The Adido Digital Blog

We were lucky enough to take part in the latest SEOMozinar yesterday looking more at how analytics data (and in particular Google Analytics) can be used to improve SEO. I was expecting to get some tips and tricks on how to use the data directly to help tweak rankings but rightly the seminar looked at analysing your traffic and breaking it down into segments to help understand what traffic converts best and how to tie up your data to your SEO rankings. All in all it was a great talk we'll be looking forward to more in the future (although we feel Rand needs to look more into the benchmarking tool...)

Numerous things were mentioned in the talk and on the online chat and I've taken the liberty of posting four links which I felt were worth sharing to help improve your analytics analysis.

Exporting over 500 rows from Google Analytics to Excel
When it comes to analysing big amounts of data from popular websites with decent amounts of traffic, you might need to export more than 500 rows of data. Thankfully analytics works from querystring parameters so if you want to get more data then its pretty easy.


Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics past page one
The guys at Distilled came up with a way to track your Google ranking clicks in Google Anlaytics (something which we originally started doing a year or two ago) This is great data to get your hands on to identify opportunities of rankings that are driving traffic but are out of sight to the majority of most searchers. (around 75% of people don't go past page one!). Give it a spin!

Tracking Google rankings in Google Analytics (the best way)
This is the holy grail article that you need if you're serious about viewing your rankings and traffic in one place using Google Analytics. By setting up this in GA you can get to see data about the page someone clicked on in Google and the phrase that they clicked on as well. This improves knowledge of conversions, traffic and rankings in one place which makes life a lot easier for anyone doing SEO.

Plugin for Excel to get Google Analytics data
I'd not seen this before but it looks like a pretty useful tool to help analyse analytics data for those who are confident with Excel. Getting to the root of your SEO problem sometimes isn't that obvious from looking at the graphs you get and by having the ability to play around with the raw data in this way, you can find out more about how successful your SEO efforts are. Worth checking out.

There were lots of great ideas shared by the SEOMoz team  and we're really excited about applying them to our clients sites in the coming weeks to get better visibility of the work we're doing and how to improve our SEO efforts.

If any other attendees of the mozinar had any links to share, please feel free to add them.