- [Instructor] Google Analytics has
dozens and dozens of reports
but as SEO, what reports should you be looking at?
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today I'm going to break down
the basic reports that you should be looking at as SEO.
(upbeat music)
Now, before we get started
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Now, of course,
the first thing that everyone knows to look at
if you're SEO is your conversion rate,
if you have goal tracking set up in place, great
if you don't no worries, you can always end up
setting it up, but all you do is go on the left side
you click on conversions, you click on overview
and boom you can end up seeing your conversions
for whatever you may be tracking
or you may not be tracking.
And I recommend just set it up
and you can end up seeing what's converting,
what's converting by channel,
what's working, what's not,
here's the example of goal completions,
that's idea of, hey, what's working, what's not,
what pages are and what you need and fixing
that's great for SEO.
But what most people aren't looking at
and this is where I would start off
within your Google Analytics account
is your week-over-week results.
So here's what I mean by that, right?
So if I click on real-time overview
you'll end up seeing all right
how many people are coming to my website right now.
If I ended up clicking on the home button
you'll see a screen like this,
which has a combination of real-time
and your traffic more so week-over-week,
and you want to see how you're doing week-over-week.
And don't just look at it as pure traffic
look at it from a country-specific crackerjack
or a SEO specific sort of traffic,
and here's what I mean by that.
So I get traveled from all around the world,
Just because I'm assuming you do as well,
whether your website's just in English
or multiple languages like mine,
you can still get traffic from all over the world.
For example, in English,
there's people who visit my site from the UK
or from the US, or from India,
for example even Canada or Australia.
Now my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital,
at the moment we don't have offices in all those countries.
So for example, if we get more UK traffic
although I love it and eventually we'll expand there,
it doesn't necessarily really help us.
So one thing I like doing
is looking at how I'm growing or not growing
week-over-week
within the specific regions that I'm targeting.
So I'm going to compare March 18th to March 11th
as you can see, I'm getting more traffic, 7.12%
so not too bad,
but if I scroll down and I click on country
under demographics, you can see, all right
United States, great, I'm getting more traffic,
this is one of the main areas that I want more traffic from.
And I then go back, I change the March 11 dates
which I selected the compared to
and then I'll click on the fourth, right?
So I'll just go up.
And I want to see how I'm trending
7% more traffic United States
a little bit more traffic, not much more.
And I'll go and do that
and I'll start going, week-over-week that specific day.
And you'll notice a trend here, down 5.18%, right?
In the United States traffic,
even though total more traffic down in the United States,
17 up 9% but down again in the United States, right?
And I'm going to keep going back
and you'll notice that over the last 30 days,
I'm starting to lose more and more traffic
from the United States.
Now, at first you may freak out
and you're just like, wait, what,
that's, something's going wrong?
Because what most marketers do
is they just look at the total traffic
and they're not looking at the total traffic
that they can convert or qualify traffic.
So I'm getting more traffic from Brazil,
we do work in Brazil,
so that's great but I still generate more income
from the United States due to the currency exchange.
So I want to focus
on the regions that are making me the most, right?
Which would be in this case United States,
I'm not saying the other countries aren't amazing
I'm just saying
it happens to be where we tend to just generate more revenue
from the United States.
If you have access to multiple Google Analytics properties,
which I do,
and if you don't you should
talk with other members within your community.
This is one of the big things that people should do
is they can go look at other sites or talk to other people
and see how they're doing week-over-week.
So here is me comparing my site March 18th
versus February 10th.
I'm going to do the same thing for Crazy Egg
in which I click the compare button right in the date range.
So 18 to February 11th
and let's see if I clicked the 18th to February 11th
you want to make sure it's the same day, week-over-week.
So if it's a Thursday, you need compared to Thursday.
And if you look at that
United States down 12%, down for me 6%, both sites.
And when I do this for Crazy Egg and I compare,
you know even like the 25th to the 18th,
25th is a Thursday just making sure,
down 12%, UK, 11%,
this has been happening for a lot of the sites
in the marketing niche.
And I know a few other players in the marketing niche
some are not direct competitors,
some are just software solutions or
in other verticals marketing are just blogs
that just give free information.
But by asking people this and comparing
that's one of the first things that you should do
to see how you're growing week-over-week,
because it's deceptive.
If you look here @neilpatel.com,
you see a total number of users increasing,
which is great, but if I'm losing traffic
in the main region that I care about
you know, most margin part, hey, we're up 12%,
well, you're kind of down in the main region
that makes you money, so that's kind of all that matters.
The next thing I want you to look at
is your overall search traffic.
And I want you to do it in two ways.
So the first is, I want you to just go to
acquisition campaigns, organic keywords
and you can see how your search traffic is doing again
on a regular basis.
And the higher it goes, the more up it goes
the better off you are,
that's a good trend to look at.
And I recommend looking at this
over time and extending it out.
So let's say, look at it for,
the last six plus months,
I recommend you look last year or so.
And you just want to make sure overall you're increasing
which seems pretty healthy in a positive direction,
but as you scroll down and I want to do this on purpose
and I added a lot of dates or a long date range
because you can see there's a lot of junk traffic,
this really isn't search traffic.
So another thing that I recommend that people do
is go to the Search Console,
and I'm loading it up here may take a little bit
just because of a lot of data
and see how you're performing within Search Console.
So let's say I do last 12 months because as I mentioned
I recommend that you check out the last year
and you can see this,
similar to what I ended up showing in analytics
it's increasing, which is good,
Search Console tends to remove all that junk bot traffic.
But I also recommend you filter by the country,
so you click on new, click on country,
and you click on United States
or any country that you're targeting.
Typically that list that's ordered
the ones at the top is where you get the majority
of your search traffic,
as you go down on the list you'll get less and less.
As you can see here
my United States traffic for the rest year or so
it climbed up, but this was during,
when COVID was really booming or first coming around.
So it was during that down period,
if I extended a little bit more out,
you can see how during that COVID period,
I started losing a little bit of traffic,
and I'm just extending it a little bit
so you can end up seeing,
but yeah, so it's a little bit better then COVID.
Then once everyone started working from home traffic boom,
then it started flattening out, started going up
and then started flattening out again.
I do think some of the reasons why my decline right now is
industry related and some of it is not really seasonality,
but quote unquote, external factors that I can't control
like a lot of people staying at home due to coronavirus.
So those are some of the reports that are at first look out.
Another report that I like looking at is real-time.
And if you have enough time traffic,
you can click on real-time then content,
you can see where majority of the people are
spending their time.
Another report that I like looking at is, as a SEO is
your overall traffic,
if it's coming from desktop or mobile.
Because if you're monetizing your traffic
and you have elements for conversion optimization
you have to check to just make sure that
you're doing it for all the mobile stuff as well.
Because on my mobile site
I had conversion optimization elements
but then when I was looking at my real-time,
I realized that most people
are actually looking at my amp pages,
look at this, slash amp, slash amp, slash amp.
And I didn't actually monetize my amp pages
because here's what they look like,
I'm going to pull up my, this is my desktop device
but I can show you what I amp page looks like
by just putting slash amp at the end of my URLs.
So here's example of one of my blog posts,
and here's what it look on desktop.
With amp though,
which is where a lot of people were coming to,
it was just basic and there was no monetization,
it was just the content.
So I wasn't actually making much money
from my mobile traffic,
even if it was coming from the United States.
And from that, I learned that,
hey, I should put some top bar to monetize,
so I put that call to action that slides with you
and I put a bottom one,
and this says click to get more traffic
and if someone clicks
it just takes them to my consulting page.
But I did that and I started generating more conversions
from mobile, specifically my mobile SEO traffic.
But those are some of the places I would start off with
within your Google Analytics conversions.
Everyone should already have set up
if you don't have that set up,
I recommend that you set it up.
And then the rest you can check out
and start looking at some of those reports.
The big one to really check out as a marketer and SEO
is the week-over-week,
and specifically how you're doing week-over-week
during that same day,
and how you're doing
so you would compare, let's say Thursday to Thursday
and you look at it based on regional-based traffic
which is where you're making your money from.
If you need help with your analytics
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
If you enjoyed this video, like it, share it,
tell the people about it,
and sorry for the background noise, I have a baby
and during COVID, I don't want to tell my baby to be quiet
because I would feel that's a little bit rude on my end and
I love my child.
So thank you very much,
and again, if you have, have any questions, leave a comment.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it,
thank you for watching.