Google Analytics 4 comes with a variety of segmentation and data analytics features that let you better understand your website visitors and their customer journey. You can also use GA4 to measure your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and see if your SEO initiatives are improving your search rankings, driving more organic traffic, or generating more conversions such as sales or online inquiries.
Here are three ways you can use GA4 to measure your SEO performance.
Integrate GA4 with Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a Google-powered webmaster tool that shows important website and SEO data such as search queries that are generating website traffic to a website, a website’s search rankings for different search terms and overall traffic volume for a specified period of time. This data helps you understand whether your SEO efforts are helping your website improve its search rankings for relevant keywords or if your website is garnering more organic traffic.
You can integrate Google Search Console with GA4 so that you can look into all this valuable data directly in your GA4 account. Moreover, you can engage in custom segmentation in GA4 to understand your SEO performance even more.
For example, within GA4, you can create a segmentation to look at data of websites of a geographic location. If you’re a local Vancouver business, you can create a segmentation to look at organic traffic of visitors from Vancouver. You can use the segmentation to see which search queries being used land on your website. This data is useful to understand if your SEO efforts are helping you generate more organic traffic from your target market.
Assess Landing Page Views
You can also use GA4 to see which pages your organic visitors are landing on. You can go to the pages/screen section in GA4 and create a custom segment to look at organic traffic in order to see which pages your organic visitors are landing on. This data is useful to measure your SEO performance because you want your organic traffic to visit your higher-value pages. For example, if a majority of your organic visitors are landing on your contact us page, it could be that your prospects are current clients who are searching on Google for your contact information. It’s good that prospects or existing clients are searching for information to contact your business, but you also want organic searchers to land on your product or service page using generic searches. For example, if you’re a local auto body shop, you want your website to generate organic traffic for more generic search terms such as “car maintenance” or “fix car engine”. You want to generate traffic from this kind of generic searches because searchers of these terms are in the market for products or services you offer but they don’t have a particular brand or company they want in mind. This is where SEO does its magic. You can bring these general searches to your website by appearing on the top search results so that users will click on your website listing in the search results and then convert these visitors into clients!
Analyze If Your Organic Visitors Are Converting
You can use GA4’s built-in reports to see if organic visitors are actually converting on your website. Alternatively, you can create exploration reports to see your organic searchers’ customer journey on your website and see if the organic visitors are converting on your website — whether they’re buying from you or submitting inquiries. Looking at whether your organic visitors are converting on your website is effective in measuring your SEO performance because you could be bringing organic traffic to your website for irrelevant search terms if a very small percentage of your organic visitors are converting on your website. That said, some industries do require a long buying process and it’s normal for prospects to take their time to learn about certain businesses before converting (e.g. submitting an inquiry or booking a demo). It’s your call on what is an acceptable time for your organic searchers to convert on your website as well as the percentage of organic visitors that eventually become clients.
Google Analytics 4 offers a variety of useful data analytics features for you to understand your audience. Particularly, you can use GA4 to understand whether your SEO performance is generating the results you want. You can use GA4 to integrate with Google Search Console so you can see valuable data such as your website’s search rankings and the search queries that are bringing organic visitors to your website directly in your GA4 property. You can also use GA4 to see on which pages your organic visitors are landing and whether your organic visitors are converting. These insights are all beneficial in helping you further improve your website and SEO initiatives so that your website can bring in more prospects and clients!
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