Search Engine Optimization in Google Analytics - Part 2

In my previous post I showed you how to set up ‘Web Master Tools data sharing’ in your Google Analytics account, in this post I give you more information about the three reports available under the Search Engine Optimization section.

Queries:  From the three reports provided we find this one the most useful. Within this report you can see metrics related to the web search queries that returned your page in the Google Search results.  The metrics include impressions, clicks, average position and CTR for the top 1,000 daily queries.  

The following are some ideas that might help you to have a better sense of how your site is performing in Google Search:

• The Queries report is very useful to help determining improvement of search queries after running a SEO audit and applying changes in your site, look at changes in average position and CTR.  
• As in any of the other reports in Google Analytics, you can compare different periods, i.e current month and last month and look at the performance of the search queries you are more interested in.  

• Compare impression and CTR to get ideas of how you could improve the content of your landing pages making them more relevant based on the search queries.
• Apply secondary dimensions to filter data for particular search queries.  For example, you could be interested to analyse search queries by country and by search properties (i.e image, Mobile smartphones, Mobile, Video or Web).

Landing Pages: Similar to the Queries report you are able to see the top landing pages by impressions, clicks, average position and CTR.  You can find that some of the pages don’t get a good CTR because the meta tags such as description, title and keywords are not configured or are not used effectively. 

Geographical Summary: Under this report we can see impressions, clicks and CTR by country and by Google search property.  

My advise is that you don’t use these reports trying to match information from Google Analytics with Web Master tools because they may differ.  The way how Webmaster Tools processes the data is different to Google Analytics; but it’s possible to find some similar trends in the number of clicks and visits. Also I guess they will differ more now that Google will no longer report the query terms the user searched on to reach your site when they are logged in with their google account.