Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a great tool for analyzing traffic to your website and offering insights into the performance of your campaigns as well as user behavior. SEO professionals can use the data provided by the reports and metrics of GA4 for improving SEO performance.
Reports in GA4 don’t automatically show Google Search Console (GSC) data. GSC has to be manually linked in the admin section of GA4. Once it has been linked, you need to publish the reports manually for the data to be accessible in GA4. Once this has been done, you can view the following reports:
- Google organic search traffic report. This report allows you to analyze data from Google’s organic traffic search by the user’s landing page and query string as well as device type and country.
- Queries report. This report helps you to gain clarity on search terms including clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average keyword rankings.
There are additional reports available in GA4 to help you organize data on your organic traffic, the traffic that comes to your website through organic search rather than advertising links. The GA4 Acquisition report allows you to filter data from different mediums such as Google, Bing and Yahoo or from referrals or emails.
Your organic traffic can be organized at the level of individual URLs or broadly. You can analyze pages with different levels of traffic, which can provide insight into the performance of specific pages. You can track bounce rate, measure interaction time and learn what percentage of users are engaging with content. You can also learn which pages are converting most effectively, which can help you improve landing pages.
You can follow the user’s journey and track where 404 pages are by using Page Path and screen class dimension. The path explorations report allows you to automate the process of studying the user’s journey on any web analytics page.
Measuring Events
Events measure specific interactions on a web page such as clicking a link or filling out a form. Under Reports – Engagement – Events, you can learn how many events are being achieved. This gives you more information about the quality of your web traffic. Analyzing search results metrics can help you understand the most popular search terms visitors are looking for and traffic you’re getting from individual countries.
If your site allows product comparisons, you can set up an event to see what products or features are compared most often. You can also plan blog content to respond to the most common questions and comparisons.
Metrics and information available in GA4 reporting can be very useful for SEO campaigns. You can create customized reports to give you better insights. You can customize information such as dimensions, metrics and filters to make the information you’re looking for easy to find.
For professional help with leveraging GA4 or with PPC, SEO or inbound marketing, reach out to Softline Solutions. We’ve helped hundreds of companies to succeed online, and we want to help you too. Contact Softline Solutions today.
