SEO gap analysis

Part 2: How to Fix this Problem – SEO gap analysis

To fix it, we will take the most useful search-related report from Google Analytics & add extra data to it from elsewhere. Here’s the extra data that should be added:

1. The estimated total volume of search traffic available for each term.
2. Our current percentage of the maximum available traffic.
3. Our current rank for each term.
4. Which page of ours is currently ranking.

And here’s how this all looks when combined:

So rather than scratching our heads wondering where to start, that immediately tells us:

1. Which search terms are bringing us most visits today?
2. Which keywords do we have the potential to improve for? (& which the fastest?)
3. What pages do we need to change to do that?
4. What extra actions can we take to get more traffic for each term?

A quick example: If you look at the table above & take a look at the phrase ‘used laptops’ (the one with the orange ’11′ for current rank). Google Analytics data would have only told us “You got 1,664 visits for ‘used laptops’ last month”. Instead, here we can also see:

• We’re getting just over 9% of the total available search traffic (meaning there is potential to improve).
• We can also see that it’s in position 11, meaning a little bump in ranking would push it from page 2 to page 1.
• Finally we can see the page currently ranking is ‘page804′, allowing us to quickly check whether there’s anything extra we can do on the site (or through external links) to boost that page’s likelihood of ranking higher for the phrase.