The Simple Way to Set Up Analytics for Enterprise SEO

If you’re undergoing an enterprise SEO campaign, you have a lot of data to manage. 

To help, you need to have proper analytics set up. Doing this will improve the way you collect, manage, and analyse data, ultimately improving your data-driven decisions. 

Whether you’re new to enterprise SEO or a veteran, the following can teach you the simpler way to set up analytics for these campaigns. 

What is Enterprise SEO Analytics? 

Enterprise SEO analytics is the process of tracking, measuring, and analysing the performance of SEO efforts for large-scale websites. 

Why is Enterprise SEO Analytics so Important? 

Simply put, without data, you can’t make factual decisions. 

By setting up enterprise SEO analytics, you unlock this data, allowing you to create strategies that’ll actually improve your search performance. 

With SEO, this is so important. A small change can make a huge difference. For example, organic position. 

A simple organic position change from position three to position two or position two to position one can change performance massively. 

Source: Backlinko 

However, without tracking data and setting up analytics, you would never discover this information. 

That’s just one example, also. SEMRush performed some research on the number of seconds per user decision. 

Source: SEMRush 

Again, this data tells us so much. It clearly indicates that whatever you’re trying to push on your website, you need to push it quickly. 

How to Setup Analytics for Enterprise SEO 

Step 1: Plan Your Analytics 

With enterprise SEO, you can get lost in the rabbit hole of data. This can easily cause confusion and distractions. 

Because of this, you need to ask yourself the question “What do I want to learn about enterprise SEO?”. 

Once answered, you can then map out the tools required for your specific analytic goals. 

For example, you may want to collect data about the follow SEO areas: 

• On-page SEO 
• Off-page SEO 
• SEO competitors 
• Technical SEO 

With this information, you can then find the appropriate analytic tools required in the next step. 

Step 2: Set up the Right Analytic Tools 

Now you know what you want to analyse, you now need to select the right tool to perform the analysis. 

Ahrefs and SEMRush are good all-in-one solutions. They also have special platforms for enterprise businesses. 

You should, however, always use Google Analytics or Google 360. These are commonly referred to as the “single source of truth” regarding search engine data. 

Step 3: Pixels, Segmentation, and UTM 

To get deeper insights into your user behaviour, you’ll want to set up advanced tracking. This can be classified as the following: 

• Pixels: Pixels help you track specific user actions, for example, button clicks, form submissions, and video players. You can setup custom pixels on your website from third-party analytic tools, but you’ll most likely use Google Tag Manager (GTM)

• Audience Segmentation: In GA4 you can break down audiences by factors like location, device, and behaviour. This helps you develop specific strategies for different types of customers. 

• UTM Parameters: Track the effectiveness of different campaigns, email, social media posts, etc., and how they contribute to SEO. You can use a UTM parameter generator to create these. 

With these tracking tools, you’ll be able to measure your changes based on specific audiences or techniques, which could be greatly beneficial. 

Step 4: Monitor Competitors 

As part of your analytics, you’ll want to monitor your competitors. This way, you can create benchmarks to aim for. 

You can monitor them across all areas using analytic tools. Please note, however, if you’re going to measure traffic, keyword positions, backlink profiles, etc., on tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, they’re not completely accurate. 

You can even measure their technical performance on platforms like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and PageSpeed Insights. 

Step 5: Integrate SEO Tools 

In an enterprise SEO campaign, you’ll likely want to use tool integrations. This will allow you to transfer data from different tools, so you don’t have to keep flicking through the different software’s. 

When considering the tools for your enterprise SEO campaign, it’s really important to think about integration. This makes the process a lot easier and more efficient. Not only this, but also a lot more accurate as you won’t need to manually input data to create specific KPIs. 

Step 7: Create Dashboards and Reports 

To make sense of all the data you’re collecting, you should create custom dashboards and reports. These dashboards should report on your specific goal that you create in step one. 

There are loads of different dashboards and reporting software’s out there. For example, Looker Studio. A lot of people use Looker Studio or enterprise-specific dashboard/reporting programs. 

Looker Studio, however, is highly recommended. On this platform, you’re able to integrate data from over 1,000+ data sets from over 1,050 different connectors. You can also create custom visualisations to showcase data to non-SEO professionals. 

4 Tips for Setting up Analytics for Enterprise SEO 

To improve the way you analyse data for enterprise SEO, consider the following tips: 

Integrate Tools & Data 

When it comes to enterprise SEO, there’s a lot of data. Because of this, you need to use a lot of tools. 

The last thing you want is to have 5+ tools running on your device at once. One would be perfect, but two to three would also be good. 

The goal here is to integrate tools. Not only tools, but also data. This ensures that you can collect, review, and optimise data from a few central hubs rather than lots of different tools. 

Automate SEO Reporting  

Sometimes you’ll need to manually input SEO reporting, especially if you have offline sales. However, you want to automate as much of your SEO reporting as possible. 

It won’t only make the process easier; it’ll also make it more accurate. And with enterprise SEO, accuracy is everything. 

You have a lot of different automated SEO reports you can set up. You can use a third-party software like Whatagraph or something like Looker Studio. 

Whatever option you choose to go ahead with, just make sure that the tools you’re using to measure the data can be integrated to the reporting platform. 

Create Alerts for Critical SEO Metrics 

You should also create alerts for critical SEO metrics. For example, if organic traffic drops by a certain threshold or if you lose keyword rankings significantly. 

If either of these cases become an issue, it’s probably an issue with your website. Your hosting, server, or something has crashed. It’s not ideal, which is why you need to fix it right away. 

You can then have alerts, such as email alerts, to notify you if anything like this happens. It’s possible to do this on Google Analytic or SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs. 

Use Customer Event Tracking 

Though so important, very little SEOs actually use customer event tracking. However, if you don’t use it, you don't know how the customers converted. 

This information is like gold dust. Simply put, if you know where high-converting customers are coming from, you can then double-down on your efforts in that specific area. 

Not only that, you can look at it from the opposite direction. For example, why aren’t people converting from this page and are from another? This will help you identify the problem and develop a solution to increase your conversion rate. 

Final Word 

You should now know the simple way to set up analytics for enterprise SEO. 

If we had to give you one big tip, the tip would be to narrow down your software. Only use software that you really need, and even better, software that can integrate with each other. 

This will save you a ton of time and headaches. Having these features allows you to develop quick dashboards with reliable data, ensuring you have a successful enterprise SEO campaign.