This is a follow up to the post I created yesterday on using analytics. When optimising your site and analysing data it’s best to go after the quick wins in the short term while still having a strategy for your long term goals. The quick wins would be to optimise and link build for the keywords that your ranking on the 2nd page of google and receiving traffic.

The appeal of this technique is pretty obvious. If your receiving traffic already from the 2nd page of google, how much traffic would you receive if you ranked on the 1st page of Google? If you already rank in the Top 20 of Google for the keywords how much link building will be required to move into the Top 10 compared with optimising and link building for a new keyword?

So now we know the benefits, how do we track our 2nd page rankings?

Thanks to Will and the guys at Distilled, I’m going to show you how to set this tracking up in Google Analytics.

• Create a new Profile for the site

• Add a filter and apply it to the newly created profile

• Set the filter up as follows:

The text in the Field A –> Extract A box is (\?|&)(start)=([^&]*)

This is a regular expression which extracts the parameter called ’start’ from the referring URL. Google uses this to determine which page of results to display (page 2 is start=10, page 3 is start=20 etc. for anyone with the default settings of 10 search results / page)

Segmenting the data

Now when we go into the profile we have the above data but it’s not quite what we want, we need to segment the data just to capture the keywords from referred from Page 2 of Google. To this we do the following:

• Select Advanced Segments

• Click on the drop-down and add a new segment as shown below:

• Finally Apply this segment to the report

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When relying on search engine optimisation for your affiliate sites it helps if you can understand, analyse and make decisions based on the data you have for your sites. Google Analytics is a fantastic package for presenting your data regarding traffic to your site but it doesn’t offer everything you need right out of the box. But don’t worry Google Analytics is totally customizable and allows you to create filters and use expressions to get the data you need.

Some of the most important metrics I believe required to monitor your SEO efforts would be the ability to monitor Keywords, Rankings and Landing Pages. This data can always be manipulated with “Links to your site” data from Webmaster Central to monitor effects of link building.

There have been a couple of solutions on how to do this on the internet. Yoast had a post on how to track what page of google traffic came from along with keywords. This was good but it was still a bit awkward to read, i.e. the ranking report displays page 1 results as unset, (page: ), page 2 results as (page: 10) or (page: 11). Damon Gudaitis wrote a post on how to use Yoasts technique but how to make it more presentable, i.e. Page 1, Page 2, etc.

Again this was better but not quite there, it wasn’t actually tracking the ranking position. But then Google modified it’s referrer string for search queries and this was spotted by Patrick Altoft who immediatley realised it was now possible to track ranking positions.

Expanding on Patricks information using an example from James Morell, I’m going to show you how to setup Analytics to track keyword, ranking and landing page:

• Create a new profile in Google Analytics, and call it something like ‘SERP result and landing page.’

• Hit ‘Edit’ and add a new filter. There will be four filters in total.

• The first filter is for Google Traffic only. Set it up as follows

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Include’ radio button
Select Campaign Source in the Filter Field dropdown
Type ‘google’ into the Filter Pattern
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Next, Create another filter called ’search term and rank filter’

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Campaign Term in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Referral in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (\?|&)(cd)=([^&]*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 1 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1 | rank: $B3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Create a filter called ‘landing page’ to search for the landing page people are getting to:

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Referral in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (\?|&)(url)=([^&]*) in the text box
Leave the Field B -> Extract B box empty.
Select Custom Field 2 in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A3 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

• Finally, merge the last two filters together with one called ‘keyword, rank and landing page.’

Select filter type: Custom filter
Check the ‘Advanced’ radio button
Select Custom Field 1 in the Field A -> Extract A box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select Custom Field 2 in the Field B -> Extract B box. Enter (.*) in the text box
Select User Defined in the Output To -> Constructor box. Enter $A1, LP: $B1 in the text box
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field A Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Field B Required’ radio buttons
Select ‘yes’ from the ‘Override Output Field’ radio buttons
Select ‘no’ from the ‘Case Sensitive’ radio buttons

To get value out of this report, go to Traffic sources, Keywords and select User Defined Value in the Dimension drop down. This will give you something like this once it has run for a few days:

So try it for yourself and see if it helps in monitoring your SEO efforts!

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