Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

Google Analytics is a great tool to improve your advertising and understand your website visitors, but did you know that you can use it to boost your search engine rankings?
To get the best rankings in search engines each page on your website must have an effective page title.
I don’t mean the title or heading that appears in the web page, I mean the hidden title that you only see in the browser’s window title bar.

Ensuring your web pages have an effective page title is a significant factor in getting a good ranking in search engines. To get the most from this you need to ensure that:
1. Every page has its own individual page title,
2. There are no pages without a title,
3. Page titles include the target keywords for your search rankings.
This article will teach you how to use both Google Analytics and Urchin to quickly identify which pages need attention.
Finding Pages with Duplicate Page Titles
So, how can you locate which pages need attention? Well Google Analytics offers a little known feature that you can use to find out which pages need work. You can also do this with Urchin with a few extra steps.
If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account you will need to set on up and install the tracking code onto your website. I suggest that you wait a few weeks before doing this analysis. If you are using Urchin, then make sure that you are using the UTM tracking script.
The first step is to look at your top content report.
To find this report:
Google Analytics – Content -> Top Content.
Urchin – Content Optimization -> Content Performance -> Top Content
In both cases look at the total number of pages reported:

Remember this number.
Then look at the Content by Titles report.

To find this report:
Google Analytics – Content -> Content by Titles
Urchin: – Content Optimization -> Content Performance -> Content by Titles
Again look at the total number of pages shown.
Are the numbers different?
If so then this may indicate that there are pages with duplicate page titles and this puts your site at a disadvantage in the game of search engine optimisation.
If there is a big difference, then we need to find out why. There may be good reason for this difference, e.g. the search results page on your website may always say “Search Results”. Equally it could be the sign of a significant issue such as your content management system displaying the same title for every page. One way or another we need to get to the bottom of this to find out why.
Unfortunately Google Analytics doesn’t behave as expected when you go to the report Content -> Content by Titles and then click on the link. What you might expect to see here is a list of the URLs that displayed this title. What you will see instead is a list of URLs that visitors used to click to this page.
To get a list of duplicate URLs requires an advanced filters and a bit of work in a spreadsheet.
You may want to consider creating a new profile for this report as it will alter the Content by Title report.
Add a new filter to either your existing profile or to your new profile with the following settings:

Filter Name: Add URL to Page Title
Filter Type: advanced
Filter Field A: Page Title
Extract A: (.*)
Filter Field B: Request URI
Extract B: (.*)
Output To: Page Title
Constructor: $A1 :: $B1
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: Yes
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No

Wait a day or so and then you will see a list of pages that display the page title and the URL. You can then export this into a spreadsheet and then split this on the pattern ::. From here you can sort the columns by page title or create a pivot table on the page title field to identify which URLs have duplicate titles. Once you have identified them you can then assess which pages need to be corrected and if they are worth the effort.

In Urchin this requires a different filter. This short help sheet will assist you to create this filter.
1. Using Google Analytics for SEO
2. Finding Missing Page Titles
3. How to find keywords in your page titles

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