So you’ve been working on your SEO for a few months and you’ve been tracking your incoming visitors through Google Analytics.
You look at your data over these months and see that your website has had a steady increase in traffic and conversions.
Alright! All of your SEO has been paying off, right?
Not necessarily.
Don’t make the rookie mistake of going up to your boss and saying:
So What!
You might be wasting huge amounts of time and money on unnecessary keywords – or your keywords may not be performing at all.
Top-line figures mean very little when you’re trying to review performance. So, if your boss comes up to you and asks this:
Don’t you want to be able to answer his request like a champ?
Introducing Custom Segments
Custom segments can let you analyse which keywords have been performing best for your website in just a few seconds.
It takes a little longer than that to set them up initially, but when you do, you’ll suddenly have a wealth of actionable data that can help you take your SEO to the next level.
Step 1 : Segment those keywords
No matter what website I’m working on, I like to break my analytics data into three keyword groups: Brand-keyword traffic, Non-brand keyword traffic and (not provided) traffic.
Without segmenting your keywords, you cannot be sure whether any increase in traffic and/or conversions is a result of your SEO work, or merely an increase in brand awareness by other marketing means.
By setting up custom segments, we can see whether or not the keywords you are optimising for are performing as you want them.
As an SEO specialist, I would happier to see data that indicates non-brand keyword traffic has increased by 20% month on month rather than all organic traffic increasing 40%, because it shows me that my efforts in trying to make the website more visible for certain keywords is working.
Step 2 : Creating the Segment
The first thing to do is to create a custom segment.
From anywhere within your analytics dashboard, click “Advanced Segments” and then “New Custom Segment”.
From here, you will want to give your segment a name:
At this point, I take a couple of steps to ensure that the figures receive are 100% organic.
My first rule says to only include data whose “medium” is “organic” and exclude traffic whose “landing page” includes “medium=cpc”.
Every now and then, Google Analytics, through its default segments, let’s clearly paid traffic appear in its non-paid traffic segment.
By starting your segment with these two rules, you are making sure that any PPC landing pages and/or display network users are not counted as organic traffic.
Note how the second rule is an “AND” statement.
For this example, we will set up a “Brand Keyword” segment. Here, you will create another “AND” statement, select “Keyword” and then type in your brand name.
I would then add in a few “OR” statements to this rule, so that you can capture all of the brand keywords your website has, plus a few common misspellings.
So, if your brand name was “ABC Smith”, you should be left with something similar to this:
Step 3: Repeat the process for non-brand and (not provided)
When you’re creating a segment for your Non-brand terms, you create the same set of statements, but instead of “including” the keywords, you simply set it to “exclude” the keywords.
The (not provided) segment is easiest of all, you only need to include one statement keyword, which of course is (not provided)!
Step 4: Reap the rewards!
Now you can apply these custom segments to any part of your report. This includes looking at your traffic data and, most importantly, conversions.
All of the data can be back-dated with these new segments, so you can check your data from many months ago with these new segments and see how your SEO performance has changed over time.
An increase in new visits from your Non-brand keyword segment would suggest that your SEO efforts are reaping their rewards, as you have most likely increased your visibility for certain search terms.
It should be remembered, however, that Google Analytics works on a last-touch conversion model. This means that whatever keyword that was used last before converting will be given the full credit.
This can result in your conversion data not telling the whole story, even with these custom segments.
For example, a non-brand term may have brought a user to the site for the first time, however, may have only converted while searching for the site with a branded term a few days later.
This is why it is important to go into the “Multi-Channel Funnels” section in Google Analytics.
This way you can see whether any non-brand terms have started or assisted in a user conversion. If you see an increase in these channels, you should take confidence that your SEO efforts are going well.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this guest post.
If you have any questions, please use the comment box below and I would love to hear about any custom segments that you have built!
About Tom Roberts
This is what I actually want to know about optimizing my SEO knowledge. There are so many things I don’t know about SEO.
Thank you very much for explaining further on make use of google analytics to optimize SEO.
This is really meaningful for me and worth reading it.
Heru Prasetyono recently posted..Fix Your Xbox 360 Ring Of Death Fast!
Hi Heru
Thank you very much for your reply, I’m glad you found the guide helpful!
You’re welcome Roberts. I just want to increase my SEO knowledge and leverage it to put my blog on the next level.
I install SEO plugin by Yoast in my WordPress blog installation. And I think I am not satisfied with all I have been doing so far. I am not sure search engines are willing to crawl my posts even though I optimize them well in my opinion at least.
I don’t understand better how to work with SEO to get better rank and huge traffic.
Heru Prasetyono recently posted..Fat Loss Diet – Fat Burning Foods – Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle By Tom Venuto
Sounds like you’ve been performing a bit of on-site optimisation, but have you been working on your off-site? For instance, have you been doing an inbound marketing? This could include creating some great content to post on your blog, or to share with other blogs as a guest post. If you’re writing for an engaged audience, the links you earn as a result could help to improve your organic rankings.
Top notch stuff Mr Roberts. You’ve just made this afternoon’s SEO report for fertility client infinitely more interesting!
Thank you Chris! Glad to be spreading my seeds of erm…knowledge?
Excellent information. Blogs have a lot of power and your suggestions are great tools for maximizing that power.
Jaimie recently posted..Are we a nation of shopping addicts?
Awesome post& cool Memes
thanks for sharing !
anis recently posted..4 Easy Ways to Make Money Through Blogging !
When you will know which keyword is giving much benefit to you then you can judge now what you should do with this keyword in future and i am totally agreed with you when you will have good strategy in SEO then you can achieve your goals.
Hyptia recently posted..France Process Servers | Paris Process Services | Serving Documents
Hello Tom,
I found this post very helpful. I’m gonna bookmark this post so that I can come back again when I’m ready to create custom segments.
Come up with more useful posts Tom.
Thank You
~Thejas
Thejas recently posted..7 Things You Should Do After Publishing A Blog Post
Hi Tom,
Interesting topic to read for and probably people think like Analytic only for custom report tracking. Apart you have mentioned essential things about Google analytic.
Arafath recently posted..Creating a Website for Home Based Business in Simple Steps
Delighted so many of you have found this guide useful. If there’s anything Analytics or SEO related, you can also ask me directly on Twitter – I’m @tjproberts
One of the most popular and powerful features in Google Analytics is Advanced Segmentation.
Thanks for the post as this post will help the new webmasters!!
As gaining more traffic on your website is important which analytics helps to do so.
Clear steps provided to segment the keywords..
Vincent Armstead recently posted..Apple iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4 – The Two Most Advanced Smartphone
Thanks for this very helpful piece of information. I am not yet too familiar with custom segments in Google analytics.
Mike Carlson recently posted..How to Motivate Others
I was unaware of such a brilliant feature of Google Analytics.
Nice explained tutorial. Need to study about how I can use it properly.
Mohammed Abdullah Khan recently posted..10 Most Important Features of iPad to Consider Before Purchasing.
I don’t understand why Google Analytics sometimes shows “not provided”, especially in the search reports
Hi Laura
(not provided) occurs when the user is using “secure” search – which can be enabled if you’re logged into a Google account, or searching from the Firefox URL bar. This will soon be auto-enabled for those using Chrome as well.
The information is hidden by Google and unfortunately no analytics software is able to access it – unless Google makes it available and sells it back to us at a later date.
hhaha funy and helpfull shareing point
be Happy with Blessing of GOd the Pic you use is perfect 
aqil recently posted..Remove All Empty Folders
Yes, i really with your article.
Google Analytics is a very good option to check out our Site or Blog performance on audiance. I helps us to know about Page View, Content Searching Most as many as so function. It is really helpful to all blog or sites. So , your article is really very valuable article.
Thank you for this valuable information.
Deepak recently posted..http://www.clat.ac.in CLAT Admit Card 2013 Download Hall Ticket 2013