they used to be. Featured snippets on position #0 are the new objective.

SEOTesting.com for CTR testing

We do organic search click-through rate (CTR) optimization for all our clients and this tool is our favorite one for the job. The tool also helps with a variety of other SEO testing tasks, and after beta testing with the tool’s founder, I can give away that there are new features coming soon that we haven’t seen anywhere else yet. With the existing CTR features, we’re often able to double the CTR using this workflow:

• Take five to ten high-converting pieces.
• Write down their current meta titles and descriptions.
• Improve the meta text based on recent keyword data.
• Use SEOTesting.com to setup testing focused on change in CTR.
• Where CTR went up, get excited. You’re getting more clicks and your position is likely to improve as well.
• Where CTR went down, repeat the process. Tweak meta text again and keep evaluating the tests until all the high converting pieces are up.
• Next month, repeat on five to ten more pieces.

CTR optimization has proven to be invaluable to us. To get a head start, feel free to copy our CTR Optimization sheet template.

HotJar for higher engagement

Heat maps are usually thought of as a tool for conversion rate optimizers and UX designers. But because on-page engagement affects rankings, we find user behavior heat maps to be very helpful for SEO work. Example use cases:

• Watch video recordings of visitors on long-form content
• Find out where on the page you should be placing key elements or information, so that even the visitors who skim get value out of their visit

Now you’re measuring like an SEO Pro. What next?

We find that the hardest part of SEO is the strategy. You always need one, but you don’t always know how it’s going to pan out. That’s why you want to have both variety and depth of your own data whenever you’re making decisions. You also want to have a way to apply feedback loops. Stacking up the SEO tools will empower you to do so.

To get the whole team to buy in, on both the client side and your own side, you also need to be able to convey your data. That is what the next phase is for.

Phase #3 – SEO analysis via data visualization

What you’ll gain

We find that even when last month’s results aren’t as desired, the client still has confidence in us as long as we show them that we know what the cause is, and that we have a specific plan for fixing the cause.

In the same way, when the results are outstanding, clients are excited when we show them that we know why it is so, and that we have a specific plan for doing more of the things that worked so well.

We’ve also learnt that we should not expect our clients, bosses, or team members to do their own interpretations of the data visualizations that we’re so excited about. When we strive to drive action (i.e. always), we like to remind ourselves of Lea Pica’s approach:

“The key to driving action with your insights is communicating quickly, clearly, and creating an intuitive understanding of what you’re presenting. That’s the definition of an insight. When you’re presenting data using proper narrative structure and visual design best practices, you’re facilitating that intuitive understanding for them and giving them a clear roadmap to action.”

Lea Pica | Data Storytelling Guru

MarTech for SEO reporting & analysis: our favorite tools

The list below of SEO analytics tools is what we use in our own work. You can definitely use different tools yourself, and I’ll even say that you should. Take the list as a case study of our professional services, but tailor it to your own process before you adopt it. Incorporating data blending into your workflow can also help you combine insights from multiple tools for a more comprehensive SEO analysis.

I’ll be excited to see your own version of the stack – please comment below or message me about it.

Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) for all reports and analyses

I absolutely love Looker Studio for SEO dashboards. Tableau is the only other data visualization and reporting tool that I’ve tried and that does a whole lot of what Looker Studio doesn’t. Even the premium tools such as Klipfolio, Grow, and Databox tend to either create reports that don’t look as good, require much more work when creating simple charts, have a steeper learning curve, integrate with fewer platforms than Looker Studio, or a combination of the above. My top reasons for loving on Looker Studio are:

• Shallow learning curve, to a point where you barely need to explain to clients how to use the reports.
• Ease of integration with a plethora of data sources, especially thanks to community connectors such as the Looker Studio connectors by Supermetrics. For those particular use cases where a data connector isn’t developed yet, you’ll find a nimble backup in Google Sheets with all their formulas and automations.
• Data blending in Looker Studio allows you to merge multiple data sources for a more comprehensive SEO analysis without complex database queries.
• Live, interactive reports that are appealing to the eye.
• New valuable features almost every month, e.g. the data explorer, drill-downs or chart presets.

With Looker Studio, you can really get creative. You can take SEO reporting a step further and conduct true analysis. For a hands-on example, check out our analysis of SEO channel context. The piece was published on Moz, tweeted by Google Analytics, and, you know it – it has a link you can use to copy the Looker Studio file and use it as a template.

Google Search Console (GSC) for analyzing Google’s own data

This one is a no-brainer. For SEO analysis tools, you’ll always want to start with Google’s own organic search data. Moreover, GSC has seen major upgrades lately and I expect that Google will keep improving it further. Use cases:

• Landing page ranking position reports
• Monitoring indexation errors
• Submitting sitemaps
• Getting actionable data about the website’s backlinks
• Pouring Google search data into Looker Studio

With that, I have two pro tips for you:

• Tip 1: Always setup Google Search Console domain properties, instead of the old type of URL prefix properties.
• Tip 2: Create your Google Search Console data source with Supermetrics instead of the native Google connector. The Supermetrics one gives you many more options. That lets you look at search data from more angles, as well as it enables you to make your charts look more consistent.

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) for more context

Bing and Yahoo have to try harder to get marketers to spend with them. As a result, they are often happy to give away more data than Google. You’re right if you’re thinking about how Bing and Yahoo only tend to bring 5-10% of all organic search traffic. But for large websites, even that small share is a large amount. We implement BWT and act on the data for every client with more than 50k organic visits a month. Our favorite benefit of adding BWT to the SEO reporting stack is:

• Juxtapose GSC and BWT landing page data to conduct analysis via comparison
• Better understand Google algorithm updates by looking at whether the affected content saw a drop or spike on Bing-Yahoo, too

Google My Business Data (GMB) as a must for local businesses

Local SEO is an important element of traffic for all local businesses. The searches tend to be bottom-funnel and local searches often result in action taken directly on Google, without even going to the website. It is therefore invaluable that Google shares data on GMB conversion actions. To track similar actions on a website, e.g. phone calls, you’d need to pay for premium tools such as CallRail. To make things easier for us, Supermetrics has made a Looker Studio connector for GMB, too. For your inspiration:

• Compare data about GMB calls and direction requests to data about website calls and Contact Us views
• Find out which one of your locations generates more interest among users who don’t come to your website

Supermetrics

By now, it is safe to assume that you know what Supermetrics is. Me, I’ll add that the tool is stellar. Not because they’re publishing this piece for me. Or because the tool comes from Europe, and everything that’s from Europe must be good (especially sheep cheese from Slovakia).

Supermetrics connectors for Looker Studio tend to be better than the native connectors created by Google. Often times, it’s about attention to detail. First day of the week is a good example. Supermetrics always lets you choose whether that’s Monday or Sunday, so you can truly compare the same weeks to each other.

Most times, Supermetrics goes deeper than the native connectors. The number of Looker Studio dimensions and metrics that Supermetrics provide is often a few times bigger than the number of metrics and dimensions in native connectors. This makes for better SEO reports.

Some of my favorite use cases:

• Change lookback window for conversions without creating a new data source
• Enrich your Looker Studio report with data from the email tool that sends out content to people who signed up to your blog’s newsletter
• Add metrics about the role of organic search in the common conversion paths – not covered by the native GA connector
• Use a single connector to bring in data from a few different ad platforms and GA at the same time. This makes it much easier to create cross-channel calculated dimensions, and to pour data from a variety of sources into one chart.

Phase #4 – Bringing it home by acting on insight

If you’ve come this far, you’re empowered. You’re tracking better than many big deal SEO companies, and you’re presenting data in ways that would make Lea Pica proud. The final step is to take action that improves SEO performance. Action and decisions grounded in data is where your clients get bang for their analytics buck.

Yet, using data is often an after-thought. To make it a priority, we apply the following cadence in our ongoing projects.

I. Semi-manual analysis

The project director goes into the Looker Studio report and manually writes down insights about SEO performance and search engine rankings once a month. You may be thinking – Looker Studio is meant to be live and interactive, why would you need to update it manually. That is a good question. The answer is that having a human write down insights is what turns a report into an analysis. Our clients can, of course, access the Looker Studio file and see all the numbers whenever they want. Our notes don’t need to be there for the report to work. But from our experience, as an SEO, you’re expected to do the thinking and interpretation of numbers, too. Emailing over a report without your own comments often leads to nothing being done about the report.

The notes our project director will write in are structured as follows:

• What is going on – interpretation
• Why is it going on – explanation
• What do we want to do about it – recommendation
• What is the expected outcome of the recommended action – justification and prioritization

II. Client meet, internal team meet, task planning

We use the Looker Studio file as the agenda for our monthly meetings with clients. Then, when we recommend something, we make sure to have a chart on the screenshare that shows why we’re recommending it.

I highly recommend having more than two people join the meeting. It only happens once a month, and is time very well spent. A great team composition for a monthly client meeting is:

• Client – operations director, or someone who knows the day-to-day of the business very well
• Client – content liaison, or whoever needs to review and approve new content or website changes
• Agency – project director (not manager), or whoever has the combination of an overview of all tasks in progress, analytics knowledge, and SEO knowledge
• Agency – SEO specialist, or whoever will have valuable suggestions for how we can act on the insight

After we’ve discussed recommendations with the client, we meet one more time internally. In that meeting, we decide who takes on which task, what assistance they need, and what the due dates are. We use Trello for task planning and we keep as much communication as possible within the pertinent Trello card. I’ve also used Asana, Jira, Basecamp and Mavenlink, and I find that Trello is one of very few project management tools that helps you avoid spending too much time on project management.

III. Execution

After being this thorough with our SEO analytics process, you can shoot for the moon with your SEO efforts. As our friend and favorite author of blogging best practice Andy Crestodina puts it, there is no other thing to shoot for, anyway:

“Google famously has 2,000+ math PhDs on staff. So think of it this way: if you created one of the best pieces of content on the topic, there are 2k math PhDs trying to help you. If you didn’t make a great piece of content, those same people are trying to stop you.”

– Andy Crestodina | CMO & co-founder at Orbit Media

With that mindset, you’re ready to execute. The execution takes up at least 9-times more time, resources and effort than analytics. But without thorough analytics, we’d be spinning our wheels and have slow, if any, continual improvement. The SEO analytics tools and processes help us formulate the best possible list of tasks to tackle every month. Below are samples of our deliverables that are grounded in SEO data, combined with examples of how analytics enables quality.

New content for own site

• New blog articles – write to answer specific top to mid-funnel questions that you haven’t addressed on your website yet
• New service pages – create for deep topics that may convert high once you have valuable content about them

Content upgrades

• Overhauling existing content – your post used to rank for a set of keywords. Now the awareness of the topic has changed, along with keywords users type into Google. Add more content about the new keywords to your post, streamline the content about the old keywords.
• CTR optimization – you know your page is better than most, so you set up testing for meta text updates and find what copy works best. You learn what appeals to your relevant audience.
• Adding schema markup – your page doesn’t get as many clicks as you would expect for its high rankings. You look further and find out that the top of page #1 is packed with featured snippets. You enrich the page with content that caters to the snippets.

Link building

• Guest articles – you look into Google Search Console and find a handful of quality sites that already link to you. You approach them about a content collab.
• Guest quotes or media – there’s a set of blogs that are popular in your industry. You don’t have the budget to write full articles for all of them, so you suggest short contributions to their existing pieces of content.
• Contextual link placements – you know you’ve published about a topic that will be a traffic magnet. You help make it so by paying a white-hat link building partner for a number of quick, contextual links.

Tech & structural

• Optimized information architecture of the website – user behavior reports tell you that visitors bounce because they have a hard time navigating on your website. This helps you understand how the visitors think about your service, and tweak the site’s structure accordingly.
• Internal link clean-up for pillar page structure – once you’ve optimized the site’s structure, and identified which pages should be the most packed and exhaustive ones, you create internal linking structure around them.
• Canonical tags, noindex tags – technical SEO audits uncover old pages that are cluttering up your sitemap

Local

• Regular GMB posts – actions taken on your Google My Business listing have dropped. You poke around and discover that businesses in your vicinity are showing up in the map pack more prominently than you because they have more ratings and GMB posts. You facilitate a system for generating reviews, and create a schedule of GMB posts that use existing website content.
• Contact page optimization – you notice that a lot of your visitors land on the home page, then go directly to the contact page, then leave without taking action. You create an alternative way of contacting after hours.

Results that SEO Analytics Can Help You Achieve

Analytical SEO is a lot of work. And it pays off. There’s so incredibly much good content on the internet, and so many good websites, that “good” doesn’t cut it anymore. To do well, you need to do work that is great. Analytics has been our key to that. It makes all the investments go farther.

To be specific, here are some of our client examples. In your own search presence, aim for no less.

Regenerative Medicine Clinic

ThriveMD is a local business with two offices. Yet, as the search presence grew, the website outranked WebMD, for a period of time, for a set of search terms lucrative to us. With some of the medical content approval process, we sometimes struggled with content creation, but we usually managed to create enough quality material to fuel the machine. One big factor behind the results was that we were able to apply almost all of our process, as described above, over a longer period of time.

Web Analytics Agency

We helped make the new website for our friends at MashMetrics. We were able to structure the website, and create each service page, by following a detailed keyword map. We’ve also put data about the old website to use. After we added some backlinks from large marketing blogs, the 5-person company ranked #1 for “web analytics agency” and #3 for “free analytics audit”.

Ranking #1 in a dense market

MarTech Experts

There are very few organizations that know marketing automation and analytics tools better than McGaw.io. After using feedback loops to dial in our copywriting, we’ve been able to come up with an advanced process that helps us start ranking fast. The piece took us a while to publish, and the client’s content team went through a change or two during the process. But as a result, we now rank in the featured snippet – position #0, as well as in position #1. That is right below Amplitude’s ad, right above a piece by Mixpanel itself, and well above the content and videos published by competing agencies.

Blog with E-commerce

Our good friends at The Longhairs won over Mark Cuban in one of the most entertaining Shark Tank episodes ever recorded. Shortly after, they broke the world record in the amount of hair donated to charity. From the marketing perspective, their content creation is on point, and they’re already doing super well in organic search. But, knowing our approach, they come to us periodically when they want to ramp up for a new product launch – e.g. by providing them data-driven guidelines that will help rank for “hats for men with long hair”. Despite how active they are with Facebook Ads and email sequences, a majority of visitors as well as revenue comes from organic search. Their data is the set we use for the SEO channel context analysis.

SEO analytics and testing case study

And here is a video case study putting it all together that shows the full SEO analytics process we use with our clients.

Your turn

Thorough use of analytics in SEO is hard work and highly rewarding. Have fun with it. Get creative. Do it right.

Want to use Supermetrics to help improve you SEO analytics? Start your free 14-day trial today.

About Branko Kral

Branko Kral is going to analyze data on how you engaged with this article and use that insight for his future content. He’s a director of analytics in SEO projects, after all.

He is also a linguist from Slovakia with an international background, entrepreneurial spirit and passion for community building. Based in the highly delightful Mammoth Lakes, CA, he builds Chosen Data, spends his fair share of time on a hill, and helps enable fellow remote professionals.