Chris Peters: Web Developer

One of my goals this month has been to use Google Analytics to measure effectiveness of organic SEO keyword work I’ve done. Google AdWords lets you measure your PPC keyword traffic easily, but it wasn’t so apparent how to do the same for organic in Google Analytics. Let me show you what I think is the best path to setting up a report.
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google, google analytics, google_analytics, seo, report, reporting, organic, marketing, search marketing, search_marketing

Report on organic keyphrases used to get to a given web page

My organic SEO work has focused on taking a single web page and optimizing it for a keyphrase or two. I wanted to take a given page and see what keywords searchers have been using to get to that page. If the page is ranked highly for a given keyphrase and my reporting shows no traffic generated by that phrase, then it would be an indicator that I’d probably want to try something else (or figure out why no one is clicking to get to my page)!

For example’s sake, let’s take one of my blog posts and pretend that I’ve optimized it for a given keyphrase. Let’s say that I’ve optimized my site’s home page for the keyphrase [chris peters]. (Imagine that!)

How to set it up in the new Google Analytics

There are many different ways to approach reporting on your metrics in Google Analytics, so let me show you the best path to take in reporting on organic keywords.

Once you’re in your site in Google Analytics, click the Content link in the left navigation.

Next, click Content Drilldown.

If the page you’re interested in reporting on doesn’t appear in the Content Performance area, go ahead and search for the folder name in the Find URL search box at the bottom.

Once you’ve found the page you want to report on, click on it. (Note that if you’re reporting on the index page of a section (index.html, index.php, home.aspx, etc.), you will need to click the actual backslash “/” link to pull up the correct page.)

You should be on a report called Content Detail: [Your URL here]. There is a dropdown called Analyze that defaults to “Content Detail.” In that dropdown, select “Entrance Keywords.”

Once on the Entrance Keywords: [Your URL here] report, click on the Show: non-paid link to the right underneath the main graph.

At this point, you will see a list of keywords searchers have used to arrive at a given page, along with traffic metrics. If you look at my example, you’ll see that I’m pulling a decent amount of traffic for my name. (Considering that not too many people are looking for me.)

If you would like to automate this report, you can click the Email button at the top of the report to have to sent to you daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

Caveat to reporting in Google Analytics

Unfortunately, if you have multiple links on your site that point to the same content, you could have a problem with getting to the metrics that you want.

For example, if you have links on your site to

• /products
• /Products
• /products/index.html
• “/products/”

then those are going to show up separately in Google Analytics. This applies to mixed case variants. The best way to avoid this is to go through your site and use a consistent linking convention. (I prefer all lowercase with a trailing slash, as in <a href=”/products/”>Products</a>.) If this is too painstaking, you may just want to see which version of the URL that Google search results are sending you to, for starters.