- [Instructor] Hi everyone, it's Neil Patel
and today in SEO Unlocked we're going
to be going over Google Analytics part two.
In other words, I'm going to help you master
Google Analytics and got into some of
the nitty-gritty details that you need
to know to really succeed.
Before we get started,
a quote I want to read from W Edwards Deming,
"In God we trust; all others must bring data."
And, as I mentioned, we're going
to be going over Google Analytics part two.
So the big problem that you may end up facing
with Google Analytics now that you have it up
and running is, "Hey, what are
"the keywords that are driving traffic to me?"
With paid advertising you'll see them right away,
but if you're not using paid advertising,
a lot of your organic and SEO traffic
will show you "not provided,"
and they ended up making this change
in October 2011 to help protect users' privacy.
So, the way that you would uncover
you're "not provided" keywords is
you would go into Google Analytics,
click on Admin, click on Create View,
and then you want to go to Filters.
And when you click on Filters,
it'll break down how to create it
so that way you can view all the "not provided" keywords,
but a really important disclaimer
that I need to make is do not apply
this filter to all of your website's traffic.
That would eliminate important data from all
your analytics account that you won't be able to recover.
So this is really important
that you follow it step-by-step.
And what you want to do is add a filter,
and when you click add a filter you'll go through
and you want to end up putting Search term not provided,
you'll also want to end up putting Request URL
and just copy it literally verbatim,
and then Campaign Term you want to end up putting that.
When you end up doing that you'll be good to go.
It ends up taking let's say a few days to a week
to collect significant data.
If you don't get much traffic at all,
it could take a few weeks,
but you'll start seeing data on some
of those "not provided" terms.
In addition to that, another easy thing
you can do is connect your Google Search Console account
to your Google Analytics account
and that'll also start showing you data
of all the keywords that people are finding you from
when it comes to SEO standpoint.
Another problem that you're going to be facing
is dark traffic.
You're probably wondering, "Hey Neil,
"what's dark traffic?"
Don't worry, it's nothing shady or unethical like that,
it's more so direct traffic.
You get all this direct traffic,
but is it really direct?
How are they learning about you?
How are they finding out about you?
So, when you look at your site
you'll probably see that maybe 20%
of your traffic is direct.
It shouldn't be more than, let's say 38, 40%,
but in general what you'll find is,
if it's too high and you're not getting much traffic at all
it could just be you going to your site
a lot of times and that'll be considered direct traffic.
But, in most cases, it's actually Google traffic
that is the direct traffic.
Not all, but a large portion.
So, there's a company called Groupon,
you know they provide coupons for any restaurant
or place or spot or really good discount
and they ran an experiment,
and I do not recommend that you run this experiment.
They're like, "Hmm, let's run a little experiment
"and block out Google for a few days
"and see what happens."
What quickly ended up happening is,
not only did their organic search traffic go down,
but also their direct traffic went drastically down.
And it shows that, hey a lot of people
who are just going to your website,
they may just be coming from search,
but it's being classified as direct traffic.
So, what I want you to do is create
a new segment and click on Add Segment
and then from there click on New Segment,
and what I want you to do is click on Traffic Sources,
contains direct, and then I want you
to add a condition in which you say
is none of and it's pretty much not your homepage.
Because when you exclude your homepage,
most people aren't going direct to like
neilpatel.com/blog/howtoboostyourSEOtraffic.
They're usually going to your homepage,
so when you exclude out your homepage
chances are the rest is direct traffic,
and you'll want to name this segment,
like you could call it Dark Traffic
and then click Save.
So then that will give you an idea
of how much of your direct traffic
is really direct or a search.
When you're also doing SEO,
especially if you're working for someone else,
and even if your business owner,
you want to see the value.
You don't want to make an investment in SEO
just because I tell you.
You want to see the ROI and Google Analytics
is the main way to measure this ROI.
It'll tell you if something's driving revenue
or conversions or sales.
It'll always tell you that, hey,
if your ranking for a page and this key term,
if it's driving revenue or if it's just driving
you traffic that doesn't convert,
because you need a purpose.
Your SEO goals isn't to just drive traffic
unless your campaign is brand awareness.
You goal should be to drive revenue, leads, sales,
and that's why you want to use Good Analytics.
You also want to use that data to make informed decisions.
And I'll break in a bit on how to find more data
within Google Analytics so
you can make informed decisions,
but it's super important because within your organization
or your company, look we as individuals, even me,
we don't know everything.
You want the data to guide you
and tell you what you should be focusing and doing.
So make note of all the changes
that you make within your marketing so you can see
that hey, when we're making these changes,
is it causing more conversions,
is it causing more traffic, is it causing more sales, right?
As I mentioned, you want data to guide you.
So within your Google Analytics
you can click that small dropdown arrow
and you can start adding annotations.
You'll also see on the right side
there's a little blue link that says Create new annotation.
And anytime you do something or make a change
you can create a new annotation
and you can quickly see,
all right this is the day that I made this change
and did my traffic or sales go up,
or did they go down, or did they stay flat?
This is really useful because it'll help
guide your changes and tell you if you did something
good or bad so you know in the future
what to repeat or what not to do at all.
I also love comparing my traffic year over year
because it'll tell me are things go better
or are they getting worse over time,
and if they're getting worse
then what did I do in the previous years
that helped me perform better than I am now.
And that's why you want to use annotations as well.
You also want to look at your blog content.
Is it appealing?
Which ones are?
What ones are performing better?
Because that's the stuff you should be writing more about.
In your navigation you want to go to Behavior,
Site Content, and All Pages, and this will show you
when you see spikes what pages are doing the best over time,
and those are more of the pages that you want to create,
especially if they're driving sales, leads, and conversions.
You can do the same thing with your landing pages.
You'd use similar navigation,
go to Behavior and then Landing Pages
to see what Land Pages are also performing
the best over time because that'll give you and idea
of the type of landing pages that you should create
and the ones that you're just wasting your time on.
I also want you to check your social media traffic.
So within the left navigation bar
click on All Traffic and then go Source Medium
and look for your social traffic.
What social channels are driving you consistent traffic,
and also look at the goal completion
from those social channels
because now you can see which ones are also driving revenue.
Is Facebook making you more money,
or is YouTube, or is it Twitter, or Instagram?
You'll be able to see within this report.
You can also break it down by referrals
because a lot of social sites won't show up there.
So you can go Acquisitions, All Traffic, Referrals.
This also shows you all referring traffic as well
even if it's not a social site.
Like let's say if Forbes linked you,
or Huffington Post, or CNN, or BBC,
you can see what kind of traffic you got
and what kind of revenue it generated you as well
because you set up goal tracking.
I also want you to check out your campaigns
if you're doing pay-per click traffic or any ads,
and when you go under Campaigns
in your left navigation, or Acquisition,
Google Ads, Campaigns, you can quickly see
if it's working or if it's not.
Now, one thing to note here is
we typically see the conversions,
the numbers that you see in this report,
not always match up 100% with your database.
So let's say you have an E-commerce site
and you're selling boxes.
You may end up seeing in this report 100 conversions,
but you may end seeing in your backend
that you only got 89 orders.
So it's pretty close to accurate,
but just, you know, use it as a general rule of thumb
if things are going up or down.
Keep in mind it's not 100% accurate always.
You want to double check the data with your own database.
This will all help you figure out
what's working and what's not.
You want to do more of what's working
and less of what's not.
And when you're finding that something isn't working out
you don't want to just delete those pages or stop,
you want to go into Google Search Console,
click on Search results in the left navigation
and look at those pages that aren't working
and be like, "Hmm, are they getting impressions
"but low click rate?"
Because if they are, maybe I just need to adjust my
meta tags, like my title of the page,
meta description, to try to get more clicks.
And that will help you get more traffic,
and as you get more traffic,
those pages may start working again.
And the other thing that you want to end up doing
is track that over time
because once you make those changes within Search Console,
usually within 30 days you can see
if you're getting better results from it or if you're not.
And what I like doing is,
I do either rewriting the post,
include more detailed content, if I'm trying to improve it,
I may include images or surveys,
surveys you can use tools like SurveyMonkey
or Hotjar to survey our audience
and figure out what you need to improve,
update the meta description and title tag like I mentioned,
you also want to look at your competitors
and create better content, better videos,
better images, just in other words out do them.
Put in 110% effort.
And once you make your changes,
go back into Search Console,
click on URL inspection and then type in your URL
that you make the changes to
so that way Google call crawl it
so you can quickly see
if the changes you're making within 30 days
are providing you with a lift or flat
or are they actually tanked your traffic.
Because sometimes you can make changes that hurt,
sometimes the changes are good.
This will all tell you what
you should be doing in the future
because it shows you what's working and what's not working.
So some action items for you.
Run reports and find out what's working.
Upgrade the posts with impressions,
high impressions and low click through rate.
And rewrite the titles.
So, if you do all of this, you'll be better off.
You can also use a tool called ClickFlow
that'll help you rewrite the titles,
so check that out as well.
Thank you for tuning in
and I look forward to continually helping
you grow your search traffic.