Measuring international SEO campaigns
In many ways, measuring the performance of
your international SEO efforts is similar to what you do with any other marketing
channel. The trick here is that you'll be looking at specific languages,
regions, or combinations of the two. Generally, analytics tools offer a number
of reports that are helpful for tracking and reporting success. While any of
the major analytics tools out there will have a similar functionality to what
we're going to discuss in this chapter, for our purposes we're going to use
Google Analytics, as it's installed on more websites than any other.
And we're really only gonna scratch the
surface here. If you're looking for more detail on analytics tools in general,
then don't forget to check out the Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics titles
here on lynda.com, for a more in-depth look at the things that analytics can
do. The first report we're going to look at from an international SEO
perspective, is found by logging into Google Analytics, clicking on Audience,
then Geo, and finally the Locations report. At a very basic level, you'll be
able to determine what countries, regions, or even cities are visiting your
content.
Clicking into a country takes you to a more
granular view of locations within it. And you can use the links across the top
to look at different levels of granularity on a global scale. In this case,
you've probably noticed that we're looking at an example of a website that has
a localization tailored to Spain and the Spanish language. Not surprisingly,
it's good to validate that the majority of the sessions in this regionalized
site are coming from the target country. But it's also interesting to see other
countries that are making a strong showing. Even at this high-level view, we
can see metrics that help us understand what volume of visitors we're getting
for each row, how engaged they were in their visits, and whether or not they
were converting on our business objectives.
A quick look here shows me that there's a
considerable Spanish-speaking population in the US on this site. And row number
three tells us that Argentina has a good quantity of pretty engaged visitors,
and they've spent some money with us. This kind of finding might be a catalyst
for a discussion around whether or not we should invest in an additional
regionalization for Argentina, or Spanish-speaking Americans. This kind of
finding might be a catalyst for a discussion around whether or not we should
invest in an additional regionalization for Argentina, or Spanish-speakers in
the United States.
And of course, we can do the same thing from
the perspective of language by clicking on the Language report. Here you can
see how each language is performing with the same session, engagement, and
conversion information Remember, this is the language that's installed on the
operating system of the device that's being used for the visit to the website,
and it can be a good indicator of the native languages of your visitors. In
this case, not surprisingly, we see Spanish as a leading language. And don't
forget about your Secondary Dimensions or drill-downs as well.
Let's drill down on "es", and add
the Secondary Dimension of Country/Territory. Here I've got further
confirmation that Argentina might be a good place for me to expand my efforts.
But I also see plenty of Costa Rican's, Uruguayans, Colombians, and
Venezuelans. And it looks like in Uruguay I've actually already had some sales.
And you can certainly go back and take a look at the English language group as
well. Remember, many of the Spanish speakers in that big group of people coming
from the US will actually be on devices that have a US English default setting.
Both of these are pretty basic reports to get
started with, but they can be helpful in learning more about your visitors, and
they're definitely worth investigating. There are, of course, hundreds of
reports, and countless dials and knobs to turn within your Analytics solution.
But one interesting thing to look at with Google Analytics in the context of
international SEO, is the Benchmark reports. It turns out that Google Analytics
is installed on a lot of websites across the globe, and there's a set of reports
that aggregates and anonymizes all of this data, allowing you to get an idea of
how your regional site compares to others in similar industries.
Benchmarking is located under the Audience
menu, and for international SEO, you'll likely be interested in the Location
reports that compare your site's performance against others targeting the same
location, and that are in a similar industry. We can change preferences around
the Industry, Country or Region, or the Size of websites to narrow down the
field of sites that really are similar to ours. And then we can identify areas
where our efforts are paying of, and where we might want to improve. Here you
can see that while we may be doing a lot better at attracting traffic in Iraq,
for example, we're not necessarily doing a great job of engaging with that
traffic.
And don't forget the sort functionality.
Reversing this on Sessions can show me all the countries I'm not present in
that my competitors may be. Of course, measuring SEO success will also include
measuring organic traffic from search engines. We want to see growth in organic
sessions over time, and we also wanna pay close attention to conversion and
engagement metrics to make sure that we're getting the right kind of traffic on
our websites. We've spoken a lot about different search engines around the world,
like Baidu, Naver, and Yandex, and in the Acquisitions menu, we have a report
called Channels.
Clicking into the Organic Search row, and
selecting the Source as a primary dimension, you can get a list of all the
traffic being sent to you by organic search engines. If you wanna examine
Google by region, for example, you can just drill down and add a Secondary
Dimension. Now, we can get a pretty good idea of which country-level Google
search engines we're doing well with, and which could use improvement.
If you've integrated Google Webmaster Tools
with your Google Analytics account, you can check out the Search Engine
Optimization reports under the Acquisition menu. Here you'll get a look at
pretty much the same data we looked at earlier directly in the Google Webmaster
Tools interface, like which content and what search queries are driving
impressions and click-throughs. Here though, you can use that Secondary
Dimension of Country or even Google Property to dive even a little deeper. If
you select the Landing Page report, you can see the same information for the
top pages driving impressions and click-throughs in Google.
For both reports you can also track the
average position. Last, the Geographic summary report lets you track
impressions per country. It's important to note that all of these reports are
only available for the past 90 days. So a good best practice is to make sure to
either download this data regularly, or monitor it on a regular basis. If you
have separate Google Analytics web properties, or views, configured for each of
your country or regional site, you may find that there's both a bit more
flexibility, and a bit more complexity to the way that you'll use Analytics.
But generally, being able to slice and dice
your data activity from multi-regional locations and languages, is key to
understanding how your international SEO efforts are paying off, and guiding
your strategy forward for the future.
