Tracking ROI and proving the monetary impact of your SEO efforts is critical. Yet, it’s something many businesses still struggle with. How exactly do you put a concrete dollar value on things like website traffic, rankings increases, and new organic leads?
This is where website analysis tools come in handy! These invaluable marketing tools provide the data, insights, and reporting you need to accurately quantify your SEO efforts and demonstrate a clear return on investment.
Whether you run a small business or enterprise organization, being able to pull authoritative reports showing how much revenue and value SEO delivers is hugely beneficial for several reasons:
- It allows you to justify continued or increased spending and resources on SEO initiatives
- It helps you double down on high-ROI SEO activities
- It uncovers areas for additional optimization to improve value
- It gives you an impartial means to showcase the capabilities of SEO
The right analysis tools make proving and tracking SEO ROI much easier. In this post, we’ll explore the key website analytics every SEO professional should be leveraging, strategic ways to quantify performance data, and tips to showcase even more value from your organic search strategy.
What are Website Analysis Tools?
When we refer to “website analysis tools” – what exactly do we mean? These are software platforms and online services that help us evaluate, monitor, and uncover insights about our websites.
Some common capabilities of key analysis tools include:
- Crawling and indexing web pages to identify SEO issues
- Running speed and performance checks
- Auditing for proper on-page optimization
- Providing visual reports on site visitors and traffic sources
- Tracking keyword rankings and visibility
- Uncovering UX problems impacting conversions
- Offering competitor and industry analysis benchmarks
Leading solutions include all-in-one SEO suites like Ahrefs, SEMrush and Moz Pro. There are also more specialized tools like Screaming Frog for crawling diagnostics, Pingdom for performance checks, and proprietary analytics like Google Analytics providing user and traffic data.
The metrics, reports, and insights uncovered by website analysis software enables us to measure SEO ROI and impact. They play a pivotal role in helping analyze and quantify program success.
What KPIs Should SEOs Track with Website Analysis Tools?
When it comes to demonstrating SEO success and value, which metrics and KPIs should you focus on? There are a few vital website analytics every SEO professional should be tracking on an ongoing basis:
Organic Traffic Trends
Analyzing the growth and trends in monthly organic sessions, users, pageviews, etc. allows you to showcase the incremental value SEO delivers over time. Comparing y-o-y organic traffic is a straightforward way to present the impact of your optimization efforts.
Increase in Organic Leads & Conversions
One of the most powerful ROI metrics is tracking how many new leads and sales are being driven specifically from organic search. Documenting the uptick in form fills, phone calls, email signups, and ecommerce transactions attributed to SEO is hugely valuable.
Increase in Keyword Rankings
While moving up in the SERPs doesn’t directly equal revenue, it is still crucial for proving the effectiveness of your optimization tactics. Monitoring if and how many additional high-value keywords your site is now ranking for can help quantify SEO progress.
Higher Organic CTRs
Improving your click-through-rates reflects positively on user experience and your ability to get your site featured prominently in results. Comparing organic CTRs to other channels helps further validate SEO’s value.
Decreasing Costs of Paid Traffic
As organic brings in more relevant traffic, you can optimize paid search budgets leading to nice cost reductions. Documenting these SEO-driven savings helps showcase additional ROI.
An Overview of 5 Commonly Used Website Analysis Tools for SEO
Google Analytics
As the gold standard in web analytics, Google Analytics supplies rich organic acquisition reports tracking key metrics like: monthly sessions, conversion tracking, location data, traffic source trends, and more. Ideal for monitoring overall organic growth, conversions, and decreasing paid channel costs.
Google Search Console
Directly from the source, Search Console shows impressions, clicks, CTR, average positions, and performance for target keywords. Critical for gauging keyword rankings and visibility in SERPs. Syncs with GA for full conversion tracking.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ SEO toolkit identifies on-page areas for improvement through site audits and broken link checking. Quantify how fixing errors and optimizing pages for performance and technical SEO will convert more organic users.
SEMRush
SEMRush reveals site problems via readability and SEO audits tailored to best practice criteria. Flaunt the opportunity cost of not optimizing pages to management by comparing against high-performing competitors.
Moz
Moz Pro combines rank tracking, site crawler, and page optimization tools to diagnose technical issues, and monitors them over time to showcase SEO value. The Keyword Difficulty tool demonstrates the immense opportunity still on the table.
Taken together, these platforms provide well-rounded and accurate tracking of campaign performance. Analyze this data consistently and demonstrate to stakeholders how SEO delivers value and ROI across key areas like traffic, conversions, costs, and more.
How do We Use These Tools at Direction.com?
Google Analytics
At Direction.com, Google Analytics forms the foundation for tracking client SEO performance and quantifying ROI.
The Organic Sessions report demonstrates the incremental lift provided through our ongoing optimization efforts. We showcase user and session growth over time, particularly for high-value landing pages.
Conversion tracking is a pivotal metric for our clients. We implement goal tracking for actions like form fills, phone calls, demo requests, etc. when setting up a new campaign. Using the Organic Goal Completions report, we showcase the increased customer actions driven by improved SEO visibility. Comparing goal conversion rates from organic vs other channels validates the SEO opportunity.
We also connect GA to Search Console to build a Keywords report. By monitoring incremental impressions and click volume for target keywords, we reinforce expanded visibility from our work. Tracking the increase in associated conversions for ranking keywords gives further proof of SEO value.
Additionally, leveraging the Site Content tool provides details on popular pages and user flows patterns. These insights guide our content and UX optimization efforts to decrease bounce rates and improve engagement metrics like pages/session, average session duration demonstrate positive progress.
By combining analytics data from multiple lenses in GA, we build a full picture of SEO-driven results. The in-depth and customizable reporting equips us to showcase client ROI across both traffic and conversions goals.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is incredibly useful for presenting website performance data to our clients. The intuitive, yet robust reports demonstrate the direct impact of our ongoing optimization.
We analyze the Search Performance report to showcase incremental impressions and clicks driven for target keywords. Tracking the keywords and pages gaining visibility reinforces expanded reach.
Additionally, comparing click-through-rates in the Performance report validates that our efforts are improving relevance for users. Higher CTRs indicate better page experience leading to more conversions.
Diagnosing discoverability issues is also simplified in GSC. Leveraging the Index Coverage report, we quantify pages impacted by indexation problems.
We also rely on the Enhancements section to improve site quality. Demonstrating mobile usability and Core Web Vitals gains showcases how our optimizations are driving better user experience.
Regularly exporting Search Console data allows us to illustrate month-by-month progress. We use exported reports to showcase growth trends across key SEO health metrics. No need for expensive rank tracking tools!
Rank Tracking
While positional rankings have limitations as a success metric, rank tracking still plays an important role in showcasing our optimization efforts.
We leverage rank trackers like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and (sometimes) Moz to monitor a targeted set of commercial keywords for clients. Tracking upward progress for priority targets reinforces our ability to gain visibility for the most valuable queries.
However, rather than putting all focus on specific keyword ranks, we emphasize share of voice in rankings reports. Documenting an increased presence across thousands of relevant keywords and search results pages demonstrates expanded reach and visibility.
We also avoid using rankings as a billing mechanism. While improved positions can reflect effective SEO, the real value is in driving more revenue. We work with clients to connect rank tracking data to other critical conversion metrics in analytics.
Increases in site traffic, goal completions, and lowered cost-per-acquisition from organic are better indicators of a successful optimization strategy. By combining rank tracking with business metrics, we quantify SEO value beyond just moving up in SERPs.
The focus stays on profitability gains rather than arbitrary keyword ranks.
Setting Up Analytics Dashboards for SEO Metrics and Data
If you need to take your SEO to the next level and maximize ROI on all the activities you are paying for, you should really consider building an advanced analytics dashboard for SEO campaigns.
Put together a list of SEO metrics that make the most sense for your business and have someone build a dashboard for you with these metrics. There are multiple dashboard tools that make it relatively easy to put together, like SuperOkay, which we use to create custom reporting dashboards for our SEO clients.
You can also use Google Data Studio to create a dashboard, but there is a learning curve there.
Regardless of the dashboard you choose, these metrics can be useful when combined into a single dashboard:
- Total organic visits
- All organic visits over time
- Top organic landing pages by entrances and bounce rate
- Top organic landing pages by goal completions
- Top organic landing pages by average page load time
- Top organic keywords by % of new visits
- Pages per visit by organic keyword
- Keyword phrases sorted by goal completions
- Most successful keywords by goal completions
- Number of monthly conversions – micro and macro
- Phone calls, form fills, demo requests, etc. completed by organic sessions
Again, focus on your business goals and conditions and do what makes sense for you.
Keep Your SEO Analytics Evolving
Proving the value of your SEO efforts is crucial for securing the growth and resources the program deserves. As we’ve covered, website analytics tools make quantifying SEO success much more straightforward.
By consistently tracking key performance indicators like organic traffic trends, conversion rates, rankings, click-through-rates, and costs, you can build an authoritative view of the ROI your optimization work delivers. Leverage platforms like Google Analytics, Search Console, rank trackers, and all-in-one suites to unlock multidimensional insights.
The most effective SEO professionals use data-driven reporting to showcase incremental value and spotlight new revenue opportunities. Rather than making vague promises, they pull concrete statistics demonstrating how organic drives more quality leads and sales over time.
Now that you understand the fundamentals of connecting SEO activities to bottom line business value, you can confidently make a case for prioritizing optimization. Approach leadership with tangible evidence of how organic contributes to financial growth goals right alongside other marketing channels.
If you need help setting up your SEO analytics for your local business, interpreting data, or actionable suggestions for your SEO campaigns — get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to share our expertise.
