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Home Blog Search Engine Optimization Tracking actual search rankings with Google Analytics

Tracking actual search rankings with Google Analytics

Some time ago I came across a fabulous tip from Andre Scholten posted on Yoast about how to track the actual rankings on search engines for keywords you're receiving traffic from. That's right, let me say it again: track the actual position of your link on a Search Engine Result Page, as well as the traffic generated from that keyword.

How does it work?

Read the article for the full details, but the basics of it revolve around using advanced filters to extract the page of results. The resulting filter will reflect the keyword and the pagination location the user clicked from. This method will track position to the page level, i.e. page 1, page 2, page 3, etc... and not the #1, #5, #9 level of detail. That said, grouping SEO traffic by the page it was generated on is still a fabulous idea in my opinion.

My only addition to the filter set would be to augment the page number. As Andre explains, page 3 results on Google would actually be reflected by "start=20". Thus, I would add a filter that runs after the "determine the page" filter and changes "start=20" to "page=3". Automating this to work for all pages would be great, but I'm not quite sure how I would do that with REGEX just yet, so stay tuned...!


Comments(3)
Display #
 Great seo tool

By: periscopeup on 2010-Jan-20 20:10:52
This is a great tool for those of us in Search Engine Optimization. Any chance you can add this to your bookmarklet?
 Re: great seo tool

By: calebwhitmore on 2010-Jan-20 21:32:07
This is an issue of filtering your GA data so it isn't something we can add to the Analytics Toolbar(let).  We will follow-up with a post on improved filters... should be out soon!

-Caleb

 Try this... &start=([0-9]|[1-9][0-9])+

By: Phil on 2010-Jan-26 03:32:48
There are no maths function in RegEx (e.g + is an expression) & lookup tables are disabled in GA. However, rather than 10 individual find & replace filters you can use this one:

Referral:&start=([0-9]|[1-9][0-9])+
User-defined:page=$A1 plus1

Result will be 0|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9.

Obviously this is not ideal, as page 1 is actually page 2, but I guess this could be seen as positive - being on page one ;-)

Note: position 100 ignored.

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