While you may be hard at work when it comes to content creation and paid marketing, it can be easy to forget about how all of this affects your overall SEO performance. Most people who are somewhat aware of SEO create content and market their online presences in order to boost PageRank and overall visibility with search engines, but some still do not know how they can empirically verify whether or not their strategies are producing measurable benefits. Fortunately, Google Analytics contains a wealth of knowledge about your site when used properly and can shed light on the issue when no clear verdict can be ascertained otherwise. Below, we’ll discuss a few key ways to use Google Analytics to confirm whether your SEO efforts are having an impact.

Monitor Your Organic Traffic

If you want to know how well your SEO efforts are doing, then there is no better way to check in than by using Google Analytics to explore the amount of organic traffic to your site over a period of time. Whenever you are pinging users with content through search engines and links, you naturally are going to build more traffic over time. Through the use of date range and comparison tools within Analytics, you can quickly view performance as it relates to visits for up to one year at a time. You can then compare the dates of specific projects and efforts to see when and if there was a measurable effect. This makes this Google solution a prime way to find out whether or not your recent SEO efforts are working.

Create and Monitor Landing Pages

The use of landing pages in conjunction with traditional marketing can give you the ability to monitor each effort independently of one another within Google Analytics. Within your keywords reports, you can access separate options for landing page statistics, which will display the total number of visits and bounce rates for each page. Even if you do not have keywords associated with your landing pages within Analytics, you can still access this vital feature and see how much traffic each page brings to your site or blog. Depending on the SEO efforts you have employed for each, you can determine which ones work best and which ones do not work; think of this as an opportunity to do some form of A/B testing with SEO.

Integrate Google Webmaster Tools

You may already be using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, but have you linked the two together? A variety of elements become available once you do so, including access to rich keyword data and algorithms that help you make sense of it all. Even if you are not pinging users via paid advertising, this can come in handy for keyword research and can help compile various forms of data about your SEO efforts into a single location. Clickthrough rates, keywords you have targeted and bounce rates can all be accessed instantly, making this one of the most popular duos of Google products for webmasters of businesses and projects – large and small.