How To Make SEO Analytics Your Competitive Advantage

If your agency offers SEO services for clients, you know that it takes time to see a return on your marketing efforts. Even as the results start coming in, they also fluctuate dramatically over time, making it challenging to report SEO wins to clients.

You may be publishing content regularly, building backlinks to their website, and doing everything else that goes into a successful campaign, but these traffic fluctuations occur nonetheless, and they sometimes worry clients.

The changes in performance may be from a new Google algorithm update or simply from seasonal trends in traffic—regardless, your agency needs to be aware of it, analyze its impact on your client's site, and be empowered to make data-driven marketing decisions from the insights.

This is where SEO analytics come in handy.

It helps you measure, analyze, report, and act on insights from the overwhelming amount of search data at your fingertips.

This step-by-step guide helps your agency make the most of your clients' SEO data and prove or agency's long-term value.

Let’s get started.

What Is SEO Analytics?

One of the advantages of running an SEO campaign over a more traditional, let’s say direct mail campaign, is that every piece of data is tracked and easily accessible with the right agency-centric SEO software tools.

But there is a process to take this raw data from SEO tools and make sense of it for you and your clients. This includes identifying key metrics, visualizing data, and writing summaries. The ultimate goal of your data analysis is to be able to take this data and derive actionable insights from it.

The actionable insights that we’re referring to could be things like:

• Identifying new opportunities to rank for high search volume keywords

• Identifying that page load speed is negatively affecting your bounce rate and user experience

• Identifying which traffic sources are driving the most organic conversions

To successfully analyze SEO data from various sources, it’s generally recommended to use a rank tracker tool that can help you quickly perform tasks such as daily keyword rank tracking, data visualization, data storytelling, and efficient reporting so that you spend your time on the marketing itself instead of inside a manual spreadsheet.

Simply put, you’re trying to figure out exactly what is working and your current obstacles for successfully driving organic traffic and conversions for your clients.

Let’s look at a step-by-step process of getting started with your analysis.

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Step 1: Preparing for Success

Before we get into the SEO tools and analytical techniques, let’s first review what you should have in place before starting your SEO analysis.

There are two crucial elements to put in place before you start your analysis, including:

• Deciding who is responsible for each task involved

• Choosing the frequency that you’re going to review your clients' SEO metrics

Assigning Roles for SEO Analytics

Whether you're a small or large marketing agency, knowing the various roles and responsibilities to complete your clients' SEO analysis is essential.

A few of the most critical tasks include:

• Collecting data from various sources

• Performing data visualization

• Analyzing the data and providing written insights

• Preparing and reporting the data to clients

It could be a single SEO analyst that performs these tasks, or you can use software to automate much of it, but generally, you want more than one team member reviewing that data regularly.

Choosing a Frequency for SEO Analytics

Another worthwhile consideration is how often your agency tracks SEO metrics, which you should decide early on.

Depending on the marketing budget size, it generally makes sense to review your analytics at least once a week. That said, if you choose to go with an analytics SEO reporting tool, you have key metrics automatically sent to you and your clients on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis so that you’re always up-to-date with their data.

Step 2: Setting up the Right SEO Analytics Tools

Now that we know how to prepare for an SEO analysis, it’s time to collect data. In particular, the SEO tools we’re going to set up and review in this section include:

• Google Analytics (or GA-4)

• Google Search Console

• AgencyAnalytics

Of course, there are lots of other powerful SEO tools at an agency's disposal, including Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush, Google Lighthouse, and more. But, for today, we're going to focus on a few of the most commonly used tools by marketing agencies.

Google Analytics

There are many SEO analytics tools on the market, but since we’re typically trying to rank on Google, the first step is almost always to set up Google Analytics.

You might be accustomed to using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for creating SEO reports, but it's good to know that it's not your only option. Google Analytics offers insights into what visitors do after arriving at your website, such as the number of pages they explore and where they decide to exit. It provides you with numerous other data points as well, making it a valuable tool in understanding user behavior. If you're interested in utilizing this tool, or perhaps expanding your current use, the following step-by-step guide will help you get started with Google Analytics and explore its full potential.

Here’s a step-by-step process for you to get started with Google Analytics:

1. Create an account or sign in to an existing account at google.com/analytics/.

2. Set up a property in your account. A property represents either your website or app that Analytics is going to collect data from. To set up a property, simply click on “G4 Setup Assistant” under the Property column, as shown below.

3. Click on "Get Started" followed by "Create Property". After this, look out for the green "Connected" text, which indicates your Google Property was successfully connected.

4. Add the Google Analytics tracking code to your website so that it can collect data.

To do so, click on “Admin” and select your property. Under the property, click on Tracking Info > Tracking Code to find your Google Analytics ID. Add this Analytics Tag to your website to understand how each web page performs.

5. Now that you’ve added the tracking code to your website or app, the next step is to set up “Goals” in Analytics.

Goals are the best way to measure important events on your website and can include things like completing a purchase, collecting an email address, and so on.

Understanding how many people complete the goals you set up is crucial, as it gives a clear ROI to evaluate the success of your campaign.

Now that we’ve got Google Analytics set up, let’s look at a few ways to use it to help analyze your SEO efforts. In particular, a few of the insights for improving search engine optimization efforts include:

• Creating SEO-related goals: Here's a tip from the digital agency Avalanche Creative regarding SEO-related goals:

We love using the Reverse Goal Path in Google Analytics to show our SEO clients how improving and adding content is contributing to the most important factors: results. This means you've got to have Goals set up properly with Google Analytics (form completions, clicks to call, sales, etc.). From there, you can see what landing pages lead to the best results and what pages people interact with most on their way to the most desired results; your goals.

• Finding top-performing pages: Regularly looking at your top-performing pages allows you to figure out which pages to prioritize for optimization is another useful tactic. You can find your top-performing pages right on the Google Analytics home page.

Use the AgencyAnalytics dashboard builder to quickly and easily create client dashboard templates, then duplicate them for each new client with just a few clicks.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is another useful SEO analysis tool from the Google Suite, which describes itself as:

Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site's Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results

As mentioned earlier, Google Analytics is an excellent tool for analyzing everything that happens after someone clicks on your website. GSC, on the other hand, provides in-depth analytics into everything that happens before someone clicks on your website (i.e., while they’re still in the search engine).

A few of the use cases include:

• Analyzing impressions, clicks, and position in Google Search

• Identifying which queries are bringing people to your site

• Testing the mobile usability of your site

• And much more

Let’s now look at the step-by-step process to get it set up and ready to analyze your clients' SEO services.

1. First, you need to log in to Google Search Console—keep in mind that you should log in with the same account you used to set up Google Analytics so you can sync the two.

2. Next click on “Add a property” and choose between adding a Domain or a URL prefix as shown below:

3. Next, you’ll need to verify domain ownership. We won’t cover verification in this article, but if you’ve chosen to add a Domain, this requires DNS verification, and there are several other verification methods if you use a URL prefix.

As soon as you’ve added your property to GSC, Google starts tracking data for it right away, even if you haven’t verified it yet. After you’ve verified your website, you’ll have access to all the data they’ve been collecting.

When To Use Google Search Console

A few of the most common ways you can use this platform for SEO include:

• Improving ranking for underperforming keywords: If you’re ranking in anywhere except position one or two, there’s room for improvement. Keyword research helps to find underperforming keywords. Go to “Search Results” and turn on position data and average CTR metrics as shown below. Then you can scroll down and choose a filter for any keyword opportunities based on those that are ranked below a certain position.

• Improve CTR for pages with high keyword ranking: Even if your page is ranking highly in search engines, the next metric to optimize are pages with a low CTR. Toggle average CTR and position data in the “Search results” report, but this time you don’t want to filter for lower position pages.

Here's a tip from the founder of the digital agency Searchant:

There's at least one quick trick that's easy to overlook with it. If you need a quick SEO 'win,' use Google Search Console to find keyword optimization opportunities, look for keywords with high impressions but low clicks. Focus your page on those, and you've got a winner.

Don't get lost in a sea of GSC data; use an automated dashboard to quickly see what's happening. Try this Google Search Console dashboard on AgencyAnalytics by signing up for a free 14-day trial.

Step 3: SEO Analytics Reporting

If you own or work at an agency, you probably know that getting results for your clients is only half the battle. The other half summarizes the campaign's performance (usually for a non-technical audience) and presents the data in a professional way.

That’s where SEO analytics reporting comes in.

Since manually creating reports from scratch is usually one of the less enjoyable tasks for SEO professionals, we recommend going with reporting software that automates this process. Unlike the Goole Suite, there is a cost associated with reporting tools like this, but in most cases, the time (and headaches) you save yourself are more than worth it.

Let’s look at a few of the tools, reports, and dashboards to use within AgencyAnalytics.

Rank Tracking for SEO Analytics

One of the most powerful tools you can use to analyze the efforts of your SEO is a rank tracker.

As you probably know, there are countless ranking factors that go into ranking on a search engine, and these rankings are also constantly changing. One of the main benefits of a third-party rank tracker is that it helps monitor and report on keyword positions across multiple search engines like Google, Google Maps, and Bing.

A few of the other core features of a rank tracker include:

• Monitoring Multiple Languages & Locations: If your client is a local business with a presence in multiple locations or multiple languages, the rank tracker allows you to add as many as you want into a single campaign at the ZIP code, city, or country level.

• Competitor SEO Analysis: On top of monitoring your own client’s websites, use the rank tracker to determine where their competitors are ranking to identify new opportunities for ranking.

• Advanced SEO Metrics: In addition to metrics like search volume and total results, track more advanced metrics such as mozRank, Page Authority, Domain Authority, and total backlinks.

Now that we know how to use the white-labeled rank tracker in your analytics workflow let’s look at how you use AgencyAnalytics to visualize and report on SEO results to clients.

Data Visualization & Reporting

There’s no question that the analytics tools provided by Google are extremely helpful for SEO efforts, but one area they fall short of is in client reporting. Reporting in the Google Suite requires you to combine Google Analytics, Search Console, and usually Data Studio (now Looker Studio). The issue with this approach is that the time spent compiling and processing data with these platforms adds up quickly.

The fact is, most clients don’t care as much about the technical details as marketing agencies often think. Instead, they usually just want a simple report and a written summary of the performance that they can easily understand.

It's very difficult to explain the value of a service to a client without visuals. Using the web analytics report and the SEO reports side by side, helps us show our clients a correlation between SEO and Traffic.

Ruben Roel, President, Investigator Marketing

To simplify the reporting process, AgencyAnalytics has pre-built SEO report templates and dashboard templates. As you can see from the image below you just need to connect your Google Analytics account and can then automatically create a dashboard populated with your data.

In particular, a few of the main sections in the AgencyAnalytics SEO templates include:

• Conversions via Organic Search: As you can see below, if we click on the Organic Search tab we can see the conversion rate, as well as a graph showing the progress over time.

• Organic Traffic: Another key indicator to include in your data analysis is how many visitors are coming from organic search traffic, as you can see below broken out into each traffic source.

• Keyword rankings: After you know the total traffic, it's good practice to do your keyword research and figure out exactly which focus keywords are driving clicks and conversions. As you can see below, each keyword in your organic search dashboard includes metrics for engagement, views, conversions, and more.

These are just a few of the metrics included in a Google Analytics dashboard template. Other key reporting metrics to include are SEO ranking changes, new and lost backlinks, a site health checkup score, top landing pages, and the number of reviews on Google.

Need to consolidate SEO data from different sources like Google Ads? Use the AgencyAnalytics SEO dashboard template to save time and access SEO insights with ease.

Insights & Decision Making

After you’ve collected all your client's data, analyzed the key metrics, and used charts and other visual data elements in your client reports, it’s time to use these insights to make decisions for the next period of your campaign.

Before getting into the technical details of your campaign, one of the best ways to present these insights and the next steps to your clients is with an SEO report summary.

A report summary should generally be quite simple, short, and easy to read, even if the client doesn't know anything about SEO.

The main benefit of using customizable marketing report templates is that you can choose the important live data from multiple sources and display it in a way that even someone who is not technical can digest. This makes the relationship between an agency and their clients a winning relationship.

Justin Hual, Co Founder + COO, HIP Creative

In particular, we recommend providing a breakdown of the following metrics:

• Project goals and SEO KPIs

• Tasks completed

• Results overview

• Plan of the next steps

After reading the report, the client should know exactly what happened during the period and the next steps your agency plans to take toward their goals.

Use an AgencyAnalytics SEO report to capture your clients' critical SEO insights. Use this exact template when you sign up for a free 14-day trial.

With a reporting platform, you have the option to create either SEO reports that can be automatically sent daily, weekly, or monthly, or you can provide your clients access to a white-labeled dashboard with personalized commentary so they can access their data whenever they want.

Case Study: How Dilate Digital Consolidated Data From 6 Tools Into 1

An example of how to improve the efficiency of an SEO strategy comes from a full-service digital marketing agency called Dilate Digital. Since they are full service, one of their main challenges was pulling in data from a variety of sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Google Analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads.

This ended up taking up a lot of time each month, so they went looking for a digital marketing analytics solution. After trying AgencyAnalytics, the CEO realized that all he had to do was connect a client’s portfolio (social media, Search Console information, ad campaigns, etc.), and all their data was available in a single platform.

As a result, with the dashboards and custom reporting options for SEO, PPC, social, email, reviews, and call tracking they were able to increase their reporting efficiency by 50%.

Here's what the founder had to say:

We use AgencyAnalytics mainly for SEO and Google Ads metrics. We track keyword rankings, backlinks, trust flow, citation flow, and website errors. We also track ad spend and cost per acquisition. Other things we measure include social metrics, Google My Business listings, and traffic flow from all sources—paid, organic, and referrals.

Have a Strategy in Place

Whenever you’re working on analyzing data from search engines, there are countless tools available, but since we’re generally trying to rank in Google, it makes sense to start with Google Analytics.

As an SEO professional, the hard part usually isn’t learning how to use Google Analytics or any other tool for that matter but rather figuring out how to efficiently analyze and present that data to your clients.

One of the SEO benefits of using a KPI reporting tool is that you can consolidate data from as many sources as you need and then easily access them from a single dashboard or report on AgencyAnalytics. For example, combining Google Ads with their organic search results to help paint an overview of your clients' marketing campaigns.

Create white-labeled reporting to match your agency's branding, or build your own custom client dashboards. It's that simple!

Choose from an extensive range of SEO features and save billable hours along the way. Try it on AgencyAnalytics–it’s free for 14 days.