By Brie-E-Anderson

Posted by Brie-E-Anderson

Website analytics can tell us a lot about our audience and how they interact with our site. Oftentimes, we rely heavily on these analytics for reporting. But what if I told you that Google Analytics provides data that can be used as a strategy tool?

In this post, we are going to quickly look at three very specific, very actionable Google Analytics views for uncovering SEO opportunities.

Track Core Web Vitals

Google has verified that Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) are now part of the Page Experience ranking factor. These metrics together make up Core Web Vitals. This topic has already been covered many times in the SEO industry, and Google itself has covered the topic along with how to measure the metrics, so we won’t dive too deep into the metrics themselves.

In the documentation provided by Google, they break down how you can pull LCP, FID, and CLS in data into Google Analytics. This can be done by setting up custom events using the code found on GitHub.

Upon setting up those events, you’ll be able to see all of the Core Web Vital metrics in Google Analytics. They will show up when you go to Google Analytics > Behavior > Events > Top Events and toggle over to Event Action. To get further insight into how each page is performing in each category, use a secondary dimension of Page.

To find the underperforming pages, use advanced filters to look for pages that fall under the “good” benchmark according to Google.

Using this data, you can tackle Core Web Vitals head-on and keep a close eye on performance as you make changes.

Find and fix 404s

The last thing you want is for people to finally come to your site just to be sent to an “Oops” page. This can happen for a variety of reasons: a mis-shared link, a forgotten redirect, a misspelled word in the URL, etc. It’s important to find these pages early and set up a fix right away to create the best possible experience for users.

The easiest way I’ve found to identify these URLs is to navigate to a page I know doesn’t exist on my website. For example, you may type in example.com/roger-rocks, then, when the page loads a 404, grab the title tag. Now you can navigate to Google Analytics > Behavior > All Pages and toggle over to Page Title. Once here, do a search using the title tag of your 404 page.

You’ll be shown one row with all of the stats for your 404 page. If you click on the title name, you’ll be presented with a new screen with all of the URLs that resulted in a 404 page. These are the URLs you need to research, determine why people are going to them, and then decide what you need to fix.

Again, those fixes may …read more

Source:: Moz Blog

Author: Aaron