How to Measure the Quality of Your SEO Traffic Using Google Analytics

Before you start reading, I'll forewarn you that this article will start with a tweet and end with a challenge. Sound good?

From one of my favorite SEO role models, and founder of Women in Tech SEO, Areej AbuAli: 

So, before getting lost in the sauce in the various metrics, it’s important you understand that your business goals are unique to you, so the way you measure your goals should reflect that. From there, the next steps are to get a better grasp of what quality traffic means for your website, and then evaluate how users engage with your content. 

To get a better understanding of what’s considered “quality traffic”, we’ll look into various Google Analytics metrics that will help you create a rock solid SEO strategy. 

Why does quality of traffic matter for SEO success?

At the end of the day, quality traffic is what accelerates business success, especially for post-publishing optimization. 

For example, let’s assume your blog has 200 visitors per month with a conversion rate of 1%, generating two leads. By improving the quality of your traffic, your conversion rate and number of leads will also increase:

• Traffic: 200

• Conversion rate: 4%

• Leads: 8

This indicates that “superfan” visitors are far more engaged and therefore more profitable than moderately excited users. Google’s new page experience algorithm update further solidifies this statement. 

It’s become crystal clear that the way that consumers interact with your website contributes to your business growth. 

How do you measure the quality of your organic traffic in Google Analytics?

We can go on and on about Google Analytics, but today we’re specifically looking at traffic quality. Here are the top metrics to keep an eye on:

• Engagement metrics: time on site, pages per session, exit rate

• Conversion metrics: conversion rate, form submissions, other goal completions, 

• Relevance metrics: bounce rate, user geo-location, new and returning visitors

Engagement Metrics

Time on site

The time on site is the measurement a user spends on a site, regardless of whether it’s being used or not. For instance, let’s say a user has multiple tabs open but isn’t necessarily using all of them at once — Google Analytics still counts the time the tabs were open. 

In fact, Google counts sessions up to 30 minutes without a visitor clicking on other pages. But once the timestamp hits 30 minutes, that session will be counted as a bounce. Knowing this, it's clear that not every user who lands on your site is highly engaged.

Generally speaking, the more time a user spends on your site the better. This indicates that your SEO strategy has defined content that is worth their while. Furthermore, the way you have structured your site not only helps them find the information they need, but they also read more about other topics or services that you might be offering. 

A good time on site indicates: 

• High-quality content

• Good site architecture

• Proper internal linking

• Great UX design

• High-quality traffic that’s interested in your products and services

To set efficient goals, you could measure time on site together with the next metric, pages per session. 

Here’s a sample goal:

Users who spend an average of four minutes on your site, and at least two pages per session are more likely to be engaged with your content. 

To find this metric, click audience (on the left side) > overview (underneath) > under overview, click average session duration.

Pages per session

To put it simply, pages per session is the average number of pages a user views in one session. It is one of the most important behavior metrics within GA, as it indicates how deep within your site a user navigates to. Essentially, the more pages they view, the more interested they are in what you have to say. Typically the first page a user lands on is your home page, but the goodies are on your service or product pages. With that said, to obtain quality traffic, you should aim to have at least two pages per session on average. 

If you aren’t seeing these results, you need to start investigating what isn’t working. It might be that you're targeting the wrong keywords or your audience is in the wrong country, and therefore they bounce. 

If they land on your home page and don’t move onto another page, it’s a possibility that your home page isn't properly linked to other pages, it’s too slow when loading, or the overall architecture of the site is confusing. Tweak this if necessary, and observe what happens. Often, the simpler it is to get around your site, the better! 

Now, as you view your pages per session, I recommend segmenting pages per session based on channel, so you can see which streams have a greater impact and double down on that. 

To find pages per session, navigate to GA, and then click “Acquisition overview”. Under the behavior bar you’ll see “pages per session”:

Exit rate

This one’s pretty straightforward. An exit rate tells you how often a customer has left your site from a page. Unlike a bounce rate (which I’ll discuss later), the exit rate tells you that a user left one page, and went to another. Let’s take a look at an example to illustrate.

Let’s say a new visitor enters your homepage, but they want to learn more, so they navigate to your blog. They spend some time reading your content and find what they want, so they exit. This shows up as a percentage under site content > all pages > exit rates. 

(see image below to visually see where to find the exit rate on your Google Analytics) 

Of course, if the exit rates are high you’ll want to assess elements like:

• Website copy

• Images/videos

• Site load time

• Page design

Start by tweaking one element at a time and analyze the results after each change until your exit rates start improving. Some pages will inherently have higher exit rates than others such as  your privacy policy and contact us pages (usually users find what they’re looking for on Google without entering your site). 

However, if you manage to decrease the exit rates for your services pages, blog posts, and/or product pages by tweaking the components we just talked about, you’ll find higher quality traffic and more conversions.

Now that you’re an expert in engagement metrics, let’s have a closer look at conversion ones.

Conversion metrics

Conversion rate

Google Analytics adds up all the goal completions of  your site  and calculates that as the overall website conversion rate. Nonetheless, consider looking at each goal separately to see how they’re performing so that you’ll know which goals you’re meeting and which conversion goals need to be adjusted. 

To view each individual goal, navigate to “goals overview” and then pick the goal you want to assess by selecting it in the drop down menu. From there you’ll see your conversion rate overview for that particular goal. Here’s an example of goals in the below image:

Now let’s look at how organic traffic plays a role in this scenario: 

How can we discover whether or not organic traffic on your site is helping you reach your conversion goals? If for example your conversion rate has gone down, while your organic traffic has gone up, it's possible that you’re targeting the wrong keywords, thus getting less qualified visitors to your site. From there, you’d need to analyze which keywords need to be replaced (hint: check Google Search Console for keywords that are bringing in the highest CTR).

By switching your perspective and looking at the conversion rate of each goal through individual traffic sources, you can make better decisions to optimize and therefore obtain higher quality leads. 

Form submissions

 To get the most out of Google Analytics, I suggest setting up event tracking for form submissions so that you have a clear overview of what users are doing on your website. Tracking your form submissions allows you to understand how users navigate to the form page and focus your marketing efforts there.

Coming back to SEO, the relationship between form submissions and quality of organic traffic is quite similar to conversion rate. A form submission is considered as a goal which users are prompted to complete. If a large percentage of your users don’t fill in a form, this indicates that they are not engaged and therefore are not the right kind of visitors you should be targeting. If this is the case, re-assess the kind of information you request, the usability of the form, and the overall UX of your form page to make it more relevant and engaging.

To track your form submissions, click on admin at the bottom left hand corner > click view > click goals. 

Other goal completions

In addition to the metrics mentioned earlier, you can also set up goals like trial sign ups, newsletter sign ups, ebook downloads, or case study downloads (to name a few). You can track these goals by time, events, pages, or url. 

For example, if you recently posted on your social media channels about a free download, you can set up a goal and pinpoint which social media post brought the most traffic and assess the ones that worked better.

As mentioned earlier, tracking your various goals helps you better understand your audience as well as how they engage with your website. You will be able to deep dive into the channels that work best for your overall marketing efforts, as well as identify ways to incorporate UX and content design into your SEO strategy.

False conversions

I’d like to mention that although tracking metrics in Google Analytics is important, it’s just as critical to ensure you’re not skewing your data through false conversions. Inaccuracies in your data set could cause several problems and lead you to the wrong conclusions about your traffic and its quality. Looking at such false data will be the reason to decide on and implement the wrong SEO strategy for your website. 

To double check the goals you’ve set up, look for the conversions tab > goals > reverse goal path. Once there, you can identify where your goal conversions are occurring and if there are incorrect pages popping up that could be a sign you’ve incorporated the wrong data for a goal. 

Check out the visual below for further direction. 

Relevance Metrics

User geo-location

To find your audience’s geo-location, scroll to the audience on the left hand side, then geo, and finally location. Here you’ll find all the different countries that users are coming from, their acquisition, behavior, and conversion data. To get even deeper, you can click on a specific country and see state or city level data. 

For larger and international businesses, the big picture geo location data will be most useful, but for smaller or location specific businesses, the granular data will be crucial. For instance, if you’re a boutique clothing store, the city view helps you understand what locations your customers are coming from so you can create more relevant content and optimize according to location. 

By understanding the demographics of your audience, you can create highly relevant content to answer their questions and improve the quality of your organic traffic. 

Bounce rate

We spoke earlier about bounce rates, but let’s unveil how to use this metric to help your company. The bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who land on your site and quickly exit without navigating to another page. 

For example, if you have affiliate links on your site, a user might click on a specific link and go off onto a new browser window. Your bounce rate would be high but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing in this particular situation, as affiliate purchases are one of your business goals. If you’re a service based brand and you have a high bounce rate, this indicates that people can’t find the information they’re looking for on your site and exit.

Your bounce rate will depend on the goals you’ve set up on Google Analytics and what type of business you have. If you look at the acquisition overview section of your Google Analytics, you’ll come across the bounce rate. Here you’ll notice the bounce rate percentages from different sources of traffic. If the bounce rates are high for organic traffic, that could mean you’re targeting the wrong keywords or audience.

New & Returning visitors

To get more information on your new and returning visitors visit the audience tab, then click on behavior and “new and returning visitors”. Instead of looking at these metrics separately, it's a good rule of thumb to view them simultaneously as your company grows. 

Over time, you should see both numbers increase. However, if there’s ever a drastic decrease in the amount of returning visitors, that could be an alarming metric. You’d need to deep dive into the reasons why this is happening (such as a recent change on your site or the wrong marketing tactic). 

Benchmarking Google Analytics traffic data 

Let’s be honest here… you need benchmark data to truly understand how well your website is performing. I get it, we’re humans and we need guidelines! So in this section, I’ll cover low and high percentage rates for metrics discussed above. 

For example: 

To add, the new versus returning customers metric varies by industry and type of business however 20-30% for returning visitors is a typical ratio to achieve. 

How to use Google Analytics data to improve your website’s SEO traffic quality and user engagement

Google Analytics data is valuable because it helps us prioritize and strategize how to improve our SEO traffic quality. To truly see the benefits of using Google Analytics and to improve the traffic quality of your site, you’ll need to monitor engagement, conversion, and relevance metrics  over a long period of time, but these are only one part of the puzzle. Sustainable growth will come from continuously researching, analyzing, and adjusting your site.

Downloadable version here

What to do if your engagement metrics are underperforming

On page optimization

Optimizing your published content is an easy way to improve the quality of your traffic and increase engagement. To do so, you want to look at applying keyword research that matches search intent. Group keywords with similar topics and identify the right terms to target through each page of your site.

Other specific on page optimizations include:

• Incorporating your target keyword in the first 200 words of your copy

• Your page title and meta description to have the acceptable Google length (72 characters for title and 170 for meta description)

• Your target keyword is included in H1 and subheadings

Now, let’s focus on design. 

Think of content design 

Another quote for you from Ginny Redish, Consultant Specialist in Web Usability and Writing: ​“Content is the user experience”.

With that in mind, the layout of your website and the way visitors consume content has a gigantic influence on your user experience. Not only can creating human-first content design improve your SEO, it can consequently enhance your traffic and engagement metrics. 

Here are some pointers on how to make this happen:

• Avoid large images and videos that take up a lot of page ‘real estate’

• Split your content into short paragraphs and headings

• Emphasize important words and elements to improve readability

• Use lists and tables where possible

Up next, what to include in your blogs to ensure an excellent website experience.

Write articles that provide the right amount of information

Articles should be comprehensive, not too long just for the sake of word count and not too short where information is missing. Users will know if you’re keyword stuffing or simply providing fluff content that doesn’t actually solve their problems. 

To make sure this doesn’t happen check out these tips:

• Create articles that match the word count of top-ranking competitors but also make content succinct enough so that it doesn’t overwhelm your readers

• Create longer articles that can be promoted on other channels such as social

• Create longer articles that increase time on site metrics

Use the right language

There should be a balance between SEO language and copywriting. Ensure you’re using the right language with these tips:

• I said it before but I’ll say it again...Avoid keyword stuffing (user’s can smell a keyword stuffed article a mile away!)

• Avoid language that is not understandable from the user

• Use simple language with the right amount of keywords and spread those out evenly across your content.

Study the way your audience communicates, and model your content and copy after that. You want your audience to feel comfortable and drawn to your content, not confused and repelled. 

Improve User Experience (UX)

Look at your website and assess how easy it is to read, navigate, find out key pieces of information, and perform any actions.

Here are some quick reminders:

• Place CTAs in the right spots

• Ensure readability is consistent 

• Make sure information is easy to navigate

• Make sure the site architecture has a solid flow

Ensure the website’s design works well on both desktop and mobile

As more consumers buy online for just about everything, the mobile user experience will contribute to your overall rankings. Here are five tips to optimize your responsive site:

1. Check Page Speed Insights for mobile vs desktop

2. Ensure all elements are properly visible and readable on both desktop and mobile

3. Optimize image scale on mobile

4. Simplify navigation

5. Shorten your text 

What to do if your conversion metrics are underperforming

Use direct-response copywriting techniques

Use compelling language that encourages users to take immediate action. Copy should be targeted and to the point. To support that statement, 54% of American adults read at a sixth grade level, or below according to the U.S. Department of Education. So the simpler the copy, the better.

Optimize call-to-actions

Make sure CTAs are placed in the right spots within a page, have the right color and the right text. Use powerful and emotionally driven words that’ll entice quick wins. You’d be surprised at how a single word tweak or color change can drastically increase conversions. Not to mention, this is the precise method to ensure that SEO is bringing in conversions and leads.

Avoid any elements that could distract the user

Although some may suggest pop-ups, let’s be real here— the majority of the time you scramble to click the x so you can get back to scrolling. With that being said, avoid pop-ups, numerous CTA’s, and banners. If people are always in a rush to leave your site, that certainly won’t help any element of your marketing strategy.

What to do if your relevance metrics are underperforming

Target the right keywords 

Before creating a page or a blog, start with keyword research to identify which keywords you should target through your new piece of content. Think like your customer and identify exactly what their intent is and what’s trending in your industry. Also, pinpoint long-tail keywords that are highly specific to the niche you serve. This way, the content you put out will be for a very targeted audience, therefore conversion rates will be higher. 

Review the topic and focus keyword search intent

If the keywords you have selected are not performing well, review whether you selected the right ones and if they match search intent. Research what competitors are doing, so that you can put your own spin on the content around these keywords. 

Localize your content so you’re targeting the audience in your target market

Create content that’s relevant to where you’re located. For instance, if you own a pizza shop in Chicago, you might create a blog about the best places to get fresh cheese in Chicago. So instead of just developing random content, think about localizing content and examples that’ll attract the most qualified audience.

Work on site speed (slower websites have higher bounce rates)

In this day and age consumers want information at the speed of light, in fact 1 in 4 consumers will abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load. Tough crowd, right? To ensure speedy load times, visit Google’s Page Speed Insights to assess where the site stands in terms of page speed and to identify elements that slow down your website.

Use Google Analytics data to measure and improve the quality of your SEO traffic

At the end of the day, more qualified traffic = more money in the bank. 

So your overall goal should be working towards creating the highest quality content, website, and user experience to convert those visitors into loyal customers. 

To reach these goals, make sure to map out engagement metrics like time on site, and pages per session, conversion metrics like form submissions, and relevance metrics like bounce rate and user geo-location. 

Now, in the beginning I said I’d end with a challenge, so here it is: Create a list of 3-4 priority metrics and craft a realistic goal for each of those. Can you do that? Great! And, for on-going reflection, bookmark this article so that you can refer back when need be. You’ve got this!

Lean into Email in 2022: An Interview with iContact’s Hank Hoffmeier

I like email. Data says almost all of us do.

Email breathes easier than the social noise pollution of customers and brands trying to shout at each other through a disjointed deluge of disaster and dog photos. Ever notice how your brain feels switching from the overstimulation of Twitter to the one-on-one hush of a list of emails which you can either choose to open or delete? Do you experience a difference? Stats indicate that our private email inboxes are a sort of refuge we’ve come to count on, a quieter corner where people can experience satisfying customer service when done right.

When Moz and SMB email marketing software provider iContact  joined hands this past summer, I began looking for an opportunity to explore our shared goals of facilitating brand discovery and brand-consumer communication. Like you, I’ve absorbed years of steady statistics about the outstanding ROI of email marketing amid louder social media hype, but this was my first chance to sit down with an expert like Hank Hoffmeier, who is Strategic Insights Manager at iContact.

I believe reading Hank’s tips and talk on trends today will make 2022 the year you center email in your customer service strategy for its welcome privacy, usefulness, familiarity, cost effectiveness, and excellent conversion potentials.

The profit and popularity of email marketing

Miriam: A stat which stunned me is that email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent, yet I sometimes feel like email has been presented as “boring” vs. the glaring busy box of social. What is your take on this, Hank?

Hank: According to Demand Curve, email marketing has a higher ROI than any other form of publicity, can drive 6x more conversions than Twitter posting, and is 40 x more likely to be noticed than what a company posts on Facebook. Email marketing allows you to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, at a ridiculously low cost. Stop throwing money at PPC and social media advertising that takes longer to convert and costs so much.

Email marketing allows you to get personal with your subscribers. This is either not plausible or can be very challenging with other channels like social media that require you to follow customers to message or DM them. Email is where we obtain long form personal messages, obtain order and shipping information, and communicate at work.

With your email marketing campaigns, each message can feel like a one-on-one conversation by using segmentation and personalization. Subscribers can be greeted by first name and can experience content that matters to them on the basis of data such as survey information, purchase history, engagement history and more. Make sure to ask for information to help provide a better experience for your subscribers.

Miriam: Email open rates increased 13.64% in 2020, mostly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I was surprised to read that it’s actually millennials who are spending more time in email than any other group. What stats convince you most that email is popular, not just with brands, but with everybody?

Hank: A study from Pew Research says six in ten American workers who use the internet say email is “very important” for doing their job, while the Content Marketing Institute reported that 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters for content marketing. Still not convinced? 95% of online consumers use email! In fact, to sign up for a social media account, you need an email address. The demise of email marketing has been reported year after year, but it is still a pillar in the content marketing world.

Email’s edge amid privacy concerns and consumer protections

Miriam: Consumer privacy has become a huge topic for SEO, and I’ve mentioned above my “quiet corner” idea about email, but I know it also faces challenges. What can you tell me about respecting customers’ privacy?

Hank: Data privacy is going to be trending next year. Email marketers are going to need to do more with less. We are seeing more of an emphasis being placed on data privacy. Apple in particular is creating a challenge in measuring email open rates and identifying subscriber location. For sure, we will see more email and technology companies follow suit. There is also the pending demise of third party cookies to worry about.

By collecting first party data, marketers will be able to continue segmenting, targeting and personalizing their emails for maximum effect. Things that will help marketers prepare would be updating sign up-forms, using surveys, and integrating with CRMs and e-commerce platforms to make better use of data being collected.

Miriam: I’ve talked about social channels being overwhelming, but complaints about groaning inboxes are common, too, especially when customers receive emails they don’t want. What can you tell me about double opt-in as a vehicle for respecting customers’ wishes?

Hank: Marketers should only send emails to people who want to receive emails from them. No exceptions. One way to ensure that subscribers really want your emails is to use a double opt-in process. This allows subscribers to confirm that they want your awesome emails and also helps them find your email in their inbox right away and dig it out from spam, should it land there.

Your double opt-in messaging should not be generic. Get potential subscribers excited to receive your emails and want to opt-in right away! Remember to offer value and entertainment.

More importantly, once subscribers opt-in, you need to send a welcome email right away, telling them what to expect and how often. It helps set expectations and allows you to start your relationship off right.

Miriam: So, what types of emails have you documented as being most welcomed by customers who have definitely opted-in, and have you noticed any differences in this between virtual and local business customers?

Hank: For the most part, the differences are small between brick-and-mortar and e-commerce emails. They are both similar in that brands are looking for conversions and the differentiation is that the conversion for brick-and-mortar can drive traffic into a physical location vs. e-commerce’s solely online purchases. The same email marketing best practices work for both entities.

According to the IDC, 80% of people check their email within 15 minutes of waking up. Email is still the preferred method of communication for consumers. We buy stuff and want to know when it will ship. We want to be entertained and inspired. Marketers need to educate and inform their subscribers using email.

Emails that have images and video tend to perform best. According to Forrester, video content has a 95% retention rate versus a 10% rate with text only. Use more images and videos in your email marketing campaigns to entertain and inform.

The mobile mountain and the marketers’ meh

Miriam: 64% of small businesses are using email marketing, but one-in-five campaigns isn’t formatted for mobile use. This is a huge mountain of a problem! Both Moz and iContact care a lot about SMBs. What advice do you have to help them make the necessary mobile transition?

Hank: Let’s face it, we live in a mobile world. More than half of email opens are on a mobile device. If you are not creating mobile responsive email campaigns, you are creating friction with your recipients. It is a bad experience that will lead to subscribers ignoring your emails or worse, marking them as spam or unsubscribing.

Almost every email marketing platform will have a drag and drop email editor that inherently creates a mobile responsive version for you. iContact has an easy-to-use editor that provides inspiration and great results.

Let’s cover some basic items:

• Email content needs to have the ability to stack elements on top of one another and images and text must conform to the size of the screen they are being displayed on

• Avoid images with small details that will not render well on mobile, while also making sure that your content is not cluttered and allows for finger-friendly clicks and scrolling. Calls to action, such as buttons need to be legible and clickable.

• Use larger font sizes, shorter subject lines, avoid stacking links, and the most important tip is to test, test, test!

Miriam: Sadly, about half of marketers confess they feel the email campaigns they’re engaging in are only poor-to-average in quality. It’s definitely a “meh” state of affairs. What are the top mistakes you see in your day-to-day work in this field and do you have tips for improvement?

Hank: The biggest mistake I see email marketers making is thinking of their campaigns through their lens. They do not get to know their audience (avatar) well enough to send emails that matter to them and wonder why the results are lacking. Consider:

1. It’s important to find the right frequency of emails that resonate. Do not send too many or too few emails. Survey your audience or watch trends in your reporting to find out the right amount of emails to send.

2. The days of “spray and pray” are over. Many marketers fail to use subscriber segmentation. Segmentation allows for better-targeted emails. According to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), marketers can realize up to a 760% increase in ROI by using segmentation. How about that? Better results for sending the right message to the right person!

3. The most underutilized feature in email marketing is automation. By using workflows, you can create a powerful welcome or nurture series as well as have checks and balances along the way to drive better engagement and conversions.

Miriam: I do feel concerned for SMBs when I receive their emails with formatting errors or other problems that must be undermining the success of their campaigns. What are the bare minimum basics small business owners should look for in an email marketing tool?

Hank: Since email marketing has been around for a long time, whatever platform you choose should not be hard to use, should offer the most up-to-date features, and have good support. Look for these must-haves:

• Segmentation

• Automation

• Easy to use email editor

• Templates

• Dependable support

• Split testing capabilities

Email for welcome stability in 2022

I learned so much from chatting with Hank, and hope you’ve found good takeaways, too. As he says, email marketing has been around for a long time, and there’s something reassuring about that.

Make no mistake, email isn’t standing still. I’m interested in innovations surrounding AMP-style emails that turn mailers into microsites, enabling recipients to complete a checkout, book an appointment, or RSVP without having to leave their inbox. Dark mode email compatibility is another trend I’d like to know more about, and I’m always on the lookout for A/B split test developments that indicate how to prompt more engagement on matters of social progress.

But I think it’s the longstanding reliability of email that appeals to me most. As marketers and business owners, we feel constantly pressured to jump into the latest-greatest-new-thing. There can be fun in that, but also fatigue. Also, wasted client budgets when trendy experiments lack a foundation of proven results. Recently, I saw Rand Fishkin explain that email open rates are 252x higher than Facebook page engagements. Veteran marketers have been softly sharing this kind of wisdom about tried-and-true email marketing for years.

Do experiment! Do build the brands you market to converse everywhere. But don’t forget to take a breather when it’s so readily available, leaning on the steady edifice of email with its history of high conversion rates. Most companies, and most customers, have experienced more rapid change lately than we’ve wanted, and I’d say this should make the dependability of email communications all the more welcome to all parties in the year ahead.

Why Getting Indexed by Google is so Difficult

Every website relies on Google to some extent. It’s simple: your pages get indexed by Google, which makes it possible for people to find you. That’s the way things should go.

However, that’s not always the case. Many pages never get indexed by Google.

If you work with a website, especially a large one, you’ve probably noticed that not every page on your website gets indexed, and many pages wait for weeks before Google picks them up.

Various factors contribute to this issue, and many of them are the same factors that are mentioned with regard to ranking — content quality and links are two examples. Sometimes, these factors are also very complex and technical. Modern websites that rely heavily on new web technologies have notoriously suffered from indexing issues in the past, and some still do.

Many SEOs still believe that it’s the very technical things that prevent Google from indexing content, but this is a myth. While it’s true that Google might not index your pages if you don’t send consistent technical signals as to which pages you want indexed or if you have insufficient crawl budget, it’s just as important that you’re consistent with the quality of your content.

Most websites, big or small, have lots of content that should be indexed — but isn’t. And while things like JavaScript do make indexing more complicated, your website can suffer from serious indexing issues even if it’s written in pure HTML. In this post, let’s address some of the most common issues, and how to mitigate them.

Reasons why Google isn’t indexing your pages

Using a custom indexing checker tool, I checked a large sample of the most popular e-commerce stores in the US for indexing issues. I discovered that, on average, 15% of their indexable product pages cannot be found on Google.

That result was extremely surprising. What I needed to know next was “why”: what are the most common reasons why Google decides not to index something that should technically be indexed?

Google Search Console reports several statuses for unindexed pages, like “Crawled - currently not indexed” or “Discovered - currently not indexed”. While this information doesn’t explicitly help address the issue, it’s a good place to start diagnostics.

Top indexing issues

Based on a large sample of websites I collected, the most popular indexing issues reported by Google Search Console are:

1. “Crawled - currently not indexed”

In this case, Google visited a page but didn’t index it.

Based on my experience, this is usually a content quality issue. Given the e-commerce boom that’s currently happening, we can expect Google to get pickier when it comes to quality. So if you notice your pages are “Crawled - currently not indexed”, make sure the content on those pages is uniquely valuable:

• Use unique titles, descriptions, and copy on all indexable pages.

• Avoid copying product descriptions from external sources.

• Use canonical tags to consolidate duplicate content.

• Block Google from crawling or indexing low-quality sections of your website by using the robots.txt file or the noindex tag.

If you are interested in the topic, I recommend reading Chris Long’s Crawled — Currently Not Indexed: A Coverage Status Guide.

2. “Discovered - currently not indexed”

This is my favorite issue to work with, because it can encompass everything from crawling issues to insufficient content quality. It’s a massive problem, particularly in the case of large e-commerce stores, and I’ve seen this apply to tens of millions of URLs on a single website.

Google may report that e-commerce product pages are “Discovered - currently not indexed” because of:

• A crawl budget issue: there may be too many URLs in the crawling queue and these may be crawled and indexed later.

• A quality issue: Google may think that some pages on that domain aren't worth crawling and decide not to visit them by looking for a pattern in their URL.

Dealing with this problem takes some expertise. If you find out that your pages are “Discovered - currently not indexed”, do the following:

1. Identify if there are patterns of pages falling into this category. Maybe the problem is related to a specific category of products and the whole category isn’t linked internally? Or maybe a huge portion of product pages are waiting in the queue to get indexed?

2. Optimize your crawl budget. Focus on spotting low-quality pages that Google spends a lot of time crawling. The usual suspects include filtered category pages and internal search pages — these pages can easily go into tens of millions on a typical e-commerce site. If Googlebot can freely crawl them, it may not have the resources to get to the valuable stuff on your website indexed in Google.

During the webinar "Rendering SEO", Martin Splitt of Google gave us a few hints on fixing the Discovered not indexed issue. Check it out if you want to learn more.

3. “Duplicate content”

This issue is extensively covered by the Moz SEO Learning Center. I just want to point out here that duplicate content may be caused by various reasons, such as:

• Language variations (e.g. English language in the UK, US, or Canada). If you have several versions of the same page that are targeted at different countries, some of these pages may end up unindexed.

• Duplicate content used by your competitors. This often occurs in the e-commerce industry when several websites use the same product description provided by the manufacturer.

Besides using rel=canonical, 301 redirects, or creating unique content, I would focus on providing unique value for the users. Fast-growing-trees.com would be an example. Instead of boring descriptions and tips on planting and watering, the website allows you to see a detailed FAQ for many products.

Also, you can easily compare between similar products.

For many products, it provides an FAQ. Also, every customer can ask a detailed question about a plant and get the answer from the community.

How to check your website’s index coverage

You can easily check how many pages of your website aren’t indexed by opening the Index Coverage report in Google Search Console.

The first thing you should look at here is the number of excluded pages. Then try to find a pattern — what types of pages don’t get indexed?

If you own an e-commerce store, you’ll most probably see unindexed product pages. While this should always be a warning sign, you can’t expect to have all of your product pages indexed, especially with a large website. For instance, a large e-commerce store is bound to have duplicate pages and expired or out-of-stock products. These pages may lack the quality that would put them at the front of Google's indexing queue (and that’s if Google decides to crawl these pages in the first place).

In addition, large e-commerce websites tend to have issues with crawl budget. I’ve seen cases of e-commerce stores having more than a million products while 90% of them were classified as “Discovered - currently not indexed”. But if you see that important pages are being excluded from Google’s index, you should be deeply concerned.

How to increase the probability Google will index your pages

Every website is different and may suffer from different indexing issues. However, here are some of the best practices that should help your pages get indexed:

1. Avoid the “Soft 404” signals

Make sure your pages don’t contain anything that may falsely indicate a soft 404 status. This includes anything from using “Not found” or “Not available” in the copy to having the number “404” in the URL.

2. Use internal linking
Internal linking is one of the key signals for Google that a given page is an important part of the website and deserves to be indexed. Leave no orphan pages in your website’s structure, and remember to include all indexable pages in your sitemaps.

3. Implement a sound crawling strategy
Don’t let Google crawl cruft on your website. If too many resources are spent crawling the less valuable parts of your domain, it might take too long for Google to get to the good stuff. Server log analysis can give you the full picture of what Googlebot crawls and how to optimize it.

4. Eliminate low-quality and duplicate content
Every large website eventually ends up with some pages that shouldn’t be indexed. Make sure that these pages don’t find their way into your sitemaps, and use the noindex tag and the robots.txt file when appropriate. If you let Google spend too much time in the worst parts of your site, it might underestimate the overall quality of your domain.

5. Send consistent SEO signals.
One common example of sending inconsistent SEO signals to Google is altering canonical tags with JavaScript. As Martin Splitt of Google mentioned during JavaScript SEO Office Hours, you can never be sure what Google will do if you have one canonical tag in the source HTML, and a different one after rendering JavaScript.

The web is getting too big

In the past couple of years, Google has made giant leaps in processing JavaScript, making the job of SEOs easier. These days, it’s less common to see JavaScript-powered websites that aren’t indexed because of the specific tech stack they’re using.

But can we expect the same to happen with the indexing issues that aren’t related to JavaScript? I don’t think so.

The internet is constantly growing. Every day new websites appear, and existing websites grow.

Can Google deal with this challenge?

This question appears every once in a while. I like quoting Google here:

“Google has a finite number of resources, so when faced with the nearly infinite quantity of content that's available online, Googlebot is only able to find and crawl a percentage of that content. Then, of the content we've crawled, we're only able to index a portion.​”

To put it differently, Google is able to visit just a portion of all pages on the web and index an even smaller portion. And even if your website is amazing, you should keep that in mind.

Google probably won’t visit every page of your website, even if it’s relatively small. Your job is to make sure that Google can discover and index pages that are essential for your business.

GMB to GBP: 3 Invitations for Google to Alter Their Indifference towards SMBs

Software dashboards are supposed to feel clean and quiet, organized so that everything you need to do good work is right at hand, like this:

Seeing the rebrand of Google My Business to Google Business Profile include the news that single location businesses will no longer enjoy the dignity of a room of one’s own because nice dashboards will be the sole province of more fortunate, large enterprises, it feels like SMBs are now being told (with indifference) to manage their listings here:

In Google’s own words:

“Moving forward, we recommend small businesses manage their profiles directly on Search or Maps. To keep things simple, ‘Google My Business’ is being renamed ‘Google Business Profile.’...The existing Google My Business web experience will transition to primarily support larger businesses with multiple locations, and will be renamed ‘Business Profile Manager.’”

To wit, big businesses will be granted some version of the former Google My Business dashboard, with its helpful navigation and dedicated work areas, while SMBs must figure out what has changed and try to manage their most visible local business listings directly in the messy SERPs, amid an astounding clutter of ads, organic results, SERP features, carousels, images, video results, and so on.

Perhaps it’s no big deal and local businesses desiring the organization of a dedicated listings management dashboard can rely on the Moz Locals of the marketplace. Or perhaps it’s a turning point.

Maybe now is a critical moment in Google’s history to invite them to rethink this troubling pattern their powerful company has fallen into since they stepped into the lives of small business owners 16 years ago, and began to dominate so much of their fate. The highlighted words in the above quote are an emphatic statement of alignment with larger — often elite — brands instead of with the diverse small businesses, which are the very meaning of localism.

Personally, I see our socioeconomics deeply wounded by the pattern of giving preferential treatment to whatever is largest and treating whatever is smallest with chronic indifference, and I believe Google has the clout to change this dynamic within their own, very substantial sphere — if they choose to. Today, when champions of positive change are the most important people in any room, please join me in sending three invitations to Google from the local business neighborhood, in hopes of an RSVP.

1) Could Google stop hiding 59% of websites in local packs?

My friend and Moz’s marketing scientist, Dr. Peter J. Meyers, recently shared some numbers with me that deserve to be seen. Running 10,000 keywords through MozCast, half of which were specifically localized to cities, Google returned 3,322 local packs on desktop, meaning that 33% of the SERPs queried featured these types of results. Of these packs, 59% featured zero links to local business websites, in this fashion:

This was not a case of website links missing because no websites existed — packs in which some of the entries had website links and others didn’t (because no URL had been added) were 41% of the total number. Rather, these website-less packs were of the kind that have been dubbed “local teasers”, and a variety of other names over the years.

Dr. Pete ran the test twice, and on the second trial, website-less packs made up 58% of the total. In other words, nearly 6/10 of Google’s local SERPs intentionally hide URLs. This is not a force of nature, or a scientific principle — it’s a decision Google is making to obscure local businesses’ home base, where they work so hard to offer a customer experience they directly control.

Why am I inviting Google to change this? Granted, the chief charm of local business listings is that they can be just what customers need for very quick information. But the pandemic has made local business websites centers of help, commerce, and communication like never before, and these companies deserve a search engine that respects the investments they are making in shopping carts, booking systems, live chat, text and audio-visual media, and other brand-controlled assets.

Google’s vision is to be, as Tidings founder David Mihm says, “the transaction layer of the Internet”, but I invite them not to support that goal by hiding the transactional capabilities offered by the small brands that make up Google’s index. It’s not right or fair to do so.

Something Google can do to signal that they aren’t disrespecting single location businesses is to return websites links to all local packs whenever a business has uploaded a URL. This would show that Google understands that small business owners often feel powerless having a giant search engine own so much of the display of their information and reputation. Google can toss the ball back to Main Street so that more customers end up on a platform where the business controls the customer experience in their own, unique style.

2) Could Google align with straight talk, not scare tactics, for a healthier shared workspace?

As recently demonstrated in a study by Sterling Sky, Google’s local product has become a dominant driver of local business leads. Short of going completely off the Google grid, local business owners are forced to make Google’s place their own in order to be found by customers, and everyone deserves to have a shared workspace where they’re treated with dignity.

Unfortunately, Google chose to kick off the rebranding of Google My Business as Google Business Profile by subjecting local business owners to emails and CTAs developed to frighten them into believing that anti-trust regulations of Google’s monopoly will hurt small businesses.

The local SEO community tended to take it like this:

As reported by Near Media’s Mike Blumenthal, these scare tactics may not be new, but they are certainly antisocial. Having witnessed Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen explain how causing society anger, distress, and fear monetarily benefits publishers, all technology brands of good conscience should be pledging to become allies to a healthy and informed society instead of one that is being harmed with calculated misinformation.

As a Californian, I take Google’s attempt to cause fear personally, having recently lived through third party food delivery and rideshare corporations pouring a record-breaking $200+ million dollars into Proposition 22 in order to deny a living wage and basic protections to a group of drivers who are so poor that they are often living in their cars and eating part of the food they are meant to deliver. Prop 22 was recently ruled unconstitutional, and many voters and drivers now regret that they were manipulated into voting for it via a threatening, powerful ad campaign.

No business model should rely on creating the very stress physicians tell us to avoid to protect our health, and I would invite Google to rethink the workspace they’re creating, in which independent business owners have little other choice than to participate. These scary CTAs and emails are being received by the doctors who provide vaccines to Google executives and employees, the independent distillery owners who made your hand sanitizer when Purell disappeared, the local grocer or restaurateur who makes and delivers your meals while you work from home. Reciprocal respect is required.

Be an honest ally to the local businesses that have heroically served society through COVID-19 and kept our communities supplied. Don’t target them with misinformation and cause them distress just for the sake of protecting Google’s profits. Individual and societal health are priceless.

3) Could Google draft a good neighbor policy to establish a new relationship with small, local businesses?

In his inaugural address in 1933, FDR stated:

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor...the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.”

I’ve spent most of the last two decades of my life consulting with local business owners and becoming an advocate for the essential role they play in building diverse and sustainable communities. Perhaps it’s because I grew up hanging out in the imagined neighborhoods of Mister Rogers and Sesame Street that it seems so fundamental to me that respect for one’s self is the first step towards respecting others. Google, as a workplace, is full of good people who deserve an environment of respect that is felt by all staff, all local product users, and all communities. If you want to make localism your platform’s business, these folks deserve a good neighbor:

I can’t speak for the local business owners who have put on masks every day for the past two years to serve others at great personal risk, but I would like to start an open list today of suggestions for how Google, with its central role in the online local world, could become a better neighbor in serving the offline, real world we all share:

1. Reconsider excluding single location business owners from the dashboard; everyone deserves an equal workspace.

2. Return website links to all local packs.

3. Do not use fear to protect your profits; stress causes damage to human health.

4. Do provide accessible support for all Google local products, via a full staff of remote workers who have been deeply trained in all the things that can go wrong with Google Business Profiles and how to fix them.

5. Create a dedicated, remote listing spam removal team to the scale of the problem and demote easily-manipulated ranking factors like business title stuffing.

6. Create a dedicated, remote review mediation staff to the scale of the problem to promptly investigate and resolve business owner reports of review spam attacks.

7. Launch an investigation into the pattern of low quality Q&A answers and reviews that has arisen from the decision to incentivize Local Guides; if business owners aren’t supposed to offer perks in exchange for this type of UGC, Google really shouldn’t either.

8. Don’t use your power to favor Google products and partners over small business solutions.

9. Do use your power to lead on Climate Action to protect local business districts from wildfires, floods, and other increasing disasters.

10. Put @EthicalGooglers and other human rights and DEI groups within Google at the center of company policy-making to reflect a real-world diversity of people, values, and needs.

I’d like to ask the Moz community to be a good neighbor by adding their sincere suggestions for positive change you believe Google can contribute to. Tell me what you’d add to my list by tweeting me.

In his article entitled How Indifference Can Kill a Relationship, John M. Grohl, Psy.D. states:

“What a relationship has real difficulty surviving is when two people have gone into ‘autopilot’ mode and become indifferent toward one another. When you’ve given up on emotion entirely, when you feel nothing toward the other person, that’s a difficult thing to come back from.”

I don’t believe that the good human beings working at Google are personally indifferent to the doctors, restaurateurs, grocers, drivers, shopkeepers, teachers, religious leaders, and other community servants who care for their needs and whose entities make up the thing now called Google Business Profile. I believe all we have here is a relationship that needs to be fixed, and that Google already has everything they need to do it. 2022, with all we’ve been through together, would be a wonderful year for Google to show their deep investment in localism and their intentions to build forward from a place of mutual respect.

Image credits Kelly Sims, R. Kriatyrr Brosvik, and Baker County Tourism

How to Make Newsworthy Content: Part 2

Content marketing expert Amanda Milligan is back with three more ways to make your content more newsworthy. If you haven't seen part one, be sure to check it out! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Amanda Milligan, and I am back with a part two for how to make newsworthy content. So when I made part one, I was working at Fractl, and I talked about three things. Let's see I remember them. It was data, emotion, and impact as three elements you need to be considering when creating newsworthy content. Those are still important. If you haven't seen that Whiteboard Friday, check it out after this one. It doesn't need to be in any particular order. 

Now I work at Stacker. stacker.com is a publication, but it's also a newswire. So like the AP for breaking news or Reuters for financial news, Stacker is a newswire for data journalism. So I work on the brand side though, where we partner with brands. They underwrite content, and we syndicate it to our newswire. I've been talking to the team, since I'm still relatively new, and they told me that these are three additional things that they consider when they are creating content for their publishing partners.

So it was fascinating to get their take on this, and I'm really excited to share this with you. 

Is it serviceable?

So let's just dive in. Three things to consider. The first is if the content is serviceable. Basically, all that means is how can it help the reader. So as marketers, we're actually already pretty good at this. This is like the how-to content of the world just with more of a news spin.

So it's not going to be your standard blog post. It's going to be more along the lines of how do you take something practical that's happening to people, that's also newsworthy, which we can get into exactly what that means. This will overlap with a lot of these other different qualities. So if it's serviceable and it's also adding context to a greater story, if it's serviceable and also based on new data, or it's based on an emotional component or it impacts a lot of people, those things all help it be newsworthy.

Is it contextualized?

The second is contextualized. This is something that Stacker really excels at and I find fascinating. So we can't break news as marketers. That's not our job. We're not in the business of doing really quick reporting off of big events. That's just not what we're doing.

So contextualizing is taking a look at what's trending, what people are talking about, what's happening and thinking about the other angles, the other perspectives that tell a more comprehensive story to that. This has worked really well. I think it's something that all brands should be considering when they're following like if you have those websites or blogs that you follow in your niche, thinking about what those kind of like top news stories are and how you can add to the conversation.

Is it localized?

Finally, localized. So this one is near and dear to my heart because I actually have a journalism degree even though I never became a reporter. I learned localization in college. I took a class called reporting that was extremely difficult. It was the weed out class for the journalism degree. The first time I got an A and I got my article run in the college newspaper, it was from localization.

There was a national story about how doodling can help improve your concentration, which I thought was interesting and kind of contrary to what you would normally think. I called up local experts, like people at the university, neuroscientists, and I said, "Hey, I just saw this report come out. Do you agree with it?" They were thrilled to talk to me about it, and they told me all about how they absolutely believe that that's true, that they doodle when they are listening to presentations.

Anyway, it's not that the data was any different or anything. It's that it was localized. It was that it mattered to the people who were reading it because it was being corroborated by people in their own community. So localization can be a huge asset if you're a brand that has a brick-and-mortar or not. If you specialize in certain areas, if your customers live in certain areas, localizing content can really speak to them in a way that the national content might not.

An example story

So I just ran through those things. So let's do a little exercise. This is a statistic I saw recently. The median home price for an existing home in August of 2021 increased by 15% compared to 2020. 

So this is from the National Association of Realtors. It's a statistic I saw. The exercise I want to do is let's try to come up with angles, not even necessarily the ones that you're going to run with for the story, but to brainstorm in that direction. 

1. Serviceable

So serviceable. How do you take a statistic like this and consider the serviceable angles? So I have written, "Where are the most affordable places to live?" So if we're finding that home prices are going up, it's a practical, helpful thing to know where it could actually be affordable to move.

If people are thinking about moving, they're like, "I don't know if it makes sense to do that." At least now they can have their options. Then going a little deeper or even just like a different way of approaching the same conversation is what an average home looks like in X place at X price. So you're taking those increased prices and you can show examples of what a home looks like.

I've seen projects like this before. You probably have too. But it's a different way of illustrating the same useful point, which is where could I actually see myself living. That's what makes it serviceable. You're giving them information that they can actually act on later. So those are some serviceable angles. 

2. Contextualized 

Contextualizing. So there's a lot to unpack in this stat. I believe this was a Forbes article I was reading, and they go into a little bit of detail about some of the context. But there are other ways to dive into the context. Even without reading the story, what I was thinking about was: What is the average down payment now? So if the home prices are increasing, presumably the down payment costs are increasing.

What I remember the article saying was that that's always the biggest hurdle, or not always, most of the time the biggest hurdle, especially for first-time home buyers, is the down payment. It's a big sum of money. So how much is that increasing, and what does that look like for the average person? What does that amount of money equate to in the rest of your life? How long would it take to save that amount of money?

These are all contextualizing details that make it feel a little bit more relevant to you. Then I said, "How does this compare to the average student loan debt for a person?" So just telling a greater financial, like personal finance story. The way the team at Stacker thinks about contextualizing is you're comparing it to similar things.

So things may be historically is the quickest way to do it. Like how has this been in the past? But also different things that are still relevant. That's where student loans come in. It's not just in a vacuum. Your financial situation is impacted by multiple elements, and it's good to get a full picture of that. 

3. Localized

Finally, localizing. So how have prices changed? So this is the average in general. But have they changed in different states at a different rate? Which states has the price increased more? Which states maybe have stayed the same or maybe have dropped? That's not being illustrated by a national statistic. What local programs exist for first-time buyers?

This is a great combo of serviceable and localized. So if you are a first-time home buyer and you're thinking, "I have no idea how I'm going to do this now because COVID happened. I don't know how I'm going to afford a house." An article that shows them all of their options, tells them what localized programs there are for first-time home buyers is extremely relevant and serviceable and local, and that is where you get the sweet spot of newsworthy content where publishers are really going to want that information.

So consider these as potential angles to brainstorm when you're coming up with content ideas. 

Final tips

Consider the data

Also consider what I talked about last time, which is data. We're all about data. If you can use original data in your story or take existing data and draw new conclusions and tell new stories with it, that's gold.

Consider emotion

Emotion, does it have an emotional impact? Impact, meaning how many people does it affect. All of these things are great, great lenses to come up with fantastic newsworthy content. 

Thank you so much for listening to this and taking the time. If you have any questions, feel free to reach me on Twitter. I'm @millanda, and my email is amilligan@stacker.com. I love talking about this stuff. Please reach out if you have any questions and thank you so much again.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com. 

Improve Your Reporting and Make Stakeholders Listen by Incorporating Share of Voice

What is “share of voice”?

Share of voice (SOV) in marketing originated as advertising terminology, defining the percentage of media spend by a company compared to the total spend in the market. In essence, it’s meant to gauge visibility of a brand compared to its competition. In the SEO world, it measures organic visibility compared to the rest of the search landscape.

Share of voice has been used in the SEO industry for years, but recently more SEO tools have begun incorporating it as an additional measurement alternative to simple rank tracking.

Rank tracking is extremely valuable, but when it comes to reporting and speaking with stakeholders unfamiliar with the minutiae of SEO, rank tracking can get people confused and caught up on a specific rank for one term at one point in time. Not to mention that search engines are extremely sophisticated now, and many factors can influence why a brand may rank position #1 in one location and position #8 in another.

Share of voice is an alternative measurement that brings rank tracking to a higher-level conversation about overall awareness performance.

I’d be remiss not to mention that share of voice is just one metric to incorporate. Good SEO measurement dives deeper into the business impact of the channel, But including SOV can be a great way to discuss overall awareness, which is an important step in the funnel to sales and conversions.

How is SOV calculated?

Share of voice is typically calculated as (Position Click Through Rate X Search Volume) / Total Volume summarized for all keywords. This allows higher search volume terms to make a bigger impact than those with lower volume.

For example, if you rank position #3 for a term with 1,000 monthly searches and position #1 for a term with 100 monthly searches, you would do the following math to get SOV:

• Keyword 1: Position 3 CTR 9.25% * 1,000 = 92.5

• Keyword 2: Position 1 CTR 34.76% * 100 = 34.76

• Total SOV = 127.26 / 1,100 = 11.57%

Thankfully, tools can do this automatically for us. (2013 me was doing this at scale in Excel, and ain’t nobody got time for that anymore!)

How to use STAT SOV

STAT automatically calculates SOV within their tool. They do this at a few different levels: the overall project, a data view, and a tag. This allows for flexibility to report on SOV for the whole site, a certain section, or a certain topic. You can get as creative as you want when setting up the tags and data views. Just keep in mind what you would want to report as SOV for a website when creating your tagging strategy.

There are plenty of resources already on how to set up tagging strategies. Here is a great article on the overview of using tags for analyzing data, and STAT resources have plenty of documentation on how to set up tags.

Out of the box, STAT utilizes their own click-through-rate percentages, but you can customize them to match your industry if you have different metrics you’d like to use.’

STAT automatically calculates the SOV for the top competitor sites in a group of keywords. You can add your sites domain(s) and any top competitors you want to make sure are included as “pinned” sites within the SOV settings tab.

Learn more about how to customize the SOV settings here.

Once you’re all set up with your customization, you’ll receive daily updates to SOV and can use the helpful reporting dashboard to compare over time.

Incorporating SOV into reporting dashboards

You can always export data directly from STAT or utilize screenshots in your monthly report format of choice, but I prefer using the STAT Google Data Studio connectors. These allow for an easy data connection and the ability to add custom visuals to existing or new reports. It’s a shortcut to making client-friendly visuals that don’t require custom updates.

Here is a great resource to start with if you are new to the STAT GDS connection. You’ll have to learn how to do simple API calls to get some of the data points you need, but I promise you’ll feel more powerful once you master.

If the API instructions scare you, use this builder to input your own account metrics as a shortcut.

Once you have your API details, go to this link to begin setting up the SOV data connection at the site level and use this link to set it up at the tag level. You should see a visual similar to the following. The site connector will have Site ID and the tag connector will have Tag ID. Fill in your fields and add to an existing or new report.

Once you have the data in your report you can now build your ideal visuals.

Visualizing SOV

Share of voice in STAT is listed in an ongoing line chart or a table. I find that useful as an SEO, but a stakeholder tends to just need a quick snapshot they can read as “good” or “bad” quickly. People's attention span is getting lower and lower with more things to distract them everyday. Good data visualization can get your point across faster and gain trust with stakeholders.

There are a few options I tend to use as a starting point. These range from snapshot in time visuals to trending visuals.

Bar chart

Bar charts are extremely easy ways to visualize the SOV in a way that allows the audience to compare and see who is winning and who is losing in a snapshot in time.

To visualize SOV within a bar chart use Site as your Dimension and Share of Voice as your metric. Ensure SOV is properly calculated as a percent of the total. You can either customize your date range to be a default time frame or use a date range filter on the page to allow it to be changed on the fly.

Pie chart

Pie charts are very controversial in the data viz industry. These are generally not a good option since you can’t easily compare the inputs to each other. I challenge that the share of voice is less of a comparison and more of a percentage of total, which is what a pie chart is meant to show, and therefore sometimes utilize them as a quick snapshot. I tend to include a bar chart next to this visual to dive in more just in case, but you do what you prefer.

Follow the same instructions as the bar chart when setting up the visualization.

Table

Tables are simple and effective ways to easily read data. I wouldn’t suggest this as a visual by itself, but it’s great to have as a reference for a chart or for an analyst.

By default the table settings will sum the share of voice metric so make sure you adjust it to be a percentage of total.

Line chart

This would be similar to the out-of-the-box visualization in STAT itself. The difference is that you can visualize in more of an aggregate format and make them a bit more in line with your reporting visuals. Add certain colors to draw attention to your sites or calls-outs as needed. When setting up a line chart, use a simple number versus a percent to make sure it aggregates properly.

Again, these are just starting points, use what you need to tell the right story to your audience.

Take it to the next level

One of my favorite parts of GDS is the ability to interact with your data and customize it on the fly. These are just some quick tips to make your dashboards even more useful.

Utilize filters

Filters allow you to adjust data on the fly. There are two types of filters: a page level filter that can change multiple visuals while looking at the report and a visual level filter that pre-filters specific visuals. Use a page level filter when you want the report viewer to have the ability to dig into the data and use visual level filters for when you want the data to only display the filtered data you selected.

Page-level filters

You can add a filter under the “Add a Control” dropdown. The most common page level filters I use include date range control and dimension filters. You can set up dimension filters to be self-selecting or custom search options. Which you choose depends on what you want a report viewer to have access to use.

For example, adding in a filter for Sites allows you to change the competitors listed in a visual. This can help you remove competition that is making the visuals hard to read (*cough* Google *cough*) or that the audience doesn’t care about.

Visual-level filters

There are different options to apply filters at the report, page and visual level, but all of these are filters that are applied to your visual before it’s created. This customizes the data in the visual to exactly what you want to show versus the report viewer having to self-select.

For example, you could add a visual level filter to only show the sites you have manually added, in case you didn’t want to show the full landscape.

I wouldn’t recommend using pie charts for filtered data, since it does remove key data points from the total.

You can learn more about filter options from Google's resources.

Create competition groupings

Calculated fields in GDS give the ability to layer data transformations on top of the raw data source. You aren’t modifying the data itself, but instead creating a new value to include in the report. There are plenty of resources to learn how to create calculated fields so I’ll just cover the high level steps here.

Example: You want to visualize the types of competition with the top SOV by site type versus domain. Setting up the following calculated field will summarize the SOV by grouping so you can get an even higher level view of your top competition:

To add a calculated field, open the data source and click “Add a Field” and then add in your custom code.

Make multiple views

Who says you only have to have one report? I’m a huge fan of an internal and external report view. This allows you to set up more details in your internal report while keeping an external report high level and focused on the visuals. Use the internal report to dive deeper and build your insights for the stakeholder-facing one.

For a client-facing report I tend to keep the visuals focused on a specific time frame without the ability to filter. This allows the client to see what I want them to see.

For my internal reports, I tend to include the ability to adjust timeframes, include multiple filter options, and include tables to support my visuals so I can easily download or see the raw data if needed.

Get creative with your data

With tools like STAT and Google Data Studio, you can combine data sources on a common data point. The SOV data source has “Date” as a field, so any other data source that includes a date can be combined.

Want to visualize SOV on the same chart as traffic? Want to combine multiple tag SOV data sources into one? Want to layer published content dates over SOV changes? Get creative and try it out! Might as well start asking if you can visualize something and then see if you, can versus feeling limited to the basics.

We’ve covered how to set up your projects to look at SOV with STAT and how to pull that data into the Google Data Visualization tool in this article. Now go forth and use your learnings to create something custom for your client or business. Remember to focus on the story you want to tell first, and let the data bring it to life.