Monitoring organic traffic is a key part of any SEO professional’s
job. And with Google Analytics, doing this is easy, and free. Here’s a
quick guide to help you explore some key metrics.
Google Analytics
is one of the web’s most popular analytics tools. It’s a free service,
so you should set up an account now if you haven’t already done so.
1) Organic search traffic section
Google Analytics (GA) lets you see the keywords people searched for
when they arrived at your site via the organic search results, the
traffic that comes from Google or Bing that you’ve not paid for.
To check your traffic, click ‘Traffic Sources’, 'Sources' 'Search',
then 'Organic' on the left hand side of the navigation bar, as shown in
this image.

You’ll notice an increasing amount of this traffic is (not provided) ...

... which you can learn about by clicking on that last link.
If you want to look at subsections of that traffic, type in some of
your target keywords in the search bar. Google will then show data for
the keywords that contain that term. Here is the report for
Wordtracker.com. I’ve put in SEO blogger, so all terms that contain that
phrase are returned, such as
Wordtracker SEO blogger and
seo blogger tool for firefox add-on word tracker.

Looking at the traffic for certain keywords can be very informative.
You can see how many people are searching for you by name (and how this
changes over time). And you can see what stage of the buying cycle your
customers are at. Are they looking for more general products, like
laptops, or something very specific, like
Samsung Series 3 laptops? These insights can help you ensure the content on your site matches your customers’ needs.
Similarly, if you’ve been link building to certain pages, using
keyword rich anchor text, you should see (over time) traffic for these
terms increase. So if you’ve been link building around the term
shoes, you might see an increase in
shoe-terms.
You can then compare this with any changes in your
keyword rankings to see if there’s a correlation. There might not be. Often you can optimize a page for a given term like
shoes,
but you might not see any improvement in ranking for that term, at
least not for a while. But if you’re looking at your traffic too, you
might see an increase in traffic for long tail terms (like
discount women’s shoes)
that you’re not tracking the ranking for. Tracking both keyword traffic
and keyword rankings will give you a fuller picture of how your SEO is
doing.
If doing all this manually seems too much like hard work, Wordtracker’s
Strategizer
tool can do it automatically. We’ll look at your groups of keywords and
overlay them with your ranking, traffic and conversion data. You can
see all your most important data in the same place.
2) Search engine optimization section
If you type
not provided into the search bar, you'll see
that Google provides less and less keyword-level traffic. So we can’t
rely purely on the above method for our SEO reporting. We also need to
look at the Search Engine Optimization section.
You can see that you have three options here: Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary.

I'm going to ignore Geographical Summary because it just tells you
where your customers have come from, which won't be interesting (or
actionable) for most of you. But let's focus on the other two areas.
Queries
This section of GA lets you see how people are reacting to your site in the search results. Let's look at Wordtracker's:

The keywords you’re looking at are the top 2,000 traffic drivers to
your site. They're only estimations (notice how they're all conveniently
round numbers). Again, you can see how much traffic you're getting for
your certain keywords by using the search bar.

With Queries however, you can also see you how many people saw your
site in the search results, then clicked through. We call this the
clickthrough rate, or CTR.
People are more likely to click on your search result if it ranks
well (so it appears at the top of the page where users can see it), they
recognize your brand or the page description
is written persuasively. Improving your brand strength and search
engine ranking takes time, but you can change your page descriptions
quickly. If you’ve got a low clickthrough rate, see if you can improve
the description with persuasive copy and strong calls to action, like
‘click here’ or ‘check us out today’. You could see uplift in traffic
very quickly. The
BBC did this. Just by changing the page description, the clickthrough rate went from 67% to 81%!
You can also improve your CTR by using rich snippets.
These allow Google to show more helpful information in the search
results, like reviews or important dates. Snippets make search results
more relevant to what the searcher is looking for, so they are more
likely to click through.
As a rough idea of what sort of CTR you can expect, Wordtracker’s top
ranking keywords typically get around a 20% clickthrough rate, rising
to about 80% for branded searches like
wordtracker. If your
site isn’t very well known, or you don’t rank very well, your CTR will
be much lower. But watch this improve as your brand grows.
Surprise ranking
Looking at your Queries, you might spot some terms that you’re not
actually targeting. These can improve your business in unexpected ways.
Wordtracker ranks for
LinkedIn logo for example. It's a
great traffic driver, even if it's not one of our target terms. But we
can still create relevant content for it. Users may arrive at the site
looking for the LinkedIn logo, but if we can entice them to download an
e-book in exchange for their email address, we've capitalized on that
traffic. But we do this only because it’s a quick win. Don’t spend your
time chasing irrelevant traffic because it’s unlikely to convert. But if
you do get some traffic you weren’t expecting, think if there is an
easy and quick way you can capitalize on it.
Landing pages
The pages people arrive at on your site are called landing pages. And
the better your landing pages rank, the more traffic they’ll get. So
with Google Analytics, we can monitor landing page traffic and see how
our SEO is working.
You can see from Wordtracker’s analytics that we get lots of traffic to the LinkedIn page.

This is happening because we have great content that talks about
LinkedIn and lots of links to that page.
If you want more traffic to a given landing page, make sure the
content is well-written and focused. So if you want a page to rank for
Samsung laptops, only talk about
Samsung laptops on that page. Also try to get more keyword rich links to those pages. So in this example, try to get links that use
Samsung laptops in the anchor text.
Get started!
To look at these numbers in Google Analytics right now, check out this
Google dashboard
I made. Click the link, and select the GA profile you want to use.
You’ll then see the metrics we’ve talked about, using your site’s data.
They’ll be presented in a dashboard, so you’ll see a collection of
tables and charts. To drill down on a given data set, click the header,
and you’ll go through to a fuller report.

In the dashboard I’ve also included some referrer data. This let’s
you see the other sites that are driving traffic to yours. This lets you
see the impact of various things. For example, if you’re running a
social media campaign, you’d expect to see more referral traffic from
the social networks you used, like Facebook or Twitter. Similarly, if
you got a link from a very popular site, you’d expect that link to drive
lots of traffic. The referral section is how you monitor this.
But this dashboard is just designed to get you started. As always
with Google Analytics, explore the data for your own site and see what
insights you can extract. Don’t be afraid to play around. Google
Analytics offers a treasure trove of information, so go explore!
Pictures: wordtracker.com