As a law firm SEO agency, we are constantly looking for better ways to monitor performance and find opportunities. We have keyword tracking software, technical audit tools, brand mention alerts, and more, but few methods are as helpful and easy to use as the Google Analytic landing page report. We’ll look at the elements of this Google Analytics tool, how to access it, what data to look for, and what business decisions to make based on that data.
The Fundamentals of the Landing Page Report
What Exactly Is a Landing Page?
It’s very simple: we define a landing page as a web user’s arrival point on your website. If you sent out an email blast with a “shop now” CTA leading to your /shop page, /shop would be the landing page for anyone who clicks through that email. It’s the same for organic traffic; if a web user performs a search, clicks on your result, and ends up on your site, that initial page would be a “landing page.”
Most people think of landing pages as simple lead capture pages at the end of a paid marketing funnel, but as we’ll see here, you should broaden your perception of landing pages to include organic traffic as well. If you clicked on this page after performing the below search, we would consider that page to be an “organic landing page:’
What is the Google Analytics Landing Page Report?
The landing page report shows a list of your website’s entry points, how many visitors arrived there, and how those visitors behaved upon arrival. You’ll see all of the usual Google Analytics data (sessions, bounce rate, pages per visit, conversions, ecommerce revenue, etc.), organized at the page level. Here’s the Majux landing page report:
Better yet, you can use a secondary dimension to drill down into the data further.
And here’s what the report looks like after you’ve selected source/medium as the secondary dimension in the landing pages report. You can see which specific landing pages are driving conversions and explore where those users are coming from:
Where To Find the Google Analytics Landing Page Report
To access the report, point your attention to left panel of the Google Analytics dashboard, find the “reports” heading, and follow Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Screenshot:
Finding SEO Takeaways From the Landing Page Report
So you know what the landing page report is and how to find it — what’s the secret to uncovering SEO opportunities? It’s not complicated, so let’s jump right in.
Segment the Traffic Source to “Organic”
The first step is to navigate to the traffic segments at the top of your dashboard, click into the tab, and select “Organic Traffic.” You’ll want to deselect all other sources for now.
You could access the same organic data two other ways: 1) You can leave the “All Users” segment selected, then use secondary dimensions to filter for organic traffic, but the view will be cluttered and impractical. 2) If you’ve connected your Google Search Console account to Google Analytics, you could also find this data under Reports > Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages. Again, the landing page report we’ve discussed is preferable.
Look For These Metrics
Traffic-Driven Businesses
If your business is driven by affiliate links or AdSense revenue, then you’ll want to look at the Sessions or Users columns predominantly. You can easily set up a date comparison to see how your traffic is trending, and if you click on the top of the column, you can organize landing pages from most>least or least>most traffic.
Lead-Driven Businesses
If you’re using Google Analytics to track leads (you might be a law firm tracking phone calls, a contractor tracking form submissions, or something similar), then look at the right side of the report and organize your landing pages by how many “goal completions” they have (you should have conversion tracking set up on your website). You can even filter by goal; for instance, see which landing page generates the most Call Now button clicks.
eCommerce
Lastly, if you’re an ecommerce business with ecommerce tracking enabled, you’ll want to view revenue statistics instead of goal completions. This report allows you to see exactly which pages on your site are leading to quantifiable amounts of revenue.
Truthfully, all business types can benefit from doing a month-over-month traffic comparison in the organic Google Analytics landing page report. If a particular page has a drop in traffic, you can probably assume it generated fewer leads or led to fewer sales!
Finding SEO Takeaways
We work on digital analytics for clients every month, and when we notice that a client’s organic traffic is down month-over-month, the organic landing page report is one of the first places we turn. Which pages are losing traffic? Is that traffic loss leading to a loss in lead and revenue, or did we simply lose irrelevant site visitors? Which pages should we audit for technical and on-page SEO deficiencies? Did our organic landing pages drop off because a competitor with more links surpassed us? You can tackle all of these issues when you are armed with the landing page report in Google Analytics.
Drops in Month-Over-Month Traffic
When you identify pages that have suffered a traffic drop, you immediately know where to start investigating keyword rankings. You probably lost a few positions in the organic SERPs, and your traffic is suffering as a result. The first step is to download the landing page report and check your landing pages against their assigned keyword rankings. You can do this easily by plugging the URLs in Ahrefs and seeing keyword data. You’ll also want to do a manual incognito search for those keywords to see if you’ve been surpassed by competitors with more content on their page or more links pointing to their domain.
Lastly, carefully audit the pages that have dropped off; you might find on-page SEO errors, technical issues, a lack of internal links, and more. You may simply need to add an additional 300 words to the page or so.
Bounce Rate
If you see a month-over-month spike in bounce rate for a page (or if a landing page has a high bounce rate regardless), your first SEO takeaway is to run an SEO audit of that page’s speed in Google’s Lighthouse tool or WTMetrix. Low page speed leads to an increased bounce rate, and it’s an issue that can be fixed. It may be as simple as getting rid of a gratuitous header image animation or some unused script — but it does help to work with a developer on this issue.
A high bounce rate could also just mean that the users finding that page organically don’t think it’s useful — and that is a golden indicator that you should stop focusing attention on that topic.
Find Vanity Pages
Has the landing page report revealed pages that generate high amounts of traffic but a very low number of leads or sales? You need to think carefully about whether or not you are chasing after “vanity metrics,” as we say at Majux. First, decide if you can use those audiences in your retargeting funnel — they may generate sales after a bit of remarketing. If that’s not a viable strategy, use those posts to point internal links towards high-value pages, or insert CTAs throughout the content.
If the above remedies don’t lead to more revenue, you should take it as a hint that you’re producing content from a vanity, and not business point of view. You need your organic landing pages to lead to actual leads or sales.
Find High Value Pages
Some pages fly under the radar because they don’t generate exciting amounts of traffic, but for most online businesses, ecommerce revenue or call volume is what really matters. Organize your organic landing pages by how many calls they generate or how much revenue they produce, and then see if you can create pages similar to those in your content strategy.
Do you have any questions about Google Analytics, SEO, or driving more revenue to your business online? Call us at (215) 309-1631. We would be happy to help.
