Premium content is one that is optimized for the users and search engines. You can use platforms like Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console (GSC) to make data-driven decisions on ideas to use for your website.
In this episode, Sam Torres takes us through using data from GA4 and GSC to find content Ideas and optimize content.
Name: Sam Torres
What Sam does: She is the chief digital officer at Graydotcompany.
Company: Graydotcompany.
Noteworthy: Shaped by her range of experience in many facets of digital marketing, Sam offers both creative and technical capabilities combined with a humble, honest, and transparent personality.
Find trends or themes, that show that you have some relevance, but are not authoritative enough yet.
This is the first step. Try looking through the performance tab in the google search console to find possible topics to cover on your website. If you have already covered this topic, try expanding on it. Samantha refers to this as a “striking position”.
When to implement web stories into your blog post.
Samantha describes web stories as short-form content like Twitter threads, TikToks or Snapchat. Web Stories are more common for news SEOs and are a good way for users to consume byte-sized information. Sam uses the search apparent feature in GSC to know if web stories should be implemented for a blog post. She however notes that web stories haven’t really done much for them in attracting b2b clients.
Look At Your Pages That Are Ranking High and See what they have in Common!
If some blog posts on your website ranking are between positions 20 to 40, it means it’s on the third to the fifth page of the SERP. This means that Google really understands or believes that the site has some relevance to that topic. Analyze these pages and see what worked for them, it could be that they were how-to’s, listicles, etc.
Implementing a table of contents is good for better User Experience.
Using a table of contents and anchor tags is something that is powerful especially if you create long-form content. It’s great to have a table of content because the user can immediately get the answer to their query.
Segment traffic into individual traffic channels.
To do this you can either look, go into the reports or go to pages and screens in GA4. This will show you how what content is going.
It’s Okay To Use WordPress Plugins To Generate Table Of Content
Sam agrees that it’s fine to use plugins to generate your table of content however you do need to be careful about how you use H2s and H3s when using these plugins because they use header tags to generate the Table.
Connect with Samantha Torres:
Samantha Torres 0:03
Sounds good. All right. Well,
first to start, thank you so much Chima, for inviting me to come do this, I’m really excited to talk about it.
Chima Mmeje 0:12
I’m excited.
Samantha Torres 0:14
Yeah, it’s gonna be fun, we’re gonna have a good time, I hope. And for those of you who may not know me, I am Sam Torres. I am the Chief Digital Officer at the grey dot company. We are a strategic and test tech SEO agency. And then we also do a lot of specialisation in data. So really excited to be talking to you all today about some of the more data backed ways that we get content, ideas, and topics. And yes, please ask as many questions as you want.
I have definitely found the more engaged you guys are, the more exciting it is for everybody. And just overall a better experience for all. All right, so with that, let’s go ahead and get started. Like I said, we’re gonna be talking today about how to use Google Search Console, and Google Analytics, particularly GA for to help generate some of those content topic ideas. So let’s just go ahead and get started, which means I gotta share my screen. All right, so I’m going to start in GSC, which is, if it’s not one of your best friends, it will quickly become one of them. And then also one of your biggest enemies, because sometimes it just doesn’t give you the data you want.
Um, so also
for this, we’re just going to be looking at my company’s analytics. So um, you know, be nice with the judgement, y’all. Um, and hopefully, we’ll have some interesting things to talk about. So first, when I get into search console, and you guys have probably seen, this is what you start with, I always like to go into my search results, and start looking at average position. And for that, what I’m really wanting to do is see which of what types of queries is my website ranking between positions 20 to 40, because that means I’m third to fifth page, right? Which means that Google really understands or believes that I that the site has some relevance to that topic.
But maybe that we’re not speaking about it in the best way, is there more authoritative content? Do we need to expand on what already exists? So I really liked to look at that. So we’ll just go ahead and do that together. And then as I start getting through it, so first, let me sort of feel free to call out if there are specific and this is this makes me happy if there are specific topics, because we’re going to kind of carry that thread through the whole way today. Okay. So this is where we start getting in the 20s. Like I said, I’m really trying to find trends or themes, overall concepts, where maybe it shows that we have some relevance, but not authoritative enough yet, right.
So anything that you guys are seeing here, let me know definitely what I’m seeing on content development, how to decide the best keywords, right. I already know this site. So I know we have an article about how to select keywords for SEO. So maybe we need to expand on that. Okay. And as we’re looking through, like I say, we’re just trying to find overall themes and topics. Also, I know that I talk really fast. So if any of this do you want me to slow down? Please let me know.
So looks like
really what I’m seeing is mostly content strategy and how to find the right keywords. We’ve got some architecture questions, friendly URLs. So like I say, these are the things that I’m seeing, hey, we are in what I like to call striking position. We’re really close to being able to win. But we’re not winning just yet. So that’s kind of the first step. Another thing I like to do is also start looking at this according to search apparents and see which ones are showing web stories. Should I make a web story about this?
It’ll take time to load because it’s Google.
Right? So what’s going on here? Where am I seeing some wins? If a web story is showing, does that show me that I should maybe implement a web story into an article that I already have existing about that? Great question. A web story. I will take you to ours. They look very much like Tik Tok or Snapchat
Nope, that was served. That’s not the right one. Sorry. All right. So these are
what stories they’re just really short form this is basically another version of Twitter threads. And so like here, we put together one. That’s just how do you work content that maybe isn’t relevant for you? And what should you do? So it just asks you all the types of questions and you click through. So very similar to like an Instagram story or a tick tock. And just giving information, the way that they show up, let’s look at what some of these are. product collection schema. I don’t know if we’re actually going to see any on desktop, usually these only show on mobile.
Yeah, so unfortunately, can’t see the web stories, but they show up on mobile. They’re also great for showing up in Google discover. And anyways, as an agency, we’ve been playing with those.
So I really the thing to pull from here is that I do like to look at the different search appearances and try to pull all right, what are some things like, what are some FAQ rich results? Are we making sure that we’re answering some of these basic questions that users have related to our content? Because that’s really important to do. All right, how are we doing any questions? So far? All making sense?
I how? Can I get some thumbs up? If we’re good? Question? Yes. Okay. So
Chima Mmeje 6:22
what what I’m trying to understand the impact of web stories on how is it like, we have syndicating content?
Samantha Torres 6:30
Yeah, so it’s basically where I’m, like I say, it’s for showing up on mobile. And then it also works really well in discover. So we’ve seen like, you can actually tell when we started boosting our web stores,
um, it’s
something that I would say is really common or really useful for like news, SEO. Because obviously, the web stories themselves, and it’s kind of like a replacement to to amp, because amp is finally dying, thank God. And it’s just a really easy thing for users to click into from their mobile device and just consume information
quickly, and in a very, like, bite size way. Does that make sense? At all? Yes, so
Chima Mmeje 7:21
I’ll try to unmute my mic. Yes. That makes sense.
Samantha Torres 7:25
Okay. Yeah, um,
we just to share with everybody here, we haven’t seen a whole lot of results for it for ourselves in a b2b climate. But we’ve definitely tried this with some of our E commerce clients. And then also anybody who has like, like I say, a news SEO play to their website, that has worked extremely well. But for b2b, I haven’t seen it really take off yet. So it’s kind of the same with tick tock, it’s really great for b2c. Oh, yeah, if you want to look at the web stories, I can share the URL and here, FYI, we are getting rid of them, because they haven’t done anything for us. But I’ll keep it up, at least for another week for you.
There we go. Um, all right. So
again, the biggest thing is here, we’re looking at what ranks between the 20s and 40s. Because that’s quick, striking distance. If you’re finding that you’re running out of topics than just continue going, what sitting in ranks 50 To 7070 to 100, right, just start cleaning that up. And then as you start mapping things together, you might also find like, Hey, there’s this gap that I’ve got in between pieces. So let’s say, you know, we’re going with that theme of how to find good keywords for SEO.
So we have how to find good keywords for SEO. And we have other topics that are talking about like keyword research templates. Well, there’s kind of like an obvious missing step of how do we do keyword research, right? Like, once we have our keywords, what are we then investigating into those? That’s a clear step where we’re not bridging the funnel? Because there’s more to just what’s my list of keywords? It’s also understanding what’s the intent behind them, right.
So all those things through the keyword research and through the keyword strategy process, going through and identifying those topics and kind of mapping them together from GSE is how I could identify where there might be some some leaks in my funnel. We’re also going to take a look at some other places and some other ways to identify where maybe that entire thread isn’t being pulled
through. All
right. So that’s like, that’s always my first place. The reason I say it’s my first place for so quick to winning, Google is already saying that we’re relevant. So it just makes really good sense to go ahead and continue and try to capture that momentum. and get into that first to second page realm. Now, especially since we’re an SEO agency, and we’re talking about SEO, I will say for our brand, we are typically looking for only first and second page.
Obviously, for clients, you’re probably looking only for first page. But frankly, I’ve come to Jesus that I’m never going to outbreak Search Engine Land, and that’s okay. Right? So also think about that for your clients do you need to sometimes have those really honest conversations about like, Y’all, you’re not going to outrank Wikipedia, like, let’s
just be real. So Anywho. Um, so next,
I’m gonna do some of the same things.
Let’s see.
Alright, so we were looking at queries, I’m going to do the same exact thing that I did with queries, but look at pages and look at their average position.
Let’s do it this way.
Because I really want to see where are the areas where I’m super close, but maybe could improve just a little bit better?
And there we go.
So in here, right. So do I need to expand my offering on what I’m talking about with legal tech? Probably, because that’s a page where we just talked about how we serve those types of clients, the cross domain tracking guide, obviously, a very, very saturated market. So where could I expand upon this? And then you could go even a little bit deeper and just click on that URL and see what are the queries that that page is ranking for? And where are they positioned? What’s going on?
Right? Wow,
that’s a really specific query. Sometimes you get things like this, and you’re like, I guess I should have an FAQ.
But
like I say, this is really just pulling it all together, and identifying where are some areas where you can expand on existing content. Or sometimes the topic is so beefy, you need to have an entirely new page, just because now it’s a completely different perspective. So I’m gonna guesstimate that there’s probably in here some GA for C, allow linker J for because this article doesn’t actually tackle GA for yet.
So I have to look at that and start thinking as a marketer, as I do my keyword research, because GSC has identified that, hey, they think I’m relevant, but I’m not really authoritative yet. Does that need to be an entirely separate page, separate article? Or is that something that I should include into my already existing one, and I would also use some competitive research. But obviously, competitive research isn’t really what we use GSD for. The other thing I like to do when I look at just pages in general, is see as my pages that are ranking high, what do they have in common?
Okay, so this SEO customer funnels seems to be doing really well. It’s because it has a lot of steps. And yes, do you have
a question? Oh,
Chima Mmeje 13:16
I thought you said something about when you said something about beefy or meaty keywords, and then deciding to create new contents. Can you repeat that? I have a question about YouTube. I said there.
Samantha Torres 13:30
Sure. So sometimes, when I’m going through here, one of the things I have to figure out, you know, if there’s content that already exists on the site that’s talking about that topic, which generally, if you’re using GSC, then you probably touch on it right? Or else that keyword wouldn’t come up. So Google is showing your website because there’s already some kind of relevance that Google is identifying. So like I say, there’s probably something you’re already talking about.
Um, so from there, like I say, you have to figure out so taking that cross domain tracking guide. That guide is something that we wrote that really only applies to GA universal. And so I’m seeing GA four keywords pop up for from that. So does that mean that I’m going to include GA for information in my article? Or do I need to have a completely separate article? Frankly, GSC is not going to be the only source of information to make that decision. But it’s at least getting me to ask start asking the questions about what I need to do there.
And I would
Chima Mmeje 14:40
say, my question of how do you then make that decision?
Samantha Torres 14:45
Yeah, so to make that decision, I start doing competitive research. So I just start looking at the SERP itself, like when I so we can actually all do it together. So if I’m looking at cross domain tracking What does it look like versus cross domain tracking GA for? Right? Because ultimately what I want to do, you can see I’ve done a lot of research on these.
Like, here we show up. Shove number four. Awesome. Um, so I’m
like, it’s I’m trying to take note of what’s showing up right now. So we’ve got the Google support we’ve got people also asked data driven, because now I’m going to compare the SERPs and say how much of this is the same? Okay. And actually, we’re having very different results, very different users coming up.
So from just from
this, I would say, we probably need to have a whole new article, because trying to capture all this traffic with one
is not really what Google is showing preference for.
I’d probably also use my tools, whether it’s SEMrush, Ahrefs, if you have access to them, and do some competitive analysis on those keywords and see which domains are overlapping? Isn’t my competitors, right? So for my clients, that’s something I would definitely want to do.
How are my competitors tackling this? Is it two separate topics? Are they even covering it? Is it a single so kind of the the classic things you would normally do, I’m going to start including into this. But at the end of the day, I definitely have used GSC to generate the idea that, hey, I need to tackle this GA four topic.
So like here, another way to do that let’s look at and I look at just that page, hold on one second. We use a lot of anchor tags.
Alright, so I’m just gonna go back to my customer funnel page. So let’s look at this URL.
So I’m just gonna say contains the customer funnel. Because
that article has done extremely well for us in the last three months, it’s done a lot for us. So I want to see what are the queries that are showing up? Where this page is actually
appearing? And what are some ways that I can expand? Wow, some of these queries get really interesting sometimes. Yeah. I’m just like in the
awareness stage, why is it important to measure impressions? How can I say, oh, because if you look at my pages, we’re using a lot of anchor tags. So if I go to this page, you can see that we’re using our table of contents. And so
yeah, that’s what that’s what I mean by anchors.
And so I can see that because we’re using these, these whether you want to call it a pound sign Opto Thor hashtag. This is what shows an anchor. Yes. Question mark is a URL parameter.
Um, one of the benefits that we’ve
definitely seen as an agency, particularly with long form content, is once you put in these Table of Contents, A, it is a much better user experience. Oops, that’s the wrong one. Areas, much better user experience, because let’s say, I really only care about loyalty, I don’t want to have to scroll through all of this to get there. And Tori and I, who own the great company, we talk a lot. So most of our articles are usually long. So it’s a great UX. So I’m always going to promote where your users have a better experience. But also, if you guys have learned about an update that was called passages, Google started ranking individual pieces of content. So this is where actually where somebody is talking about awareness for SEO.
Google is dropping them directly on that interest or awareness stage in the article itself. And that’s what the Google passages update gave us. So it’s something that’s really powerful if you’re doing long form content, especially for like your Hub and Spoke content. Your pillar pages are really, really powerful that you can capture some of these multiple topics and ideas in a single page by using these anchor tags and then implementing a table of contents. Does that hopefully that gives some nice insight to how to craft someone from content. Question? Yes.
Chima Mmeje 19:51
I feel like I’m just going to keep asking questions throughout today. Okay, so on table of content that I’ve always wondered, Is it okay to use like one of those words First plugins that does like automates the Table of Contents, or do you still have to like, do like a bullet list table of contents and then add links to every
Samantha Torres 20:09
sub headings? Well,
so that’s a great question. Generally, I would say the WordPress plugins are probably fine. Tori and I are very, very nitpicky. And we’re also on Webflow, not on WordPress. So all of those are custom coded. Because we only want it to go to certain headers and not all headers. So I would say pay attention to how you’re using h2 and H threes, when you’re using those plugins, are they automatically being included? Do you always want every one of those to be included? Right. So I would say just pay attention to that. But it’s also kind of a great guide, when you’re starting out as far as how should the outline as an article go.
Because like I say, a lot of those plugins are going to use the header tags to auto generate your table of contents. And if it’s not a useful Table of Contents, then you maybe it’s time to revisit your heading structure, and the outline of that. So in short, use the plugins for sure, they usually work. I have not seen any issues in regards to how Google crawls those. I have seen some times where like, so our anchors have very specific names that we’ve been able to give them. Depending on the plugin or system that you’re using to auto generate those, you may not be able to customise that URL part. So this anchor title. So if that’s something that you want, I know there are some premium Table of Contents plugins that will go ahead and give you that customization ability. It’s also fairly easy to build in and do one yourself in
WordPress editor. Because you just add a link. And so you build
your link. And then you can literally do a code link that is just like I can do, I’m going to type it.
Chima Mmeje 22:14
I wanted to see if it’s possible to like show us and then we’ll just like takes it from there.
Samantha Torres 22:20
Yeah, which I had a missed time there. So ignore that.
Oh, you know what, I can also just show you what it looks like in the code itself. Awesome. Yeah, so you
can look at that. But here if I look at this, and then I go back up to my table of contents.
If I were to inspect this, make sure this is in here. Can you confirm that you can see the
Chima Mmeje 22:50
console? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Samantha Torres 22:53
So here’s so here’s my anchor tag, right there. And then the way that it works, we’ll just go ahead and go down to purchase for SEO, opened up in a new tab. Not really sure why. I think that’s a Chrome extension I have right
now. But the way that that looks when Chrome starts
cooperating, all I’ve done is added an ID to that h2 with that name.
So a hashtag pound
sign octothorpe. Again, whatever you want to call it. I personally love Octo Thorpe because it’s old school. And I get to just sound fancy.
Um, that means ID.
So that’s also something that as if and when you decide to start tackling JavaScript, you already know how to identify an ID.
So that’s all it is. It’s really easy to do. Very helpful. Thank you. Yep. Okay. Um, yes. So when
I’m looking here, I might start being like, okay, what are some other aspects that need to be added here? To this article, so to this? You know, talking about SEO KPIs and the funnel?
Let me see. That’s interesting. So unique
visits, right, just what are some of the questions and then that can kind of help me figure out again, do I need to expand? Is there a whole new article? Right, so I’m seeing a lot of questions about what a specific metric is. So do we need to spend more time explaining what those metrics are? Do I need to have an entire dictionary? Who knows?
Okay, so that’s
where I look at my top performing pages. And that’s really what I glean from the performance and Search Results section itself. Any other questions about this and what we’ve covered so far, which I know about sync a little bit. So totally fine if anybody wants to revisit anything. Any questions so far before I move into some of the other features within search console?
All right. Cool. Um, all right.
The next thing I like to look at here is really going down into my links report.
Some I have a question. Hi. This is Roshni. I didn’t understand what the goal was when we were looking at the ID tag, the h2 tag, unaudited. What were you trying to do? I’m sorry, I missed that part. Oh,
sure. No problem. I was just showing how it works to build a table of contents. Okay. So like, this is just an example of what the link looks like. Okay, when you want to build it, and then how you set up where it should go is
right here. That’s how I built this
table of contents. If you’re not using a plug in, and you want to do it manually, that’s how you do it.
Okay, thank you. Yeah. Okay, so
when I go into links, I’m really just trying to see what of my content is generating the most links? What does it have in common? And what are some things that maybe I could use that to identify new things possible? What if your top queries are not your current posts pages?
By top queries, you mean your top performing queries are not content that’s addressed on your site
does not relate to any of pages you already have.
Unknown Speaker 26:50
Actually, I referring to sound all sites, because like we, our, our current theme, natural popular would cover broken nets, and mostly local women’s sports. But our top curry is actually we’ve found a player, that’s no longer on the team. And that’s far might be four or five years ago. And there’s a whole lot of the top ranking curry all relate to him, and not to the current players, teams or events.
Samantha Torres 27:27
So I think at that point, you really have to start thinking about what do you want to do with that content? Is that traffic? You know, I would start looking into the traffic that’s coming from that query. And we can kind of walk through how to do this. Is it staying on your site? Are you still satisfying the questions that they have, right? Or if you’ve determined that this is not relevant audiences that you want? Then you really have to go on a whole process of decommission decommissioning any old content that really mentions that player? And what kind of excerpt like, and basically, what do you want to do with that?
That audience is the biggest question that really as a business only you can answer, right? Is that traffic, that you’re still wanting to promote your team to promote merch sales, right? So I would say nine times out of 10, probably a brand is going to retain that content. And this is especially happened. I’ve seen a lot of this happen with like new sites, where there’s one article about a celebrity that’s like eight years old, that still gets tonnes of traffic, they really start looking at how can they still have that content that talks about that celebrity or that player in your case? How can you craft that into getting the CTAs that you want? So my guess is that you’d probably want to take that traffic, and really get them into other funnels. So off the top of my head, I would think, you know, you might want to say like, Hey, we have you know, we’re going to answer this question about this previous player, no longer with us, check out our current roster, right. So you really want to start introducing your current players in lieu of that celebrity?
Um,
so yeah, I think from there, you really have to start thinking about, again, what, what is that audience actually looking for? And you can do that by looking at, you know, the pages were there, the pages that you have that are talking about the celebrity? What are the queries that are related? What are the longtail queries as well, because obviously, if it’s just like, I’m just gonna go for Pele or something like that. If it’s just about palay, then that doesn’t tell you anything, but what are the specific questions that people are asking? And then really, where do you want to direct that traffic to No, that’s really something that GSC isn’t going to answer, you have to go back to the business to understand what are the objectives?
And ultimately, what do you want that user to do? And sometimes an SEO? The answer is, I don’t want that user on my site at all. For many marketers, that is a difficult message to receive. But irrelevant traffic is not helpful to the business bottom line. So you definitely want to make sure that of the queries that you’re showing up for that they relate to you. And if they’re not, then what is your GamePlan for adjusting and getting those people into the right funnel?
On the inverse?
What is your plan for getting them to stop clicking on your content? Is it that you’re going to start taking it down? Are you redirecting it? Because like I say, irrelevant clicks do not help you. Lower engagement is really what that’s going to cause for you. Because if you’re not answering the question, if that’s not really what they’re looking for, they’re going to immediately bounce, and that hurts the rest of your site. So I would say like, the biggest thing is, what do you want to do with that audience? And how are you going to handhold them there? And there’s just some other factors that GSC isn’t going to answer for you.
Okay, make sense?
Unknown Speaker 31:26
Yeah, I guess I’ll say it’s, it’s more News, Coverage related in and out really, commercial, per se. So I wrote to say, you know, instead of clicking on page, let’s like, four or five years out of day, why not check out the current homepage? Or the current team? Or I guess, some sort of redirect will probably make sense.
Samantha Torres 31:49
Yeah, I’d say for our news clients, generally, what we do is we take whatever pieces of articles, whether it’s one or multiple, add some other relative CTAs. And by that, I mean, like, we are telling them custom actions. So again, for this, if it’s about a particular player, I would probably choose a CTA of like, see our current roster, right, I’m not going to try to get them directly to the merch store, because from what they’ve typed and typed in, they’re not showing a real affinity to my team yet.
And then, as that starts
getting accepted, then I might start shutting down pages. But I’d say it’s very rare, especially for news and publishers that you should just kill an entire URL. Most of the time when I see that we are recommending to kill a URL completely. And so that means take down the page and redirect it. It’s because there’s been like a DMCA violation or some kind of legal thing going on. Or it’s just outdated, sensitive information. So thinking about anything that’s medical health, FinTech, finance, legal, anything like that, where we wouldn’t want to potentially put our foot in our mouth from having outdated information posted on the website.
Yeah. Hopefully that helps. Thank you. Okay,
so back to lakes. Yes. So what content is generating the most links? What do they have in common? Are there things to expand on it? So oddly enough, my PPC page is getting has the most links. So I should look at what types of content and topics are talking about paid search? And how do I expand on that? The zero search volume keywords, what does this have in common with my dashboarding? And storytelling, right? These are the things that we really want to try to understand what’s in common? And how can we kind of bring that together or add those elements into other topics, so that we can start generating that really link worthy content over and over again.
But this is something that I think is very underutilised. How do you Oh, so this is just in the left side, you just go all the way down to links. And this is where you can see your top External links. Please note that if you are using a tool like SEMrush hrs, you are going to have wildly different numbers. So use this data on all of your tool sets available to you. And even what I will say even what Google has noticed is leaking to you. This probably isn’t a perfectly representative snapshot of that. However, you can kind of use all of those tool sets together to identify like where some opportunity on what are some good topics that are generating those juicy links for you? Because then, if you want to go a step further, it’s not just this, it’s also looking about Where are these coming from? Alright, so I’ve got 200 Total sites.
And it’s a lot of design firms. Right? And, oh, we’re on ColourLovers. That’s so fun. I love that site. Um, so I just,
you know, really looking at
are the right types of
sites linking to you, that’s important as well. So remember that link relevance is almost even more important than just having a link itself. But in here, we can kind of identify what’s going on as far as my pages that are generating the most links, like for this zero search volume,
right, seeing really a lot more newsletter
newsworthy type sites. So what is it about this that made this newsworthy? How can I include that into other topics and to other content on my website? And sometimes you might also see, based on the URL, sometimes you’re able to see what are some of the questions or topics that you’re being linked to?
Let me see here, if I can find a good one. Nope. Okay.
But yes, sometimes you do get some insight into the links themselves.
So this is talking about cloud computing. What is the correct definition of public opinion? Should I start writing about public opinion? Probably not. But it’s at least a topic idea that I generated and wouldn’t have had otherwise. Questions about using the link report? Cool. Next,
so I do like to go back into the search results, and really start trying to identify pages that are declining. So I’m going to look specifically for only things that are in my blog. And I highly recommend doing this for you. If whether it’s resources or articles, whatever you call it, looking at really what’s kind of that top level funnel, or that awareness generating content?
And really just start looking into comparison here. So over the last 28 days, what have I been seeing a decline?
Okay, so the best seo resources and more, we’re seeing a decline? So are there other ways for me to talk about SEO resources? Is there another topic that I should be going into? And I can start looking at this by clicking again, clicking into the page, and then just looking at the relevant queries?
What’s happening? Right. Best SEO tracker?
Am I talking about trackers? Am I talking about monitoring tools? And frankly, I don’t actually know the answer this question. So in this article,
you know, am I being
clear about what’s advanced versus foundational? Right? Does there need to be a difference? This actually generates an idea of like, do I need to have an article that’s aimed at SEO resources for beginners versus SEO? Resources for advanced? Right, that’s a that’s a new topic idea that was just generated from looking at what are the queries related to this. But like I say, I’m looking at what has been declining, so that I can figure out either how to re vitalizes article or if it’s going to be a new piece link back to it to kind of help promote and get that a turtle linking yumminess. So I this is something I really enjoy doing. Because like I say, it’s just something that’s really easy. You can also do this for your actual service pages as well. So kind of see what’s what’s been going down
it’s probably still mostly going to be my blog
cuz again, then
that may also Alright, so this analytics on it, so that’s where we’re seeing some declines. So what are some of the queries we’re that might generate some ideas about what I should be talking about in blog articles that would then point to the service landing page. So analytics audits, do I have a complete guide on how to do an audit? Anything related to matomo and Data Studio? Because they you just look through them. And then usually that will give you ideas about how can you expand how can you further support that specific service landing page, when you’re working with clients is if there is a specific service or product that they’re trying to promote. This is definitely something I would take a look at, regardless of whether it’s declining or not just what what is it already showing up for? And how can I continue expanding? What type of blog articles should I make? What kind of evergreen content? So that’s going to be anything that’s your guide? The How to what are the pitfalls, right, all of that really gets answered by just looking at these queries.
Right. We’re about halfway through. Y’all still feeling good? Hopefully, yep, yep, yep. Perfect. All right. So now,
we are going to get into GA four. And which I,
for some of y’all might be the first time you’re ever seeing GA four. So before you go to GFO, you have a question? Huh? Sorry, I was. Okay. So
Chima Mmeje 41:15
can you go back? And then show me how you came here to seen the low performing contents, please?
Samantha Torres 41:22
Sure.
So again, we’ll just start with search results. I would change my date to do a comparison. Um, we can do last three months to the previous period last month to the previous I’ll change it up and do the last three months versus the three months before that. And then from here, I’m just going according to which pages have lost the oops, and I’m not even in pages
which have lost the most impressions.
So yeah, so my SEO home SEO strategy page has lost the most impressions.
That’s not good.
So I click into that URL, and then now I can see what are the queries that are falling? And how does that tell me what I need to talk about. Now generally, the first or second set of queries that you get from a transactional related page, like a service landing page or product page, it generally is going to be something that’s very like that’s the name of the service or the name of the product. But ideally, you’ll also start getting into some more long form. longtail keywords, like give you a little bit more. So from here, iterative SEO, that’s really interesting to me, like, are we talking enough about Iterative SEO? You know, do I even know what that is? As an SEO? And can I can I tackle that? So it’s kind of a unique thing there.
Am I talking enough about going to see Chima in London? I don’t maybe not. Maybe I need to tweet more about it. Which I’m we are doing that soon. And I’m very excited. Um, so I will just go
through this. And like I say, start trying to find those, you know, cutting edge interesting. What are some of those long form or longtail keywords that I’m not really talking about? So corporate strategy. Maybe I should have an article talking about corporate versus small business strategy. You know, there’s all kinds of things that we can really derive from here. How do I develop a strategy?
Lots of time, y’all. Lots of time. And lots of caffyns.
So, you know, retainers, people want to understand how those things work. So like I said, this, we’re kind of going down a rabbit hole. But that’s basically what SEO is most of the time anyways. But really using this to identify what are some of the other aspects or other facets related to that single topic, which is my SEO consulting services, that I could then build supporting blog resource content on if I want to host a webinar, maybe make a Twitter thread, things like that.
Does that help Chima? Absolutely yes, this is helpful. Cool. We’re ready for GFR s all right. So um, yes, when you start in GA for if you’ve
been using universal, you probably already know that GFR looks wildly different and kind of scary and intimidating. So the first thing I want to talk about, we don’t actually have implemented on our site. So I do have a screenshot
because
I cannot share who this client is.
But one
of the things that people definitely don’t take advantage of is site search. If you have internal site search, get that data. So by that, I mean, you do have an actual search bar on your website, that’s only for you.
So
if you don’t have that turned on, and you want to know how, actually you would go to your admin, and then go to your data streams, and then you’d go to the one that’s related to your website. And then enhanced measurement
already has it on. Right, so if you’ve
turned on enhanced measurement, you should already be getting a site search. Out of the box, this works for Webflow, Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, Magento, I’ve seen those already work. Now, know that the caveat to that is any one of those websites can have a theme that breaks it. But if they are using the default search functionality that’s given by those platforms, then out of the box, GA four should be able to access that
data for you. So correct only, so users outside admin. If you have this turned
on, then your read only users of your Google Analytics property should be able to see this. Your individual, like the users coming to your website can’t see it.
Let’s say
trying to think of a site that has searched that I can go to
um, so Search Engine Land have search that does right. Yeah, so here, I wanted to see everything about GA for um,
yeah, I should be able to get the information from Google Analytics that GA four was searched.
But the individual user wouldn’t be able to see what other people are searching. If that’s the question, Does that answer your question? Rashmi?
No, I’m
okay. So my question was, what is the point of having the search, if the general traffic from outside won’t be able to see the search bar? What’s the point of having it like, I’m not understanding, I’m sorry, I missed something. Oh,
so if you don’t have a search bar, you’re not going to be able to access this data. Okay, you don’t have internal search on your website, then you wouldn’t have it on. Ours is turned on just because that’s the default. And you are probably already seeing that, as an agency, we are the worst at doing stuff for ourselves. So literally, my company’s GA four is the last GA for I’m working on. And I still haven’t finished converting at all ever. Because clients always come first. Um, so I will probably turn off the site search for this because we don’t have it. However, we are building a new site, and that site does have site search. So that’s also on keeping it on.
Um, but this is something
that I think as marketers we do not use enough is getting that data related to what our users searching for when they get to your website anyways, that’s automatically really, really yummy content and juicy details
for
what kind of content you should produce. But more than that, it can also impact what products and services should you be offering what features are your customers wanting most? What are the problems that they’re running into the most? So maybe arm your customer support team? Yes. Now the not related question. Correct. If you don’t have access to your clients Analytics, you will not be able to see how much traffic this the pieces bringing. Ideally, you would at least have Search Console analytics. And so that would tell you what’s going on in organic search.
But I would say if you are creating content, do not undersell yourself looking only at organic search, it’s also important to understand how is that traffic generating engagement with emails, right? If your client is using it in their own email newsletters, how is that working for them, because you are providing more value there, how’s it working for generating new social views or getting people to talk about the brand.
So I would highly, highly, highly recommend getting analytics access, even. And you can tell your clients, even if it’s read only, you need to get that access, because you should be able to show the value of what you’re providing. And it expands so much more beyond just organic search. Because even direct, how often are users coming back are returning are typing in that website, just for your piece of content to revisit it, that is value that they didn’t have before that you’ve brought to them. So make sure you are taking credit for it, and you are being appropriately compensated.
Roshni Shaik
I have a question, Sam. So if you how do you track it? Like for example, if there is a blog post? And how do you track that that is being sent to emails and the traffic is coming from emails? And if there is direct traffic? How do you know what percentage of it is? From emails or socials or whatever? How do you how do you do that? How do you do the segmentation?
Sam Torres
Sure. Great question. All right, so I can go into reports, we’ll come back to internal search. Um, alright, there’s a couple of ways you can do this. You can either look, go into the reports and go to pages and screens. And it’ll actually show you how what content is going. Pages and screens, if you’re used to Universal Analytics is the same as just really page. Um, one thing to understand when you’re looking at these is that essentially, this used to be GA for is what used to be analytics for mobile apps.
And now they’ve kind of merged web and apps together. So that’s why some of the things seem a little weird. It’s because it’s screen really refers to how we would track things in mobile apps themselves. But I can see for the last 28 days, my top post has been this brand positioning. Now your particular question about how do we segment into individual traffic, or like traffic channels? So I would go into explore, which looks crazy intimidating, but just know, it’s, you’ll get through it, it’s gonna be okay. So you can look at a lot of these things. I because we’re doing this let’s go ahead and start with a
yeah, we’ll start with a brand new. Okay, so let’s say, my segment, scroll, so I’ll try. Um, it’s taking its sweet, sweet time. All right.
So for my segments, I can go ahead and say, I want to know of my users. How many of them have looked at a particular blog? So I’m going to say, Yeah, GFR is waiting for y’all. I saw someone who was a data nerd. I actually love it, because there’s more power that we have. But man, the configuration is a lot, setting it up understanding how it works. It is a mind shift. So yeah, it’s gonna take some time, but hopefully these tips help today. And if you’re on Twitter, you’re always welcome to add me. Also, if you’re women in tech, SEO, I’m very active in there as well. So feel free to send me questions. I’m
okay, so if I want to
see to your specific question, Rashmi about how do you tell a certain blog. So I’m going to say events. First, I need to make sure that a page view event okay. It needs to have happened more than once. So I’m just going to say my event count is greater than zero.
Okay, so let’s just use this URL for funsies. Um,
so customer funnel blog is what I’m going to name this. Okay?
And I want the page location, by the way of these things I’m using Oh, no, that’s not it. All of these are default because as I said, I haven’t customised ours yet. So, um, so page on screen, we can see that and I just want it to be this one.
Now, one thing I’d like to note is to always I recommend, at least often saying just contains and my path, because sometimes it has all these crazy UTM like thank you, Elena for sharing it in your, your newsletter. And because of that, there’s a lot of UTM and a lot of parameters. So I want to see all of that traffic, I don’t want it to be limited to only people who didn’t have UTM, who didn’t use tracking URLs. Okay, so, but it didn’t save.
Well, don’t do that.
So I can say this.
Alright, Save and Apply.
Now, if I want to add my dimensions, I can start putting in the attribution. So I want to know what the source was.
So
SEO customer funnel is the keyword that you’re looking at.
So it’s really just this URL. Okay, yep. Okay, got it. And then I
did that for my rose segment comparisons.
Why not? Any, it’s need to add my Oh. And then you have to add your metrics. So things I might add, really just the event count
Why don’t you like that, you’re I can show you another way to yell, sometimes J for makes me want to punch things. But you can also look at traffic acquisition.
And then it’s gonna take its time, I can add here, if I want a specific page or screen.
And I can search. So customer funnel. So now I can actually get all the data of what’s going on.
So that’s how many are coming from organic, direct email, social referral. This is probably a much easier way than trying to build a customer or customer report. I don’t know why I was doing that. Sorry. Um
and then, yeah, I’ve got
the default channel group, if you want to dig in more, you can do a session source. Keep in mind, this is only showing you individual sessions. This is not showing you
user, like original user acquisition.
There are differences. And it is more clearly defined in GA four versus how it was in GA universal. So I’d say actually, that part’s really nice. If you also want to see. Alright, so from that, what I really love is all right, let’s see what your content is doing as far as how it’s being used in other places. Um, I do have this path exploration that I already built. And this is really handy, especially if you do have conversion tracking. I created this segment, and I’ll show you what it looks like. And all I did was pageviews greater than zero. So they definitely saw a page for URLs that contain the word blog. So this is really just capturing everybody who went to a blog article
on my website. And then I
can look in here at the path expiration. It’s gonna take a second to load, but I can see really All right, so this is where the session started. But, you know, a huge chunk of them, you know, 1000 out of the 9000 events that I have started on this free SEO templates, right. And you can Also add filters here. So if I wanted to, I can add a filter about, is there a specific page that I’m going for
any of that?
And then start looking at what did they do after it? And this is really great, especially if you’re trying to capture if you have conversion tracking, did they actually convert? So of these that came to the SEO templates? You know, we saw a lot of pageviews, they successfully loaded the page. Six people clicked,
what did they click on? They restarted their session. So they probably had gone inactive and came back on this Google Search Console error, what happened, they went and looked at other pages, what other pages you can really start to look and here I can switch to Page Title and screen. You can really
start to understand how users are going through and navigating your site. And like I say, if you have specific events that are conversions, you couldn’t really start drawing a very clear line of this blog post brought in X number of readers, who then navigated on the site engaged with these service landing pages or these product landing pages and resulted in X number of conversions, whether that’s transaction transactions revenue leads all that good stuff. You had some exploration available in universal, it was not as robust as this one. And in fact, we could take a look at
maybe. I mean, I think this user only has access to analyst So Jay, for right now. Um, see, yeah, I didn’t add myself to the other ones.
So give me two seconds, I can show you what it looks like in GA universal.
And while y’all are doing I’m doing while I’m doing this, you can go ahead and think about your other questions.
Okay, so I got a question and he said, Why beaten this path you had to use, you are looking for the past four blocks I want to know is it only is that the only hardware for it now is that the only step you took for building this part like using block as the as the such them, or is there any other thing you just have to do?
So I can walk you through exactly how I did it. So the path expiration is what I used. And so there are segments that already exist for you, you can use those if you want, and the dimensions that you’re reporting on, on that’s going to come into play with how you want to, you know, really just have fun and investigate the data. So from there, to identify my blog readers, as I call it, I added a segment here.
So you could look at user segments, session events, there are some templates that analytics has already made. So let’s say I want to understand how iOS users are navigating my site versus Android, I could do that here. But I did look at a user segment. And then like I say, I just saw, let’s say I want to see everybody who looked at content that had to do with data, right? I’m trying to promote my data services. I’m gonna go into events into page view. And it needs to have been more than one. So this event count, I would say this step is where people get tripped up. So make sure you’re including that the page you had to have happened.
And the page location which is in here, and I’m going to say it’s anything that includes data
So anytime someone’s looking at any of my data, like a single user has looked at data, so data interests users, I can save and apply and then start seeing what they’re doing.
Now, the reason why this starts getting really cool
is because I can start identifying and my funnel, so not only is that I can now really show the client, the level of value that I provided, I can also start seeing are there leaks in my funnel. So this brand positioning and SEO has the has data in the URL. And also keep in mind for this segment, there’s all kinds of different types of modifiers you could use. So it could be anything from like, I want somebody who identifies as male, I want someone who has had a transaction, I want to know how my return users are engaging, I want to understand if they came, if I have multiple microsites that I’m managing, which one did they start from? I might use the host name from that.
If I’ve created content groups, yes, go ahead.
Okay, the data you’re talking about? Is it the when you find the data in the URL and context or the contents?
It’s in the URL itself? Okay, thank you. Yeah. Um, so,
and how I would use this to identify if people are falling through the funnel, is that I would just start continuing this on.
Oh, see, this is kind of cool.
People are reading it in Spanish. And you know what, I don’t have a Spanish version of my website. But maybe I should make one. Um, I can start seeing why Where are users falling off and not actually ending up on my conversion page. And so that’s this is a huge way that I usually identify
how, where I need to continue hand holding my users.
There are definitely times where we’ll set up each individual step like I want the user to have taken, you know, looking at my page, my article about how to make reports. And then next, I want them to go to the data visualisation services page. And then next, I want them to go to the contact page, I’m going to build that exact funnel using these segments and these filters, so I can see where people are falling off and why they’re not doing that. And usually, that’s where identify, I am not giving enough information about how we approach analytics audits, for example.
So
that’s the path exploration, I say this is where you can really find yourself down a really deep rabbit hole that you did not mean to get into. So I would say when you start these things, set a timer to how long you’re going to do it, because you could end up here forever. And that’s really not going to help anybody. Um, the other thing, if you do have internal search, I highly, highly, highly recommend looking at it. Using that data to access that you would just go into reports and engagement.
And then you can look at events. And then you should see. As it loads, you will see an event called a search. I’ve got it right here, view search results. And then you can load this parameters and it will show you what are actually the keywords. Now because this is a screenshot you can’t see how many there are but I can tell like this is obviously a fashion website, ecommerce.
What are
kind of the the brands that I should be promoting? What type of content should I be writing about? Do I have enough content writing about us as a designer and how we work with them? This is just really great ways to generate content because your your users are actively telling you that this is the content that they want.
So definitely
something that I think is usually underutilised. The other things I like to look at is within
engagement
and really start looking at which channels are promoting the most engagement. So this user activity over time if you are a long sales cycle, this It’ll be one of your best friends.
But as we’re looking at acquisition overview,
and this is where it really breaks down by the channels themselves, I like to look at what
what type of content is generating the best social traffic. So here are all limited to social. And I’ll say that I want to know what page it is. So first user source.
And then I can start seeing, like a site, what when it’s actually generating the best kind of social engagement, because that will usually tell me a good idea. So you use landing page and query string, that will give you just the trailing slash, or you can use the path name, page path and screen class, that’ll give you everything
that really starting to look at that, like if I look at Facebook, shuttle thing, people are
talking about us on Facebook, wow, it’s a lot more than I would have thought. So that can give you an idea, you know, if something is generating a lot of social shares, it’s probably a content topic that’s worth talking more about. Right? If your customers are engaging with it, and email. So let’s just look at what’s
happening there.
Which we don’t send out emails. So I don’t know why I’m saying that. But again, that’s something that you could look at to really understand what is getting the most return value and customers coming back and building that loyalty and that advocacy? Could you afford be integrated with Active Campaign?
Yes, yes.
You still need to make sure that you have tracking URLs in your Active Campaign, emails themselves. And but generally, Google does appropriately attribute traffic from Active Campaign emails to email clicks.
Yeah, hopefully, that helps. Which,
you can see that usually first user campaign, this is where you would start again, we don’t we don’t use a lot of tracking URLs or campaigns. We’re very lazy. We’re worst at marketing for our own selves. But this is where you would start seeing any particularly tracking URLs that you put in your emails, you would start to see them here. Yeah. So UTM are still captured within GA four, you should be able to always see that.
Is this just having a minute here. I’ve noticed Jay before does this a lot. Um, yeah, UTM ‘s are still in use. If you want other parameters, you probably have to set those up custom. That’s a whole nother class, frankly.
But that’s also where GA four gets really powerful. Because you can really add some really cool stuff without all the extra fluff that we had in universal.
Yeah, I just started looking at top performers. And I look at my other channels as well. So if you’re looking, if you’re looking at analytics, and you have any paid marketing going on, what is generating the highest click throughs. That’s the kind of content that paid always wants to use plus, you should make sure you’re utilising in your organic strategy.
So those types of topics. Questions, comments, concerns? Places that I didn’t help you at all. Yes, I see a question from Adana. Missing that correctly? Yes, it means
I have a question signing the first Google Search Console. Like you talked about collecting data from an article arising that probably queries are new. You talked about using that data to probably form a topic or another spoke. My concern is that will that be like four minute duplicate article cannibalization, stuff like that for
it’s definitely a fine line. And that’s where you have to start doing your research. But you know, for this one, this is my page talking about my SEO Services. I’m trying to find topics for articles to support this landing page. So I’m seeing that like Best SEO plan, SEO strategy document, you know, retainers, is that a topic that I could write a blog about making sure that I’m not cannibalising myself. Right. And then I am promoting it up.
Also,
there is a dashboard that Roxanna stingo created that helps you identify areas where maybe you’re cannibalising yourself, I would highly recommend getting that I will try to tweet it out, because I don’t have it right in front of me right now. What that URL is, but for sure, there are times where you need to look at the topic and the research itself, and then figure out if that’s something that you’re going to add into your existing piece to make it more more authoritative, or your or if it’s enough to spin up a whole nother article, right? When I’m looking at my blog articles, chances are, I’m usually going to add on to an existing resource.
If I’m looking for ways to support a landing page, that’s usually going to be a brand new piece. Because that’s going to be a blog article or a resource piece, to then support my landing page that’s really that transactional, that conversional language that’s telling people what they’re going to get what the benefits are. The idea of the article is to answer what questions they may have related to service or the product in question. So like I say, one of the things so this is my SEO Services, landing page, so we can take a look at
it here. So my SEO consulting,
I, our pages are relatively short. So you know, from this, I’m seeing that people are really wanting to understand how do you craft a strategy or a roadmap based on the keywords that I’m seeing? So I’m going to make sure that I have an article that’s talking about approaching SEO roadmaps approaching how to document an SEO strategy. And then that article would link to this landing page to further support it, and ideally, help me rank for the term SEO Services consulting,
or SEO consulting. Does that help and make sense?
Yes, it does. Thank you.
Any other question?
Okay, some while you were talking about the law, but how many pages you said, you pick them based on the one with the lowest inflation? So I’m asking, is there a benchmark for finding the local optimum content? Or you just have to find the one with the lowest number of impressions? Or do you have a specific region, okay, if it gets below 10,000, or 20,000, or just even if, if thing goes below below that amount, you take 10 of them, or you just pick one out of all of them?
Um, so generally, I’m looking at what’s the change, so I’m looking for the biggest change, not necessarily, like it’s gone under a certain benchmark, that’s also going to change from client to client. And something that I would recommend documenting, like, if we look at my overall search results, you know, over the, you know, it’s a lot more impression questions than I would have thought. Right. So for this one, you know, I’m seeing pages that have 175,000 impressions, right? Um, um, I could make a rule for anytime something goes under 10,000. It’s usually like I said, I’m looking at what’s the change? And what is that in relation to how big it was? Right? So this increased by 12,000. But this increased by 12,000, doesn’t mean as much as this increased by 1900, because of relativity. And what’s the scale that we’re thinking about?
So, to reiterate, I’m usually looking at what’s the biggest change what used to win that is no longer winning. Or I have benchmarks that I’ve set per client, like for some of the Fortune 25 companies that we work with, my benchmark is a million, if it’s less than a million, I just don’t care about it. Right? Then I have some clients that are very, very niche. And if it’s over 100, then I really care about it. Because there’s barely 100 people searching for those kinds of services. So it’s really going to depend on the size of your client, what are they already getting and earning, which is going to set those benchmarks for you.
Okay, thank you very much. So unfortunately, that
doesn’t have a really clear answer, because it just has to go according to your space.
That’s fine. See how it always depends which is really irksome sometimes that’s where it goes.
Any other questions before we want to close Chima, anything you want to add?
Chima Mmeje 1:20:14
No, I think I’m just going to wait for the recording. Because I’m being on a see I’m just getting people to recording, then use my website to invest engineer everything you did.
Samantha Torres 1:20:26
Okay. Um, yeah, we definitely have
to run a lot. We talked on some other topics that are much more than just topic selection. But I hopefully it was fun. And it was helpful for everyone. I know I had to get done.
Chima Mmeje 1:20:41
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. This was, this was a lot of fun. If anyone has any questions. For Sam, this is your chance to ask them even not even anything, not just related to what we’ve just talked about here. If you have any questions for Sam, this is your chance to ask them what we got in session. This was so much information and so good. It was better than I expected. I just literally putting my computer in my eyes directly trying to see everything you were doing and like, take notes. Yes. So thank you so much for this. We appreciate it.
Samantha Torres 1:21:14
My pleasure.
And yeah, it was a lot. So any follow up questions, please feel free to send me a tweet at Sam Torres ATL. And also you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you’re in women in tech, SEO, I’m always on there. And you can also always ask my business partner Tori. She is very passionate in that community as well. So happy to help wherever we can.
Chima Mmeje 1:21:40
Thank you. So yeah, all right. I’m just getting to
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
