What Is SEO Analytics?
SEO analytics is the process of tracking and analyzing your website's search engine performance to gather insights you can use to make strategic decisions.
It involves tracking key search performance indicators like:
- Organic traffic: Visitors coming to your site from search engines’ organic (unpaid) results
- Search rankings: Which positions your pages appear in on search result pages
- Backlinks: Links on other websites that point to your website
Why Is SEO Analytics Important?
SEO analytics allows you to uncover search engine performance changes that influence business outcomes.
Positive changes indicate your efforts are working well. And negative changes indicate you may need to adjust your SEO strategy.
Specifically, analytics for SEO lets you:
- Find and address ranking drops before they hurt your traffic
- Discover technical errors that might be holding you back
- Learn what types of content are most successful
- Understand whether you should allocate more resources to certain tactics
Search engines frequently update their algorithms. And in all likelihood, your competitors regularly optimize their sites.
So, search optimization analytics gives you the data you need to remain competitive.
How to Perform SEO Analytics to Improve Website Performance
At a high level, SEO analytics involves regularly monitoring relevant SEO metrics, putting together a report to uncover trends and insights, and making improvements based on the data.
Let's look at the steps in more detail:
1. Choose the Right SEO Metrics
Homing in on a select number of SEO metrics ensures that you stay focused on what matters most to your business and prevents you from wasting time on numbers that aren’t impactful.
Start by revisiting your goals, then pay attention to which metrics allow you to measure your progress. These are called key performance indicators (KPIs).
The specific KPIs you’ll track will depend on your goals, but here are some of the important SEO KPIs to consider keeping an eye on:
Organic Rankings
Organic rankings are your specific positions in search engine results pages (SERPs) for your target keywords—and high rankings are often a precursor to more traffic, conversions, and revenue.
You can see your rankings for different keywords in Google Search Console (GSC) by going to “Search results” under “Performance” in the left-hand menu.
Check the box next to “Average position” once you get to the report.
Scroll down to the table to see your average ranking for each keyword listed over the selected time range.
To track rankings for the specific keywords you’re targeting, use Semrush's Position Tracking tool.
Just follow the prompts to set up keyword tracking, and then you can monitor performance over time.
For local businesses, it’s a good idea to track local rankings in Google Maps.
Use Map Rank Tracker for this. It shows where you and your competitors rank for target keywords in your selected location.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic measures the number of visitors who come to your website from standard search listings.
This doesn’t include traffic from any search ads you may be running.
Organic traffic helps you understand your site’s ability to attract people from search engine results. And you can track this metric at a high level using Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Go to your GA4 account and navigate to “Reports” > “Engagement” > “Pages and screens.”
Here, you can see your site’s total number of views (visits) for the selected time range. As well as page-level traffic.
You can also compare your search performance against competitors’ performance using Semrush's Organic Research tool.
Open the tool, enter a competitor's domain, and click "Search."
The "Overview" report will show you an estimate of that competitor’s organic traffic. And how it’s changed over time.
Organic Conversions
Organic conversions refers to how many visitors from search engines take desired actions on your site (like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter).
This metric helps you understand if your efforts are bringing in qualified traffic. Meaning those who are likely to become customers.
To see your organic conversion data, you’ll want to use conversion tracking in GA4. Which involves setting up events and designating them as key events (the term GA4 uses for conversions).
Then, go to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic acquisition.”
You’ll see your overall conversions (key events) at the top of the table. And you can see your organic conversions in the “Organic Search” row.
You can also add two different conversion rate metrics to your reports if you wish.
Backlinks
Earning backlinks to your site indicates to search engines that other websites see your content as reputable, and that can lead to better rankings and more traffic.
So, seeing an increase in the number of backlinks you have could indicate that better SEO performance is in your future.
To see the backlinks pointing to your site, go to the “Links” report in Google Search Console and study the “External links” section.
You’ll be able to see which of your pages have the most links. And which domains link to you the most.
For richer data, use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool.
It shows you how healthy your backlink profile is, how many backlinks you have, how many domains link to you, etc.
You can even look into the specifics of each backlink to discover how reputable the linking sites are and whether you’ve lost any of them.
Site Health
Site health refers to how strong your website is from a technical SEO standpoint, which can help you discover issues that might be preventing search engines from properly accessing and storing your pages.
When search engines can't properly crawl (access) and index (store in a database) your site, your content is unlikely to show in search results.
Site health is a collection of metrics rather than a stand-alone metric. Those include:
- Crawlability: How easy it is for search engines to access your pages
- HTTPS implementation: How secure your website is
- Performance: Whether your site loads quickly and is easy to use
Track site health using Semrush's Site Audit tool.
It provides a comprehensive health score along with detailed reports about specific SEO issues that need attention.
Check out our guide on configuring Site Audit and set up your first crawl.
2. Create an SEO Dashboard
An SEO reporting dashboard collects all your important SEO metrics in one place to make tracking performance and spotting trends easy.
Once you've identified your SEO KPIs, you need to build an SEO dashboard to track these metrics.
You can create custom dashboards in Looker Studio.
For a simpler approach, use Semrush's Project Dashboard.
If you’ve already set up a project using a Semrush tool, select that project.
Otherwise, follow the prompts to create one.
Once on your Project Dashboard, you’ll see many widgets are tied to tools that need to be configured.
For instance, let’s say you haven’t yet begun tracking rankings for your target keywords.
In that case, you’ll want to configure Position Tracking by clicking “Set up.”
Once you’ve configured the tool, you’ll see a snapshot of your Position Tracking report in your Project Dashboard.
And you can click "View full report" to see even more data.
Next, scroll down to the bottom of the dashboard and click “Connect” under “Connect Google services.”
And follow the prompts to incorporate data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Make sure to connect any other tools as well.
Once set up, your dashboard will automatically update with new data.
Next to some metrics, you'll see change indicators showing whether numbers have increased or decreased compared to the previous period. Hover over these indicators to see detailed comparisons.
For some metrics, you can also hover over a specific date on the time chart to view values registered on that day.
Spend some time doing data interpretation for your SEO KPIs.
It’s helpful to jot down notes about any meaningful observations.
3. Review and Act On Your Findings
Once you’ve put together a dashboard and collected data, you can review what you’ve found and make decisions.
This is a four-step process:
- Analyze the data to spot trends
- Ask questions about what you’ve found
- Dig deeper to come up with some answers
- Take specific actions based on what is and isn’t going well
Let's say you notice your Site Performance score has decreased from last month.
Now comes the question: Why is this metric declining?
To understand this, you’ll need to look into some more specific data points.
You might start by checking your load speed to see whether that got worse. But in this case, you can see that isn’t true—your site is now loading faster than it was last month.
Something else must be causing the issue.
The “Performance Issues” widget shows 149 issues listed under “Unminified JavaScript and CSS files.”
This seems like a possible reason for the decline in overall performance.
You can now review these files and minify code (ask a developer for help with this) to improve your site's performance.
Check next month to see if this helps your score improve.
Or, maybe you notice you’ve lost some of your keyword rankings.
Why did you lose those rankings?
You’ll need to examine your content and what’s showing in search results to understand.
Maybe you discover those pages contain outdated information and don't touch on some of the concepts your competitors cover.
If so, your action item is to update the pages with current information and expand sections that answer common questions.
Monitor the pages over the next several weeks to see if traffic improves.
Drive Success with SEO Analytics
SEO and analytics go hand-in-hand because search engine success requires regular performance monitoring and making data-driven decisions.
With a properly configured SEO dashboard, you can spot promising results. And also find new opportunities to improve your visibility in search results.
Sign up for a free Semrush trial to start your own SEO analytics journey.