Search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable strategy to bring more organic traffic to your HVAC website. It’s also rather complex, enigmatic, and challenging to master.
If you’re having trouble improving your rankings in search engines like Google, using a tracking and analytics tool can help you narrow your approach, see key areas of improvement, and better understand your organic traffic trends. Google Analytics is perhaps the best SEO analytics tool in the industry, and you can use this tracker to boost your HVAC SEO.
Learn how to improve SEO with Google Analytics. Then contact Relentless Digital, an SEO agency for HVAC companies, for help boosting your web traffic.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool powered by Google. This platform displays a wide range of valuable metrics related to your website’s traffic (i.e., the people who visit your site). It can also tell you a lot about your site’s SEO.
You may know that SEO relies on factors like site speed, page speed, including relevant SEO data throughout your website, JavaScript code, and much more. But knowing how to optimize every element involved in SEO requires proper SEO tracking and an in-depth look at your website’s performance.
Anyone can make a Google Analytics account and connect it to their website to begin tracking metrics. But you must know how to use this tool effectively to improve your SEO strategy. It presents a lot of information that can feel overwhelming if you don’t have a keen eye and an understanding of what you’re looking at.
What Does Google Analytics Tell You?
Google Analytics reveals numerous metrics about your website. Below are the main types of information you’ll glean from the Google Analytics SEO tools.
User Behavior
The goal of SEO is to boost your online visibility, thus bringing more visitors to your website. As a result, understanding user behavior on your website can help you understand what to change or keep the same to maximize website visitors.
Google Analytics provides information about:
- The number of users who visit your site (where “user” is defined as a first-time visitor)
- The types of devices your users are using most frequently to visit your website, such as mobile devices vs. desktop computers
- Your bounce rate, or the number of visitors who only view one page before leaving your HVAC website
- Sessions, or user activity on your website that occurs within 30 minutes of when the user first enters your website
- Search intent, or the reason users complete search queries that lead to your site
- The search exit metric, which indicates what percentage of users ended their session after visiting a landing page
Each of these data points provides key information about user behavior that you can leverage to understand how users interact with your site. For example, if your bounce rate is high, you need to improve the engagement of your home page so that users stick around and continue learning about your HVAC services.
As you modify your SEO strategies, you can watch how your user behavior changes and gauge whether your efforts have been successful.
Paid and Organic Traffic Sources
Google Analytics data also includes valuable information about the sources of your website traffic. Understanding where most of your users come from can help you:
- Invest even more time and resources into that source to further increase your search traffic
- Know which sources you may want to enhance to attract more people
Seeing an influx of users to your website can be exciting, but it won’t mean much if you can’t see where those users came from. With Google Analytics, you can identify key sources of search traffic, such as:
- Ad campaigns
- Social networks
- Search results
- Emails
Content Engagement
The final type of information you can glean through Google Analytics tracking is content engagement. How much time do users spend on your web page where they’re actually focusing on your content? Understanding this metric can help you adjust your content strategy to increase organic traffic and search rankings.
Average session duration is one of the key metrics indicating content engagement. If people only spend a few seconds in a session on your website, they’re likely not reading your content very thoroughly. And while you shouldn’t expect anyone to read every word on your website, a high average session duration indicates that:
- The page a user landed on adequately answers their search query
- The content on that landing page is engaging enough to keep users reading or scrolling through the page
- Your website as a whole satisfies the user’s search intent enough that they do not instantly click away
Google Analytics vs. Google Search Console
One final piece of information you should know before learning how to improve SEO with Google Analytics is the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Should you use both in your SEO efforts?
Both tools are completely free and powered by Google, the very search engine that facilitates most of your web traffic. The main difference is that Google Analytics reports focus more on user behavior and your website performance even outside the search results, while Google Search Console accounts for metrics related specifically to Google searches.
Many business owners only use Search Console to improve SEO because the tool deals directly with search performance. But neglecting Google Analytics can cause you to lose out on valuable SEO data.
Instead, you may want to use both tools to improve your SEO.
How To Improve SEO With Google Analytics
When you use Google Analytics for the first time, you may feel a little overwhelmed by all the data available to you. But after spending some time on the site and implementing goals, filters, and annotations, you’ll be able to use it for the main purpose of tracking and improving SEO.
Understand that Google Analytics is a tracking tool. This tool in itself isn’t going to change your SEO. However, you can use Google Analytics to track your site search traffic, allowing you to understand which areas of your website need improvements to flesh out your SEO strategy.
Here’s how to improve SEO with Google Analytics:
#1: Create Your Google Analytics Account
If you haven’t yet, set up a Google Analytics account. You can do so by going to analytics.google.com and then heading to Admin. Then click Create, and select Account.
After naming your account, you’ll need to adjust your data-sharing settings to control the data you will share with Google. Then, you can add your first property to the account, which is your website.
Take a few moments to explore the Google Analytics conversion data and get to know the platform before moving on to the next steps.
#2: Set Up Google Analytics Goals
You can use the Google Analytics Goals tool to pinpoint how well your site meets target objectives. This feature narrows the search query data you see, allowing you to focus on the most important metrics for SEO. You can create a custom dashboard showing tailored and accurate SEO reporting.
You can also set goals that track specific actions on your website, such as filling out a contact form. These goals help you understand your website performance overall.
Because you’re trying to improve SEO through Google Analytics, start by setting SEO-related goals. For example, you may want to set any of the following goals for your HVAC website visitors:
- Ten new users visit your website
- A user spends ten minutes or longer on your site
- At least five pages were loaded during a user’s session
When you log into your Google Analytics account, you’ll be able to instantly see how your SEO efforts are performing.
#3: Use the Right Filters
When using Google Analytics, you’ll want to separate your different metrics into dashboards or views that allow you to focus on one type of data at a time. Implementing filters within your account allows you to open Google Analytics custom dashboards that filter out irrelevant traffic.
For example, some of your web traffic will inevitably come from spam. Filtering spam out of your SEO dashboard can help you avoid factoring this traffic into how much organic traffic you receive from new SEO campaigns as you implement them.
Filters only apply to specific reports, not your Google Analytics dashboard as a whole. As a result, you can still keep an eye on spam traffic and the other types of data you’ve filtered out when you want to.
#4: Monitor Referral Traffic
Evaluating the referral traffic to your website, which comes from sources other than the Google search engine, can also key you into your SEO performance. The easiest way to find referral sites and monitor referral traffic using Google Analytics is through a multi-channel funnel report.
This report breaks down the marketing channels that are generating traffic and conversions. Such channels may include:
- Unpaid searches
- Referrals from other sites
- Direct traffic
- Google Ads
- Paid searches
- Custom campaigns
You can use Google Analytics referral data to see how previous referrals have impacted your website performance, then focus your top landing pages on those types of channels.
#5: Review Your Highest-Converting Pages
Your next step should be reviewing your highest-converting pages. These are the website pages on which users are already performing the desired action, whether filling out a contact form or scheduling an appointment. By identifying these pages, you can focus your SEO efforts on getting them in front of even more people.
You can review your top-performing pages by heading to Acquisition, followed by Search Console, and then Landing Pages. You’ll have the option to sort the table by conversion rate or by a specific goal you set in a previous step.
Once you’ve identified the three landing pages or other website pages that receive the most conversions, you’ll want to view their keyword rankings. You can do this through your Search Console account or by using another platform, like Ahrefs.
Determine which keywords are bringing the most people to these landing pages. Then, find other keywords you could be using to draw in even more traffic.
#6: Find Keyword Opportunities Through the Internal Search Engine
If your website is expansive, with many pages and types of content, you may have an internal site search bar that allows users to locate specific pages quickly. By tracking internal site searches with Google Analytics, you can identify new keyword opportunities and adjust your SEO according to the needs of your target audience.
For example, maybe users visit your site and instantly search for “plumbing repair.” This indicates that you need to make it easier for users to locate this page. You may want to create a landing page for plumbing repair that shows up in organic search results.
You may also want to create more content throughout your website that uses the keyword “plumbing repair.” By combining your Google Analytics SEO research with Search Console, you can find the topics your website should be ranking for, then search for the specific keywords to use within your content.
#7: Monitor for Changes in Organic Search Traffic
One important element in measuring SEO is noticing how your organic search traffic changes over time. With Google Analytics, you can quickly identify periods of growth and stagnation in your web traffic, helping you pinpoint issues that could make your site less visible.
The easiest way to do this is by setting up alerts that trigger when you experience a certain percentage increase or decrease in traffic. You can create alerts by heading to Admin > View column > Custom Alerts > Create a new alert.
When you receive an alert for a traffic drop, you’ll want to make changes to your SEO campaign. But when you receive an alert for a traffic spike, you’ll know to replicate what you’ve recently done on other pages.
#8: Set Up Annotations to Benchmark Performance
Google Analytics annotations are notes that you can add to your SEO timeline that appear on every time chart within the platform.
For example, if you realized a recent change from your site developers caused a significant traffic dip on March 30, you can add an annotation to March 30 explaining what happened. Or maybe you implemented page load time optimization strategies on June 10 and saw a spike in web traffic.
Annotations help you see the big picture of how your marketing campaigns impact SEO data. They can also help you determine the effects of changes faster, as you’ll be able to immediately reference what change occurred during a specific period of high or low traffic.
Enhance SEO With Relentless Digital
Google Analytics offers valuable data about your traffic and search engine visibility. Knowing how to read this data is a great first step in improving your SEO, bringing more users to your website, and ultimately growing your customer base.
Thankfully, you don’t have to be an expert on how to improve SEO with Google Analytics — you just need to know where to find one. At Relentless Digital, we provide full-scale digital marketing services to HVAC business owners across the country. Let us take over the responsibility of managing your online presence, allowing you to focus on what you do best: running a successful business.
Contact Relentless Digital today to schedule your free marketing call and learn how we can assist you. In the meantime, check out our blog for more on SEO for website owners, such as how subdomains hurt SEO.
