When it comes to SEO reporting, most people like to focus on a single metric – the keywords that are ranking and how high they rank. It makes sense, because the way people find you in search engines is through keywords. Theoretically the more keywords you rank for and the better your rankings are for each keyword, the more visible your site will be in searches, and the more clicks you’ll get to your site.
Keywords are important, and it’s important to pay attention to them. But there’s another focus that can be even more relevant – landing pages. Which pages on your site show up in searches? What keywords are they ranking for, and how many site visits are they generating?
Why is this a more important metric than keywords? In short, it gives you more actionable data. Knowing which landing pages are most valuable to your site will tell you where to focus your efforts making improvements to specific pages. If you’re able to tell which keywords are driving traffic to specific landing pages, even better. Now you know what to optimize those pages for to maintain and increase your rankings.
Alternatively, if you’re tracking a keyword and it moves up or down you aren’t left with very actionable data. You could attempt to optimize your entire site in order to increase your position for that keyword, but this could be a time consuming process and may carry unintended consequences for other keywords site wide.
How to get started?
In Google Analytics, run a landing page report, filter the Source/Medium down to google/organic and sort descending by revenue. This will give you the list of pages that are generating the most money from search, and is a great way to get started tracking the impact that searches are having on your site. Happy searching!
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