Setting up your SEO analytics baselines is crucial for tracking your website’s performance. Without a clear baseline, it’s hard to measure progress or identify areas for improvement. By establishing these benchmarks, you can see what’s working and what needs adjustment.
Start by using tools like a Google Analytics dashboard template. This will help you gather essential data in one place. With this setup, you’ll have a clear view of your website’s traffic, keyword rankings, and other vital metrics. Tracking these over time lets you make informed decisions and boost your SEO strategy.
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What Are SEO Analytics Baselines?
So, before beginning any campaign, it’s important to track your SEO over time and know your strengths and weaknesses. This is what helps you come up with a baseline that you can measure your performance in the course of your campaigns. But before we dig deeper, let’s try to learn about what we mean by SEO analytics baselines.
In simple language, the baselines are where you kickstart your SEO campaign. They’re the metrics that reveal to you the current standings of your website as far as SEO is concerned. Think of SEO analytics baselines as the “before” photo in the journey of your website makeover.
Why are they so important? Because lacking baselines is like scuba diving or wandering around without a headlight. You won’t know whether those backlinks you’re sweating over to build or that fancy content strategy that cost you big bucks to come up with are making a difference.
Taking a Deeper Look at Your Google Analytics Report
So, where do you begin with setting up your SEO analytics baselines? The first place to get started is by looking at your site’s report with a third eye. Through this, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of how your site is progressing and identify the strengths and weak points that need to be worked on.
How do you do that? Obtain the “All Traffic Sources” report from your website’s Google Analytics. This is where you’ll see the source of all traffic streaming to your site, from social media, email marketing, and search engines, to paid ads, and more.
After obtaining the report, all you need to do is compare it to a version of the same report but from a period back, such as a year or so. If you don’t have that, compare it with a competitor. Don’t forget that the time difference in the comparison is important as this is what will make the report relevant.
Key Baseline Metrics Should You Keep Track
In the process of setting up your SEO analytics baselines, you’re going to need an SEO baseline report. But this report needs several data points from your Google Analytics reports. So, when reviewing your analytics report, here are key metrics to note that will reveal your site’s current health. These are the important metrics you need to keep track of:
- Paid search traffic
- Organic search traffic
- Backlinks
- Conversion rates
- Bounce rates
- Top paid keywords
- High-performing organic keywords
- Total ranking keywords
- Keywords by intent
- Indexed pages
Your Google Analytics report will contain much more information than this. You can peruse through it to identify more meaningful data and details.
Another powerful alternative to Google Analytics is the Search Console, offering important metrics that you can use in your baseline analysis. However, it doesn’t keep data longer than 90 days. However, you’ll be able to access data about impressions, clicks, and the overall position of your website.
After this, the next phase that follows is to create the SEO baseline report.
Creating Your SEO Baseline Report
Creating an SEO baseline report is an essential part of the process of learning how to set up your SEO analytics baselines. Surprisingly, it’s among the easiest and least expensive ways of coming up with a baseline analysis for an SEO campaign. You can use your site’s Google Analytics tool to create this report.
Now that we know what metrics to track, we need to pick the tools for the job. When collecting data, it’s important to focus on metrics from the past three to six months. This will provide a good sense of the trends and detect any seasonal fluctuations. If you recently set up your site, simply start with whatever data is available and build from there.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) is the grandfather of web analytics and is a must-have if you need to understand your site’s health. With GA, you’ll get insights about the bounce rates, organic traffic, and more.
Step 1: Sign in to Google Analytics
If you’ve not added your website as a property in Google Analytics, this should be the first step. Open your web browser and go to the Google Analytics website. You’ll need to sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have one, you can create it for free. Enter your email address and password, then click the “Sign In” button. Once you’re in, you’ll see the Google Analytics dashboard. After signing into your Google Analytics account, you’ll be welcomed by a dashboard fully packed with useful data.
Step 2: Go to Acquisition Report
To begin building your baseline report, visit the “Acquisition” section in the left-hand menu. This section will have juicy details about how the various visitors found your site. Click “All Traffic” followed by “Channels” to get an overview of the various sources of traffic that direct visitors to your website.
Step 3: Analyze your Organic Traffic
Look for “Organic Search” in the Channels report, you’ll find information about traffic from various search engines such as Google. You’ll be able to see the number of visitors generated from organic search, as well as average session duration, bounce rate, and goal conversions.
Important metrics that your baseline should have include:
- Total Organic Sessions: This is the total number of visitors that organically found your website through a search engine.
- Average session duration: How long did these visitors spend on your site?
- Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who left after visiting just a single page.
- Conversions: Did they perform a desired action to completion, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter?
Step 4: Scrutinize your landing pages
The next phase is to drill down a little deeper by checking your best-performing landing pages. On Google Analytics under the “Acquisition” section, click on “Source/Medium” followed by “Google/Organic.” Doing this will filter the data and display only the traffic that came via organic search results of Google.
Now, switch to “Landing Page” to see which pages attracted the most visitors out of organic search. These make up your top-performing pages, those that you should keep an eye on as you proceed. Take note of the organic sessions, bounce rates, and conversion rates of your top landing pages. This will help you discover the content that resonates with your audience. It’ll also help you to identify where there could be room for improvement.
Step 5: Set Up Goals for Tracking Conversions
Now’s the time to create goals in Google Analytics if you haven’t already. Through these goals, you’ll be able to track particular actions you’d like visitors to perform on your site, such as completing a contact form or marking a purchase. This will be essential in understanding how effective your SEO efforts are.
On the bottom left corner of your Google Analytics dashboard, go to the Admin section and click on “Goals” followed by “New Goal” under the View column. Follow the wizard to define what you’d like to keep track of.
After setting up your goals, head back to the Acquisition reports to see how many organic visitors are performing the desired actions to completion. This is crucial in building your SEO baseline as it connects the dots between tangible results and traffic.
Step 6: Document Your Findings
In this step on how to set up your SEO analytics baselines, you’ll be compiling all valuable data into your SEO baseline report. This is what you’ll use as the benchmark for all your future SEO strategies. So, it’s crucial that you make it concise, clear, and well-organized.
Your document should contain:
- Overall organic traffic: This is the total sessions obtained from organic search.
- Top landing pages: These are the pages that drive the highest organic traffic, along with important metrics such as bounce rate, conversions, and session duration.
- Goal completions: These refer to the total conversions obtained from organic traffic.
- Historical data: If you have historical data, do comparisons with your current data to discover trends.
Wrapping Up
Setting up your website’s SEO analytics baseline might not be the coolest part of a digital marketing campaign, but certainly among the most important. That’s why you should begin by learning how to set up your SEO analytics baselines to avoid flying blind. Without baselines, you’ll be riding on the hope that maybe your efforts will eventually bear fruits without using concrete evidence.
However, a solid baseline gives you a clear understanding of your starting point and where you should be headed. An SEO baseline report lets you track your website progress and help you make informed decisions. Ultimately, you’ll be able to drive more traffic, make more conversions, and generate more revenue.
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Sidhant Mehandru
Siddhant is a data analytics professional and runs a consulting agency name Eaglytics that specializes in providing end-to-end data services under one roof. His firm primarily works with digital marketing agencies and provides marketing analytics and insights services. Before this, he worked at JPMorgan Chase as a business analyst and graduated from the one of the top engineering colleges in India. Outside of work, he’s a hardcore audiophile, loves playing golf and is a licensed scuba diver.
