Google Helps With SEO?

Is Google actually trying help people with SEO?  If you log into your Google Analytics account, making sure to view the new version, you will see a new set of reports.  Go into your profile, view your site’s reports, and click the “Traffic Sources” menu item.  What do you see?

“Search Engine Optimization”

Ah, but it isn’t quite as awesome as you might think.  A few days ago Google announced that there were now making it possible to connect your Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics accounts.  So, the data you get in the new GA reports isn’t actually new data.  It’s the same data you have in Google Webmaster Tools with one rather significant difference, you can access more than the last 30 days of data.  So, you can look at previous months in addition to the current month (note: the most recent 2 days are not available).  That’s pretty cool.

Quick Description
If you already have a Google Webmaster account (and you really should), you are already familiar with the data now available in Google Analyitcs.

1. Search Queries: Get a list of search queries for which your site was displayed in the search results.  You also get the number of impressions, number of clicks, average position, and click through rate for each query (keyword).
2. Landing Pages: Get a list of your landing pages that appear in the search results.  As with the queries, you get the number of impressions, number of clicks, average position, and click through rate for each landing page.
3. Geographical Summary: See info about your search traffic (impressions, clicks, and click through rates) for each country.  Interestingly, you can also get Google Property data in this report.  This gives search data based on whether the search was in Google’s web search, image search , mobile, video, etc.)  I was interested to see that half of ChristianNewsGuys impressions were in Google’s image search.

Benefits
There are a couple of key benefits to this new feature.

1. You have this data now in the same place as your analytics data.
2. The reports in Google Analytics offers several useful filtering options
3. As mentioned above, you have access to a longer period of data than in Webmaster Tools

Things To Be Aware Of
There are two bits of data that are a little confusing and, unfortunately, not quite as helpful as they could be.

1. The “Average Position” in the Queries report:  You might think that the average position would refer to your site’s ranking for the keyword.  In a sense it does, but not the way you might expect.  Instead of giving you the top ranking, Google averages the rankings of any of your landing pages that showed up in the query.

So, if you have managed to get several pages in the SERPs, you may actually end up with a lower average position. For example, if you are ranked #1 and #13, your average ranking is 7.  This also includes site links.  So, if you have managed to be ranked #1 for a query and have 4 site links, Google sees that as you ranking #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5 and will list an average position of 3.

Personally, I don’t find this very useful.  If I rank #1 and #40 and Google tells me my average position is 20, I might think I’m not ranking well, but I am.  I’d much rather have the top ranking (or both the top ranking and average position).

2. The “Average Position” in the Landing Pages report: What you need to be aware of in this data is that there’s no information on keywords.  So, your average position may be 5, but that may be the average position for dozens of keywords.

What Do You Think?

Do you think these new reports are helpful or won’t really make a difference to you?

How do you plan to use these new reports?