Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool when it comes to SEO for your B2B website. Google is one of the most popular search engines in the world, and it makes sense that to rank well on Google, you want to do as much as you can to optimize your website for their search engine. Google Analytics provides valuable information and data that your business can use to monitor and improve SEO performance.
Here are 4 questions to ask when going through Google Analytics to see if there are any areas for SEO improvement.
Who is visiting my website?
Companies can use Google Analytics to get detailed information about website visitors and where they’re coming from to build a complete customer persona. Google Analytics Audience Reports give more information about users on your website. You can see user demographics, device types, location, and more, which can help you tailor your content to your ideal audience.
It’s also helpful to review general B2B website metrics in this section, such as pages per session, average session duration, and bounce rate. Each metric gives insight into user behavior and the effectiveness of the B2B website as it stands.
Read more: GA4 vs Universal Analytics
How are users arriving?
Google Analytics allows B2B website owners and marketers to take a deep dive into where exactly their users are coming from. By frequently reviewing the Acquisition Overview report, you gain access to a high-level snapshot of each channel and their efficacy in driving traffic to your website. When discussing SEO, we’re particularly concerned with two channels: Organic Search & Referral.
Organic Search is defined as a free listing in search engines because it’s relevant to someone’s search terms. To optimize for organic search, the website must have these search terms sufficiently placed throughout the website on both landing pages and blogs in areas that make sense. Google penalizes websites that “stuff” keywords for the sake of relevancy, so you also want to make sure that you’re adding keywords only in places that make sense.
Once you establish your keyword strategy, it’s best to focus on this core set of keywords throughout the website – targeting each keyword on both landing pages and current and future blogs.
Pro Tip: Constantly introducing new blogs to your website is a great way to add keywords to the site, while keeping the content fresh and up-to-date, and Google encourages this!
Referral traffic is defined as a segment of traffic that arrives on your B2B website via another source, like through a link on another domain. With referral traffic, you can work with other businesses in the same industry and tap into new avenues of viewership. Google’s algorithm sees referral links as positive SEO ranking factors (especially for high-domain-authority websites) and signals of users’ confidence and relevance of information.
Pro Tip: If you see the referral website sources that you haven’t worked with before, it’s a good opportunity to reach out and see if they would be interested in working with you. They’ve already linked to your website in one way or another and you both stand to gain mutual benefits – your brand would gain more exposure, while they offer the latest thought leadership content to their audience, while your brand would gain much more exposure to a new audience segment.
Read more: SEO & Buying Intent – Choosing the Right Keywords
Are any landing pages experiencing less engagement?
Landing pages are meant to provide value and an optimal experience for the user. If you notice that a landing page has been historically underperforming, or is slipping in the top landing page report, it’s time to reevaluate the content of the page. It might be time to refresh the page and add in or update the content so that you’re putting your best foot forward, and keeping up with the latest trends and topics.
Your top landing pages on your B2B website are great for measuring the effectiveness of a specific page. Here are some additional, quick questions you may ask yourself to decide whether you need to make changes to the content on the page:
- Do pages have an unusually high bounce rate? If so, you may consider updating the content to be more relevant to the question the page intends to answer.
- Does the page have a shorter time on page than you expect? If so, it’s possible that there just isn’t enough content for the user to read through or it doesn’t answer their question so they move on to another page. Another possibility is that there are just too many CTAs and hyperlinks that take the user to other locations of your site. Having CTAs and relevant hyperlinks are great, but if you’re pushing them from page to page without providing them with sufficient information, it can make for an unpleasant experience.
Pro Tip: Review your top landing page report at least once a month and see if there are any opportunities to improve each page for readability, user intent, additional CTAs (or updating the current ones on page), and overall timeliness.
Why are people leaving my site?
The goal of each B2B website is to educate visitors, answer as many questions as possible, and get them to convert, whether that’s a phone call, a contact form submission, or a newsletter subscription.
However, what happens if you notice that often people aren’t taking any sort of action at all? It’s best to investigate the Exit Pages report in Google Analytics and see where exactly people are dropping off. When you pinpoint which pages visitors use to exit your website, you can target those pages and optimize them accordingly. They may need more content to better answer the topic of the page, while others may need an entirely different CTA to get them to convert.
