Priya says: “My top SEO tip for 2025 is to focus on improving your analytics so you can understand what's really working for your SEO, and where to optimize your SEO strategy.”

How do you make your analytics ready for your SEO?

“Interesting question, and that's what every business keeps asking: How do you do your analytics to make them ready for your SEO?

I am a very big fan of Google, and I love working in GA4. I know many SEOs don't agree with me because of the recent changes that have gone on in GA4 in the last two years, but trust me, if you use GA4 for your analytics, it has got so much to offer you. It’s just that we can’t see – even I can't see what's there in GA4, I am still learning.

When I talk about improving your analytics, it all comes down to your website. SEO is no longer just about traffic; it's also about value. And it has three important basic things to track, which are traffic, landing, and revenue.

How would you know if your SEO traffic is coming into your website properly and the landing page that you're using is okay? All that insight comes into GA4, and into your analytics. If you think about it, SEO is more about ranking your website at the top of any search engine, not just Google.

When I focus on Google, it means that Google offers analytics, and the Google search engine is also under the Google umbrella. So, when you use GA4 for your analytics implementation and data capturing, you're not actually putting any load on your website because that's taken care of by Google. You are basically optimizing your website by having Google on your website.

Plus, it offers you so much information about time on website, engagement rate, bounces from your landing pages, how a user interacts, which pages they interact with, scroll, etc. There are a lot of things that you can talk about and, without good analytics, you're literally guessing and not really optimizing.”

It's great to hear you being exceptionally passionate about GA4 there. As you say, some people are, but some people aren't.

“No?”

In relation to why you are so passionate and why you think it's such a great tool to use, would a good summary be to say that Google have access to the information on how your website's performing on their search engines, and they're actively telling you what to do to become more effective at making your brand/website appear more prominently in their search results?

“Yeah. If you think about SEO, in the last couple of years, Google Chrome in itself holds a very large market share, right? That's the search engine that most businesses want to focus on because, with Safari getting into all these cookie and privacy restrictions, what is the browser that is left? It’s Google.

Chrome is, in itself, a browser that users tend to interact with more, and that's the browser where your site interaction is measured based on Google metrics like INP scores or Core Web Vitals scores. How do you measure those? You measure them by optimizing your website. How would you optimize your website? Then you have data to understand which pages of your website are not performing better, and which are performing better.

Let's say you have a landing page, and that landing page has tonnes and tonnes of tags in it: Meta Pixel, Adobe Analytics, Bing, and lots and lots of stuff. If you try to rank that landing page on top of the Google search engine, it just wouldn't, because the site is too heavy for the code to land it at the top of the search engine. So, you want to optimize your website, and you might have to remove all these tags that are not very important for your business.

That is part of SEO ranking as well, and all of this is measured based on the Google metrics that Google provides in order to get your site on top of Google search engines, which is called organic traffic – which we nowadays call SEO.

A whole point comes around optimizing your website, but the point of how to do it lies with your analytics dataset. It’s the key.”

It's a powerful point you made in relation to Chrome.

Would you say that analysts, SEOs, are missing out if they're using software that isn't GA4?

“I would say partially, yes, they are. If you're using any other analytics tool, it will kind of give you the same metrics – it would give you sessions, and it would give you time engagement, etc. – but when you're not using GA4, you're not able to integrate your website with other marketing tools.

For example, you're not able to integrate it with BigQuery. When you get GA4 into BigQuery, and then in BigQuery, you start getting data from other sources of SEO, like Ahrefs or Chrome UX, and all those sorts of things, then you get a unified view in one place.

While it's possible with other tool sets as well, GA4 have all that in-house and in-built, which makes your marketing decisions more effective and more appropriate.

I wouldn't say they're losing, but I think they're struggling to get there, when it could have been made easier with GA4.”

You mentioned BigQuery there as well, and I’d like to dive into that, why you use it, and how you use it, but first of all, what data should be used in GA4?

What data do you tend to focus on initially?

“In GA4 (if I just talk about GA4), there is an entire set of traffic source reports in GA4 that you can get – and you don't have to do anything to get that report. Basically, you just have to have a snippet on your website, and that's it. You're going to get that report anyway. You're going to get which pages the user interacts with and which you attract organic traffic from.

You've got channels in your GA4 which will tell you whether the user came from SEO or an organic channel, or whether they came from a PPC, email, or something like that. Google also has enhanced measurements in it, which will track scrolls, clicks, etc. – and all of this gives you more and more data on the engagement of the landing page that a user lands on, from an SEO perspective.

One of the different metrics that you have in Google is bounce behaviour, so bounce rate. If a user does land on your landing page, and you can get that SEO traffic on your website and get the user on that landing page, are they converting? Are they bouncing off your landing page? That means they don't find the content relevant.

If you have your search engine and somebody types in, ‘give me a car insurance website’, and you bring up a bike insurance link, and the user gets landed on a bike insurance page, it doesn't serve his purpose, right? Why would he continue? He would just close the tab, and that's where you get your bounce.

How would you know that the user has bounced? It would basically come from your GA4, which has that metric very handy in its own definitions, and it has seemed to work quite well for businesses.

Time spent on the page is another metric. If a user has found your content relevant, are they really interacting with it? Are they spending more than a minute on that page, or are they moving and going to the next page? Eventually, what are they doing? The entire end-to-end journey is something that you can again get GA4.

I'm not saying that you can’t get it in other tools, but it's very straightforward in GA4, which helps you integrate with other things. Because we're talking about SEO, we're talking about organic, and we're talking about Google Chrome, it makes more sense.”

You talked a bit about bounce rate there. I think the challenge with analytics, and GA4 certainly, is knowing where to start and what to focus on.

If an SEO is starting within an organisation and has access to all of this data, how do you go about prioritising what needs to be done first?

“That's a very tricky question, and not everybody is able to come on and do the priority of things that they want to do. As an analytics implementation and consultant engineer, I would recommend that you basically look at your website and where you get the most traffic from.

It depends on the reach that you’re getting to your customers. Let's say you already have your landing pages, which are reaching your customers through paid marketing and stuff like that, and you're already driving traffic into analytics, you need to find out where that traffic is coming from. Where, on your website, are you getting more traffic? That's the first bit you want to capture, and you want to understand.

Do you want to lower your spend on that traffic if it's coming from PPC, let's say, and increase your spend for SEO? It depends.

For one business I work with, they’re very focussed on landing pages, getting the user on the website, generating a lead, and then following them through their journeys – but it might be different for an e-commerce website. For e-commerce, the focus might be on the product detail page that they want to get more users on.

To start with, we have to know which pages, and which parts of the website, are more traffic-driven and can eventually lead to revenue faster.”

What are metrics and dimensions, and what do you do with that information?

“There are a whole lot of dimensions and metrics that you can use in GA4, but to use the right one is the trick.

I will just take a use case where you want to understand the time spent on your landing pages. If you take all the landing page reports, the dimension in this case would be ‘landing page’. You then look at the metric ‘average engagement time per session’. Now, that would give you, on each landing page, how much time the user spent there.

Before looking at the engagement, you would also want to look at the views that the user had on that landing page, and where that landing page drove the user to. If your revenue conversion from that landing page has been decreasing or has remained constant, you want to look at the engagement time that the user is spending on that landing page.

If they are not spending more time on that landing page, then we drill down into more metrics. We drill down into bounces. Then we break it down with other dimensions, like pages – or if your website has any specific dimensions to look at. For example, the browser that they're using, or the product type that they viewed it on.

You drill it down more and more to get into the final hypothesis. You have a hypothesis in mind, it's just you have to prove it through data. That's what it's all about, basically.”

You mentioned BigQuery earlier on. How do you go about getting the data into there, and why do you use that tool?

“BigQuery is the ultimate reporting tool that you could use for businesses that require more inside details on different metrics and dimensions.

Yes, you have GA4, and you could use ready-to-go and self-serve reports in GA4, but what BigQuery gives you is integration with other platforms as well. For example, for keywords, you could use Ahrefs, and you can use the UX Report from Chrome for other link builders and stuff like that.

When you integrate your GA4 data into BigQuery, it's more raw, it's more unsampled. You get more in-depth dimensions and metrics in GA4 that you could use in any other reporting UI, like Power BI or Looker Studio. You can also customise it based on your requirements.

That's where BigQuery comes in – not just for GA4, but also with integrating to other platforms and driving the report in just one single reporting UI.”

I guess you're also saving that data for the long term as well, because data won't stay in GA4 indefinitely.

“Yes, yes. In GA4, there is a retention of data. In GA4, you've got events data and user data, and they both have specific retention policies.

However, in BigQuery, you can customise that retention policy, and you can have that data stay there for longer – let's say five or six years.

Of course, you have to work with your legal team to be able to get that approved but, yeah, that's a possibility in BigQuery.”

Priya, what was the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The key takeaway is: Don't be afraid of GA4. I know.

I have been talking to so many people in SEO over the last few weeks/months, and they tell me they're afraid of using GA4. I ask why, and they say, ‘Because it has changed so much in the last two years, and we still don't know where things are right or wrong.’

I tell them, don't be afraid, because it's getting better.”

It's getting better.

“It's getting better. I would not say it’s at 100%, but I think I have been able to solve so many problems over the last two years in GA4.

I understand that it was quite a shock when it came in, after UA, and everybody had to move to GA4 quite quickly, but I would only say that it's a good tool.

When you get into it, only then will you understand its value. Just looking from the outside and judging the book by its cover doesn’t make sense. Just dive into it. Don't be afraid – and reach out to the community of GA4 support who can help.

Once you get into it and see its value, it's going to benefit your business in the long run.”

I guess it's easier if there's a professional analytics person inside the organisation, or at least there's an agency that specialises in analytics and does the implementation/the heavy work.

Perhaps there's an SEO who is also a broad digital marketer, and they don't have a big team within an organisation. In that scenario, do you think they should get some kind of external GA4 professional to come in and get everything set up for them?

“That's not a bad idea, right? That's not a bad idea if you do not have a setup or a team in your own internal organisation, and you want to drive value.

Some teams upskill themselves. They learn the basic stuff in GA4. For SEO, you only require the basic stuff to start with. Once you get into that position, you can upskill yourself to do it. Hiring an agency involves lots of other factors of cost, resources, time, and stuff like that – but I won't say it's a bad option. It depends on the business priority.

How much do you want to utilise GA4? Some businesses are still using their legacy systems, which don't even tell them that the SEO traffic is correct, and the attribution for SEO traffic is correct, but they still keep using them and are now exploring other options.

It's never bad to explore and reach out to others.”

Priya Verma is a Digital Analytics Implementation Engineer at Compare the Market, and you can find her over on LinkedIn.