New Google tools for SEO

Google has recently released a new tool in its Analytics product, which enables you to link your Google Webmaster Tools account to your Google Analytics account.

It’s early days yet, but I’d recommend that anyone involved with SEO should use this feature to enable some pretty powerful keyword research. You’ll see why in a minute.

First of all, I’ll take you through how to set this up; luckily it’s pretty straightforward.

Step 1. Jump into the new (beta) version of Analytics which you’ll see in the top right-hand corner of your account once you’ve logged in.

Step 2. Drill down into Traffic Sources and click the (new) “Search Engine Optimisation” report.

Step 3. The next thing you’ll need to do is link your Webmaster Tools account to your Analytics which you can see next.

Step 4. Pick the account you want to associate the Analytics with and you’re pretty much good to go.

Once this is all set up, what you’ll see is some really interesting new data about the keywords you rank for, how many visits you’ve received from them, the popularity of the search terms, as well as each keyword’s click through rate.

There’s an example below:

At an agency level, we’ve already started looking at this as a new keyword research tool. Our research using exact match impression keyword data from AdWords shows that the impressions listed in Analytics is pretty close to the impressions from AdWords on various keywords.

Using the impression column above means you can do some pretty accurate keyword research in my opinion.

The other interesting report is the Landing Pages report, which when you add a new dimension such as “Google Property” you can see where your traffic is coming from in terms of Google Image Search, Mobile search and the web.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.