In your journey to become an internet business master, one of the most important things to learn is how to use web analytics. Analytics data is useful for optimizing your content, specifically in keyword ranking, landing page development, visitor retention, social engagement, and more. But in order to use analytics data, you must first understand analytics data. Each week I will add a way to use Analytics to benefit your websites; this week is keyword ranking. Here is a rundown of what metrics to use for keyword ranking and search engine optimization using Google Analytics.
Keyword Ranking Part I
Google Analytics is extremely helpful for this type of work and has not only provided traffic source data but also information specifically tailored to search engine optimization. In the traffic sources menu, you can see the number of visits that came from the organic traffic medium, which means that visitors used a search engine which displayed organic (non-ad impression) search results that included a page on your website. If you have a lot of visits using the organic search medium, it could indicate that your website's pages are ranking for some search query (usually in the top 3 pages). You can view the keywords that were being searched to identify exactly which terms you may be ranked for or should be optimizing to rank for.
Once you are ranking for some keywords, Google Analytics can also display information for the number of impressions that your site has within search results. An impression, in this situation, is simply the presence of your site's url within any search result display. For some keywords your site may be ranking multiple times (but with different pages at each ranking position) and more than one keyword can be ranked to the same page(s). Analytics also shows the number of clicks on those impressions, the average position within search rankings (numeric value), and the click through rate (CTR), which is the percentage of clicks out of all impressions. Low CTR's could indicate that you should improve the quality of the meta description of your site's pages. The meta description is the short trail of information that appears directly below the title of your listing in search results.
To sum up, these are the specific metrics that you should be looking at when performing an analysis for keyword ranking:

• Medium - the means through which visitors were sent to your site; this is not the technology used with the internet browser. Examples include organic, referral, and email.


• Keyword - what keyword phrase were searched when traffic was sent organically Queries - what search query was entered when your site appeared in search results


• Impressions - the number of times a page from your site appeared in search results


• Average Position - the average search position that a page from your site is ranking for a given keyword; this is a numeric value which is created by averaging the ranking of your site over the course of the time period you are viewing data for.


• CTR - this is the click-through-rate of your impressions; it is given as a percentage, and is calculated by this equation: (Clicks/Impressions) 100