In the ever-changing landscape that is digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition and spotting valuable opportunities requires up-to-date knowledge but also actionable insights that can push you and your business forward in the market. 

The key to driving actionable insights for your SEO strategy lies in understanding your users, their behaviour and the impact that your current efforts have on them. 

We’re now a few months into using GA4 and each month we’re noticing and learning more and more ways to use the different reports to find insights that can help with these key points. From on-the-job learning to gaining knowledge from industry experts, we have compiled some of the most valuable use cases of GA4. So, we wanted to share this knowledge with you and outline key ways you can use GA4 to drive actionable insights for your SEO efforts. 

In a world of data-driven decision making, harnessing GA4 and the information it holds about your users is a necessity. To make informed decisions on where to pivot your strategy, remaining agile and optimising in line with market shifts, GA4 is the digital compass that can help to guide the way. 

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or new to digital marketing, it’s crucial to have GA4 expertise in your tool kit. This blog is your comprehensive guide to driving insights from GA4 for SEO and below we will discuss the steps on how you can use GA4 to drive valuable organic insights.

1. Make Sure You Have The Basics

First things first, you need to make sure that your GA4 property is set up correctly. There are several changes that need to be made on top of the default reporting and conversion tracking that’s already in place. Areas where you can customise your property to fall in line with your business goals include Enhanced Measurement, creating custom parameters and customising your event tracking. 

We actually wrote a blog on setting up your GA4 property prior to the onset of GA4 becoming the default analytics platform for Google: Introduction To GA4 – An SEO POV so it’s worth a read if you’re just setting up your GA4.  

Following the steps to setting up your property correctly and in line with your business goals will help you to drive valuable insight in the long run as you won’t be wasting time making amendments and the data you need will be up and running straight away. 

Once you have the basics set up and you’re happy that your property is customised to your business’ needs, you can manipulate and organise the data to draw out valuable information that can inform your digital marketing strategies. For the purposes of this blog and so that I do justice to my expertise, I’ll be focusing on how you can draw insights for your organic channel.

2. Learn How GA4 Can Drive Valuable Insights

Historically, Universal Analytics has provided us with plenty of insights and helped to guide strategies for years but GA4 offers a whole new, user-focused perspective that can really drive insight and give a deeper understanding of your audience.

GA4’s enhanced metrics such as engagement rate, user engagement and depth of scroll allows us to clearly see how users are interacting with our content, spotting high or low engagement pages and, where there is merit in optimising these for your users. After all, GA4’s data model is centred around user tracking rather than session tracking as UA was.

We have another blog on the Five Great Features of GA4 For SEO which gives an overview of some of these useful features, but our favourites for driving actionable insights include the following:

📌 Explorations 

One of the key features on GA4 is the ability to create custom reports. This allows us to explore data in a more interactive and flexible way than the default reports. This feature can be used to tailor your reporting to your specific business needs, allowing you to customise dimensions, metrics and segments related to your business. 

Building custom reports and dashboards with specific SEO metrics can help to streamline your data analysis processes and give a clear overview of organic performance. Whether you want to use a custom report to spot trends in organic traffic (seasonality, device type) and other variables that could impact organic performance; analyse the performance of specific pieces of content across a period of time; combining Google Search Console data to gain insights into search queries driving organic traffic and which landing pages are most visible which can help you to prioritise or even highlight new keyword opportunities.

A few use cases of the explorations tool include: 

• Informing Content Strategy 

• Highlighting 404 Error Pages

• Tracking The Impact of Featured Snippets on CTRs

• Discovering New Content Opportunities 

• Assessing User Behaviour On A More Granular Level

• Segmenting A/B Testing

The Explorations report allows SEOs to dig deeper into the data, uncovering meaningful insights and informing future strategy decisions showcasing the evidence clearly to stakeholders.

📌Machine Learning-Powered Insights

GA4 offers the use of integrated machine learning insights models that automatically identify trends, insights and anomalies in the data presented. These can act as a starting point for you if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the data or if you’re looking for something specifically within the data but cannot find it e.g., trends of users throughout the month: 

You can find these insights on the right hand side of a report, for example on the User Acquisition report:

 

📌 Integrating Search Console Data

Once you have integrated Google Search Console data into your GA4, you will be able to use this additional data to identify opportunities and highlight trends in user behaviour such as what search terms are leading users to your website and which landing pages are receiving this traffic. 

Not only does this help you to spot trends and topics, but connecting your Search Console account to GA4 can present a unified approach to your data and allow you to understand on a deeper level how your users are behaving, which search terms are driving valuable traffic or conversion and which areas need some TLC. 

You can utilise Search Console data in the Explorations tool to uncover key insights such as the relationship between organic traffic and conversions, zooming in on keywords driving conversion to help inform and prioritise high-conversion keywords. Identity which keywords have the highest click-through-rates and where there is room for improvement. You can then focus on optimising content to match user intent for these search queries.

3. Test It Out For Yourself!

Once you have your account set up and are ready to go, try out some of the reports for yourself and see what you can find!

The above are by no means the only ways to find valuable insights on GA4 and this can vary from business to business and from channel to channel. There are a whole host of reports that can provide value from Cross-Device tracking data to Predictive Metrics. The best way to utilise GA4 as a tool to discover new insights and opportunities is by playing with the data and creating custom reports that are specific to your business. 

At Cedarwood Digital, we are confident in using GA4 to report on our clients organic performance and analysing these reports to highlight organic insights to improve not only the user experience but also pivot strategy where needed which can help to drive more revenue or more leads for your business. 
If this is something that we could help you and your business with, why not check out our SEO services or contact us to find out more.

We’re guessing you’re here because you own or work within a B2B business. If this is the case, you might be wondering how to get your fantastic services in front of as many customers as possible.

This is where B2B SEO takes centre stage. In today’s digital world, where competition is fierce, developing a foolproof B2B SEO strategy is absolutely crucial to succeed. Simply targeting keywords is no longer enough to reach your audience and secure conversions.

Research carried out by GrowFusely found that 34% of B2B marketers said that SEO was responsible for most of their leads and sales and they also discovered that 41% of B2B buyers go through at least three websites before approaching for sales.

In this guide we’ll cover what exactly B2B SEO is, how it differs from B2C SEO, and finish with a simple but effective strategy for you – you’re welcome.

What exactly is B2B SEO…?

So, let’s start with the B2B part. B2B is the name for a business offering goods, services or softwares to other businesses (like we do here at Cedarwood Digital). This isn’t limited to Marketing agencies though; a B2B company is everything from a back office solution provider , to shipping companies like Fedex, even through to platforms like LinkedIn.

B2B SEO then, stands for business-to-business search engine optimisation This is the process of creating and optimising pages on your company’s website to answer your audience’s questions and match user intent to subsequently aim to rank for keywords on search engines like Google. It includes a variety of techniques, related to both the actual content on the website, and the technical layout of the site. 

The aim is to appeal to your intended audience and provide helpful, unique information as industry experts. By doing this, you are more likely to fall in line with Google’s ranking algorithms and Quality Rater Guidelines. Not only will this improve the quality of your site but it could lead to an increase in organic visibility and better positioning in relevant SERPs. The best case scenario is that when people search for terms related to your business, they’ll see your site right at the top, and visit to learn more about your brand.

SEO for B2B companies differs slightly from B2C (business-to-customer), and we’re going to get into these differences now…

Is B2B SEO all that different from B2C SEO?

Plot twist, it’s actually not! While the target audience may be different – an audience of executives and managers, rather than the general public – the process is pretty similar. In both cases, you’re going to want to develop an SEO strategy involving the fundamentals of keyword and user intent research, content optimisation, and link-building.

However, the different audiences of B2B and B2C does make the specifics of SEO strategy a bit different. Whilst people are at the heart of both strategies, when it comes to B2B, they have different expectations and a more complex approval process. In contrast to Business-to-Customer marketing, where individuals often make the purchasing decisions, B2B transactions usually involve multiple stakeholders.

We’ve drawn up a little table for you here to make things easier:

B2B SEO	B2C SEO
Publishes content aimed at decision makers, and senior team members/managers	Publishes content aimed at a broad demographic group like ‘first-time buyers’ or ‘pregnant women’
Therefore, stick to your lower volume keywords, that key decision-makers within companies search for while at work. These might only be getting 50 searches a month but are important for us	Therefore, target high-volume keywords (the ones that thousands of people are searching for each month)
Content is very tactical	Content can be fun, friendly and emotional – to appeal to the general public
Social media marketing doesn’t make much sense in B2B, you’re going to want to stick closer to things like blogging	Focus on social media marketing because your audience is more likely to find what they’re looking for through a TikTok video

A strategy for B2B SEO

We’ve done the hard work for you and pulled together a nice comprehensive plan to get your B2B business soaring up those SERPs. Let’s take a look at this step-by-step guide…

Research the keywords your target customers are searching for

As said, when it comes to B2B SEO, we really want to drill down on the low-volume or ‘bottom of the funnel’ keywords that company executives are looking for. But how do we go about finding them? Well, good keyword research is the difference between getting a smashing ROI, and wasting time and money.

The simplest starting point is to start with ‘seed keywords’. Have a good old brainstorm about what you think your customers might be searching for. For example, if you sell software  that helps business owners create website designs, you might start with keywords like ‘website builder’ ‘graphic design’ ‘ecommerce site developer’.

This is also the point at which it’s worth scouting out your competitors’ keyword usage. Find competitors specifically invested in SEO and research the keywords that they are ranking for.

You’re then going to want to plug all these keywords into a keyword explorer software. (We’d recommend something like Ahrefs or Semrush).Using these tools, you can then see a list of all the keywords that your competitors’ websites rank for, but your website does not. This is called your website’s ‘content gap’.

Based on this information, you can then add these keywords to your list of potentials to target. It will also be worth creating a list of low importance keywords, and link building keywords (ones that receive a lot of natural links, e.g. statistical keywords).

For further insight into the best keywords for your B2B business, here’s a couple top tips from the Cedarwood team:

📌Make use of CPC rates – a high CPC signifies that this might be a potentially high-profit keyword to target

📌Google Autocomplete suggestions will really help you out with finding long-tail keywords. This is super easy – just start typing a relevant term into Google and check out the suggested keywords that come up below. 

It’s now time to optimise your content

You want to optimise each page around the keywords that you found in step 1. This is where you’re really going to get tactical with your on-page SEO, here are a few things we’d suggest implementing:

1. Make your content unique

Your pages won’t rank if they’re duplicate. Write it organically, and feel free to use an AI assistant for help researching, but don’t let them write the whole thing! I know it takes time and can be tricky, but it’ll be worth it I promise.

2. Beef up your pages

Fill out your key landing pages and blogs with over 1000 words of content. Take a look at this research from BacklinkO, which claims the best content length for SEO in 2023 is bang on the 1,500 word mark.

Source: BacklinkO

3. Be smart with your keyword usage

Don’t keyword-stuff, but include the target keyword several times on your landing page. Mention it in your page’s H1 title, title tag, and page URL. Also, use synonyms and variations of your main keyword, and try to include your keyword in the first 50 words of each page.

4. Don’t skip out on the blogging

Having a blog or insights folder on your B2B site will help establish your company as a helpful resource in your industry, and will build trust with your target audience. Making these blogs high quality will also help you out because people will want to link back to it. But more on backlinks later. 

Go for the shoulder topics, writing only articles about your specific services is a mistake. For example, here at Cedarwood, we write blogs about everything from the latest Artificial Intelligence assistants to our experience at an SEO conference.

Lastly, think about your writing style – professionality doesn’t have to mean dry, stiff writing. An executive is more likely to want to work with you if you can come across as approachable, even whilst getting your services across succinctly. In B2B we still want to create content that people want to read.

Outreach and Link-building

A backlink is a link from another website pointing to a page on yours, and once your new and improved pages are published, you want to try and build as many links to these as you can. This is one of the best ways to tell Google your content is worthy of organic traffic. (Your content must be good if all these people are willing to send their readers over to another site!)

There are numerous ways to build links. Here are some of our favourite tried-and-tested methods at Cedarwood:

>Thought leadership – this provides a great opportunity to increase referral traffic, and to establish your business as an authority

>Conduct original research and publish statistics—these are the things that journalists and bloggers love to link to!

>Digital PR: in B2B your goal should be industry blogs and news sites. At Cedarwood for example, we would try and target marketing publications that we know our prospective clients will be reading.

To Sum Up

You should now be in the know on how SEO can be utilised for B2B, and why it is so important. We hope this guide has given you some inspiration to get started on your own strategy. 

Looking for a head-start? Our team of SEO experts at Cedarwood have a wealth of experience implementing effective SEO for a wide range of medium-sized, multinational, and even international B2B companies. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can drive your business’ visibility.

Looking to increase traffic to your financial services company website? You’re in the right place. As a heavily regulated and hypercompetitive industry, putting time and effort into your SEO is key to standing out.

We’re going to take you through the ins and outs of why SEO is unique for this vertical and offer an effective strategy for ranking well in organic search.

What is SEO for financial services?

So, in this blog we’re dealing with the financial services sector. Financial services are best described as a process of acquiring financial goods. The sector covers many types of transactions in areas including banking, accounting, investment funding, pensions – the list goes on.

When it comes to SEO for this industry, we’re talking about developing digital marketing strategies to help drive natural traffic to your website, through tapping into organic searches. The aim is to increase your revenue through making your pages more visible. 

To achieve those top spots on the SERPs you’ll need to offer useful content, ensure your site is healthy and secure, and earn valuable backlinks from high-authority sites.

Financial services businesses are increasingly committing resources to SEO, but why is that….?

The importance of SEO for financial services

The financial services industry is increasingly competitive and constantly changing. The battle between established institutions and new fintech faces pushes on, with the field becoming increasingly saturated. The international market size grew at a rate of 8.8% between 2022 and 2023, with the industry now producing 12% of the entire UK’s economic output. That’s pretty hefty.

The industry is also particularly competitive when we consider digital marketing. Unlike other verticals, the financial industry will rarely see free natural links to content, so links are very difficult to acquire. Also, because SEO has proven itself a reliable strategy, lots of the industry giants are now turning to website optimisation. This means that everyone else needs to work an extra bit harder to rank highly.

We need to care about SEO in the financial services because it can see some key benefits. Putting consistent effort into optimising your website will:

📌increase traffic to your site: as you rank higher for important keywords, more and more people will see and click through

📌get you better conversions: the more site visitors, the more paying customers

📌improve your brand image: essentially, more people will have heard of your business and you’ll be on track to being considered a major player

What makes SEO for financial services unique?

It’s important to know that the financial services industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors. You need to be super cautious about the content you’re publishing because these pages are scrutinised more than the average.

This is because  financial services exist within the ‘Your Money Your Life’ category’.These are pages that can influence an individual’s quality of life – their health, wealth or safety primarily, and these companies have more responsibility when it comes to content. This includes legal and medical information pages, insurance companies, and financial pages.

But why? It comes down to something called E-E-A-T. Google introduced its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for YMYL pages in 2013 and emphasised E-A-T, adding an extra E last year.

The acronyms stands for:

–Experience

–Expertise

–Authority

–Trustworthiness

Whilst these elements are not direct ranking factors in Google’s algorithm , they are still a huge part of the guidelines, and can prevent financial services pages from ranking well. Google defines a high-quality page as demonstrating these four traits and in the SEO strategy later in this blog I’ll take you through how to hit each point.

Not only is Google more thorough when it comes to the financial services vertical, but so are your customers. When researching which service to use, users are more rigorous because their money is at stake. This means that coming across as trustworthy can really help give your business the edge.

The topic of financial services content is also unique because it is unusually complex. Your content needs to really address the customer needs. Things like investing savings, or remortgaging can be complicated and stress-inducing for customers, so your job is to make a tricky topic intelligible. SEO for financial services businesses should involve a knack for explaining difficult concepts in simple terms that a customer can understand, and then want to invest in. Use your site content to demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject matter, and a capacity to make this info user-friendly.

A strategy for SEO in the financial services industry

Okay, we’ve established that SEO is both crucial for this sector and also pretty complex. I’m going to help you out with a nice point-by-point strategy to get you hitting those top ranks.

1. Perform a content and structure audit of your site

First, evaluate each area of your site, checking which existing pages need work and where there’s space for new pages. Is your content meeting the YMYL guidelines? And if it is, is it still simple, clear and actually helpful whilst meeting these guidelines?

Then, make sure your website structure is optimised so that these pages can be easily navigated. Ensure that you’ve got a sitemap listing all your key pages, and good internal links to direct users between related pages on your site. This is your chance to fix any slow-loading pages. (Tip: make sure your site also loads quickly on a mobile device, as traffic from mobile devices now dominates search).

2. You can now move onto optimising and making changes to your site: keyword research comes first

I recommend using a third-party keyword tool like Ahrefs to discover the high-volume and long-tail keywords most relevant to your audience. Identify the keywords that users are actively searching for and that are actually related to the core aspects of your business. Then, map out a content plan in which you are naturally incorporating these words.

You can supplement this with tools like AlsoAsked which identifies question-based searches. This will allow you to incorporate your customers’ specific queries into your content.

3. Analyse your competitors

It is equally important to scrutinise your competitors’ websites in financial services SEO. Are there any keywords that they aren’t addressing? This could be a good opportunity to cash in and rank high. 

Understanding your competition is critical because, through in-depth research, you may discover that it’s not just your direct industry competitors who you need to be worried about. It could be there’s a new niche company on the market selling something similar to one of your services. You can then optimise your page to be the lucky one Google chooses to rank higher.

4. Create high-quality, instructional content 

Source: Luca Mussari

I recommend instructional styles for your financial services content. This way, you can make sure you’re hitting the users’ queries, and providing a clear explanation of those tricky topics.

Guide-style content, like the piece you’re reading now, works to position you as an authority. For example, a ‘a step-by-step guide to online banking’ or ‘how to apply for a loan’. Or, you could even go for an FAQ format which directly answers the queries in search engines, e.g: ‘answering all your questions on conveyancing’.

There’s your authoritativeness demonstrated, but what about making your content fit the rest of the E-E-A-T guidelines? You can show your expertise quite simply, with author bios accompanying your content. It should also be shown through the content itself – do your research, so your knowledge is of a good depth.

The newest element of the YMYL guidelines, experience, requires you to prove that your insights are authentic. Incorporate personal opinions and photos into your content and ensure that you have a good-quality About Us page.

Lastly, financial services sites need their content to demonstrate trustworthiness. You can get this across through having reviews from real-life clients, as well as a clear contact page. Have your customer service info displayed clearly, with accurate phone numbers.

5. Link building and PR

Your authority in your niche of the financial services field can be further enhanced through gaining backlinks. They have always been important for ranking on Google, but the algorithms are now better than ever at identifying paid links versus earned links. 

Writing high-quality content will mean it is sharable and secures backlinks naturally. Focusing on educational and user-centric content like guides and blog posts can help you attract links from other authoritative sources. There’s also the added benefit of then having content to promote on your social media channels, as we do on our LinkedIn:

6. Don’t neglect local SEO

Leave room in your strategy for time spent on local SEO. This is especially important for the financial services sector because many financial services still have physical branches.

Google Consumer Insights show that mobile queries for “bank near me” have grown by over 60% in the past two years. It can be helpful to create a Google My Business listing for each store so that you show up in the search results for customers doing local searches.

A robust local SEO strategy can provide you with a leg-up in the competitive landscape, because it is often easier to rank for local search terms.

How exactly can you optimize for local SEO? It’s important to have individual pages on your website for each location that targets those local keywords. Encourage customers to leave reviews, as this can massively improve your local search ranking and this also shows Google that you’re a business to be trusted.

7. Perform regular visibility checks / keep up frequent analysis

The fundamental thing about SEO is that it is an ongoing process. Trends, algorithms and consumer search behaviours are constantly changing so keep your eye on the key metrics and KPIs.

For example:

-where you’re ranking, per page

-impressions

-organic traffic

-engagement metrics: bounce rate and time per page etc.

-conversions from traffic

-overall SEO score using software like Semrush and Seobility

It’s crucial to keep monitoring your website, and make necessary adjustments. To appear an expert, you’ll need to update your content regularly. The financial services terrain is ever-changing and you need to stay relevant – consistency is key!

In summary

LSA found that 90% of loan and mortgage customers and 85% of check cashing consumers start their journey with an online search. More than ever, we are using local search to find and evaluate financial services providers. Use this guide to kick-start your SEO strategy so that you can tap into this search potential and thrive in this new digital landscape.

It should now be clear to you that SEO for financial services is quite a complex and challenging task, requiring persistence and a strong strategy. If you need a little help, consider enlisting some professionals to get you started. Get in touch with our SEO team at Cedarwood today who can help you create tailored SEO strategies for your financial services site.

Last month myself and the SEO team attended Thursday and Friday events at BrightonSEO. For me, this was my first time attending the event in person and actually my first time ever visiting Brighton! 

Having attended the online conferences previously, I already knew that the talks would be super insightful and full of useful tips that can be integrated into our SEO strategies and inspire us to think outside the box. The in-person talks did not disappoint and I came away with my knowledge of SEO enhanced. 

For those who might be interested, below, I have outlined the 3 talks that stood out to me the most and have listed some of the key takeaways and actionable insights from these: 

Entity SEO – Genie Jones

Genie gave such an interesting (and entertaining) talk on the power of using the SameAs tag in your schema. Genie talked us through how to mark up entities within schema using the SameAs tag and how topical authority can be achieved through using these. 

Throughout the talk Genie linked schema back to psycholinguistics to provide outside context to better describe entities and schema (which, as a Linguistics graduate, was really useful to contextualise this!)

We learnt that creating entities through schema helps to disambiguate information, helping crawlers to better understand what the site and its pages are about and the connections between these pages to help build up a Knowledge Graph filled with all of this information. 

Genie recommended using the SameAs tag to clearly demonstrate entities on your pages. This could be marking up a specific element/entity and providing a link to a clear definition of what that element/entity is. For example, for a page about farm animals, you might want to provide a SameAs tag to show that you are talking about an animal and this is the exact animal that you are talking about. E.g., marking up ‘pig’ with a link to ‘https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig’ to tell a crawler that the pig you are talking about is the same as the animal described on Wikipedia. 

This is definitely something that I will be exploring further within our strategies to provide clarity on different entities that might appear ambiguous and are therefore not being viewed or ranked well as a result. 

The SERP Multiverse – Jon Earnshaw 

Talking about SEO success and the future of SEO, Jon’s talk surrounded how to optimise for the ‘SERP multiverse,’ looking at intent on the SERP landscape, leveraging competitor analysis and looking into what the future of SEO might look like. 

Jon looked at the different SERP landscapes of what would appear to be two related queries at face value were actually completely different when we looked deeper into the pages returned, showing the importance of user intent when considering the keywords that we are targeting. 

My key takeaways from this talk were as follows: 

⭐️ The future of SEO could look more into voice search so, in some cases, it could be a good idea to target the answer card or featured snippet so that virtual assistants such as Siri will be more likely to return information from your site.

⭐️ When looking at a competitor analysis, take your keywords and assess who was on the SERPs 12 months ago, are they still there or have they dipped? Why? 

⭐️ You can use ChatGPT as a resource when considering voice search to optimise for these queries. Jon suggested asking AI to return a list of potential voice queries for a certain keyword. You can even ask the AI to take on different personas depending on your target audience.

This was certainly an interesting talk that allowed us to look outside of just search engines and consider the future of SEO, where things could be changing and how to optimise your content to better match this intent where relevant.

Featured Snippets – Niki Mosier 

In this talk, Niki explored the value of featured snippets and how we can structure our SEO efforts to be better positioned to win these in the SERPs. This is an area that is important when it comes to trying to gain enhanced visibility within the search results. 

Featured snippets are the results that you sometimes see on a search results page that aims to answer your search query as soon as possible by taking the most relevant content from a ranking page.

Here are my key takeaways from Niki’s talk: 

⭐️ To be in with a chance of winning a featured snippet, it’s important that you already rank within the first few results on page 1 for that specific search query.

⭐️ Appearing in multiple featured snippets for related search queries can help to increase your authority on the subject matter. This is particularly important for sites covering YMYL topics. 

⭐️ 77% of search results with featured snippets come from search queries that start with ‘Why’ and using Google Search Console is a great way of helping you to find these question-type queries that you already perform well on and could be targeting ‘Position 0’ (the featured snippet).

For some more tips and tricks picked up from this talk and a dive into some other insightful talks, check out Marcy’s BrightonSEO review! 

As you can see above, there were some really valuable takeaways from very experienced SEOs and it was great to learn it all in person.  

We really enjoyed our time at BrightonSEO and would recommend it to anyone in the world of search marketing who wants to learn more, no matter your experience level there will be something that you can takeaway. With SEO, there is an abundance of information and things to learn and it’s great to hear and learn from other professionals who have their own case studies for issues that haven’t yet experienced on your site!

What’s more, you’ll also get to visit sunny Brighton and whilst you’re there I’d definitely recommend trying the Belgian fries!

If you’re a user of Google Analytics (GA), you’ll be very aware that the latest version of GA, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is set to take over the current version – Universal Analytics (UA) – in the upcoming months. The countdown to July 1st is on and it’s important to have an understanding of what GA4 is, how the new version compiles data and how to use the data. 

You might have set up your GA4 properties as soon as it was announced back in 2020 and be a pro by now. Or, you might be ignoring the alert warning you of the impending migration to GA4.

If you relate more to the latter, it would be a good idea to sort this sooner rather than later. In the article below, we have picked out the key elements of GA4 that are important to know ahead of time. 

What Are The Key Differences Between Google Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4?

There are some key differences between Universal Analytics and Analytics 4 that you should be aware of and consider when using the data. Most likely, the first difference that you’ll notice is that GA4’s interface appears much more user-friendly and simple to navigate than UA’s. 

Moving past the initial interface, there are several key differences that we have seen with the newest version of Google Analytics. 

Broadly, these key differences include: 

📌 Differences in data collection methods

📌 Updated metrics such as engagement rate

📌 Easier cross-domain tracking and consolidated web and app data on GA4

📌 Improved integration with Google Ads

📌 User-centric focus with GA4

📌 Doesn’t rely on cookies 

Below, we explain what these differences mean and how to navigate these when using GA4. 

Data Collection

The biggest difference between UA and GA4 is that GA4 collects and processes data differently from UA. 

To explain the difference between data collection in its simplest form – UA uses a sessions-based data model which essentially tracks interactions on a site within the given timeframe whereas GA4 uses an events-based model in which it tracks user interactions as events which allows for a more detailed view of user behaviours. Events can include page clicks, views, scrolls, video views and other actions that users may do on your site.

GA4 collects data in a variety of ways. Behaviour can be tracked on an individual basis and across devices using unique identifiers such as User IDs and Device IDs. 

GA4 also uses Google Signals to collect data from signed-in Google accounts across devices – although you must comply with Google’s policies for data collection and use which include GDPR so it’s important to check compliance before tracking Google Signals

Another feature of GA4 is that it has the ability to predict data using modelling and predictive analytics. For example, if a user declines cookies, modelling will allow GA4 to fill in gaps by using data from similar users. 

Metrics

With these different data models comes a difference in the metrics that are recorded and used. Some of the notable metric alternatives include: 

📈 Bounce Rate vs Engagement Rate: GA4 uses Engagement Rate in place of Bounce Rate. Engagement rate shows the percentage of engaged sessions which refers to sessions in which a session lasts 10 seconds or more, has a conversion event or has at least 2 pageviews.

📈 Goal Completions vs Conversions: GA4 now automatically records some events as conversions meaning that you no longer have to set up goals based on a limited criteria.

📈 Sessions vs Engagement: GA4 uses Engagement as a primary metric which records all user interactions even if this is across multiple sessions. 

Cross-Domain Tracking

The newest version of Google Analytics offers a simplified way of measuring a user’s behaviour across domains and this just needs to be configured within the settings of your GA4 property. For example, if you have a website where a user may start on one domain and will eventually navigate towards a second domain – GA4 will be able to track behaviour of a user across these two domains. To find out more, Google Support has a helpful article on setting up cross-domain measurement.

Setting Up A GA4 Property

Now that you know how GA4 collects data and some of the ways in which GA4 differs from UA, now would be a good time to learn more about how to set up a GA4 property so that you can familiarise yourself with how to navigate the new Analytics. 

It’s fairly simple to set up a GA4 property in your Analytics account, you just need to take the following steps:

1. Firstly, in the lower left hand side of the page, select ‘Admin’ and click ‘Create Property’ under ‘Property.’ Then you can add in a property name. This can be anything but it would be best to add your business or account name here.

At this stage, you can also fill in the details related to your business. Then simply click create.

2. Then, you will need to go to the ‘Data Streams’ section in the Admin folder and you will need to add your website as a data stream. 

Here, you can also add in app details if you have an app for your business. For our purposes, we will just be focusing on adding a web stream. 

Simply click on the ‘Add Stream’ button, select ‘Web’ and input your site’s URL into the ‘Website URL’ section. You can also give the stream a tailored name here.

There is also the option to configure settings and tailor the measurements to your personal preferences here. For example, you might want to untoggle ‘Video Engagement’ if your site doesn’t have videos or you don’t want this data. These will all be selected as default, however, you can easily edit and save your individual preferences. 

3. Once this is set up, a unique GA4 measurement code will be created which will allow GA4 to collect and track data. This tracking code will need to be added to every page of your website and can be done through adding to the code of your site or can be added in Google Tag Manager. 

4. Check that the property is set up correctly and is collecting data. You will be able to see this in the ‘Real Time’ report in GA4. You can also use the site https://tagassistant.google.com/ to check that your tracking code is on a certain page. 

Using GA4 Reports

As mentioned earlier, GA4 appears easier to navigate and is supposedly more user-friendly than UA but does this extend to the reports? We think so! 

The default report options on GA4 look something like this:

The reports give clear insights into performance and are split into focused reports which give some really helpful data visualisations. 

A summary of each default report can be seen below:

📊 Acquisition – Gives insight into how users find and use your website, which channels drive traffic and the user behaviour in each of these channels.

📊 Engagement – Provides insight on how users interact with the website and the content they come across. This report will show data on user behaviour on reports on metrics such as pageviews, session duration and events. 

📊 Monetisation – Provides insight into revenue generated by the website and includes metrics such as items purchased, revenue, average purchase revenue and items added to cart. This is particularly important for Ecommerce websites. 

📊 Retention – Provides insight into user engagement rates and retention, measuring retention rates over time using metrics such as new users and returning users. 

📊 Demographics – Provides insight into demographic data such as age, gender and provides information on different user types.

📊 Tech – Provides insight into devices used by website users with information on device type, device models and operating systems. 

The great thing about GA4 reports is that you can edit collections in the Library folder to make the dashboard customisable to your needs as a business and what reports might be most handy for you.

Navigating GA4 Reporting For SEO

In terms of using GA4 reports for SEO purposes, there are a few easy ways that you can navigate the reports to find metrics and figures that can help you to report on performance and also to spot areas for improvement. 

The main report for monitoring performance related to organic channels is the Traffic Acquisition report. This can be found under Life Cycle → Acquisition → Traffic Acquisition. 

To monitor organic traffic in this report you can filter to show Organic Search results by typing Organic Search into the search bar function. This will give you an overview of overall organic performance. To view on a more granular level to monitor individual page performance, you can add a secondary dimension by pressing the ‘+’ symbol, selecting Page/Screen and then selecting Landing Page + Query String. You will then see the performance of individual landing pages. Here, you will be able to monitor metrics such as Users, Engagement Rate, Conversions, Total Revenue and other metrics that may be useful to know. 

Another way that you can use GA4 for your SEO reporting is by integrating Google Search Console which creates a report that allows you to analyse your organic search performance. Here, you will be able to see keyword queries that led users to clicks, landing pages that engage users and see where your site ranks in the SERPs. Google Support offers a handy article on integrating Search Console with GA4.

It can be daunting to use a new tool when you don’t know too much about it but hopefully after reading this introduction to GA4 you can feel more confident in understanding the benefits of the new Analytics as well as knowing how to set up a property and navigate through GA4 to use the reports. If you haven’t set up your GA4 properties yet, we would recommend getting this done as soon as possible ahead of the cut off. 

As discussed above, GA4 offers a thorough and user-friendly way of reporting on key metrics and allows you to analyse performance on a more granular level focusing on individual channels of traffic.

Knowing how these reports work and how data is collected, we are confident in using the platform to report on website performance for our clients and analysing reports to highlight organic opportunities to improve the user experience which can help to drive more revenue or more leads for your business. If you think that this is something that we could help you and your business with, why not check out our SEO services page or contact us to find out more.

When auditing a website for SEO purposes, it can sometimes be the case that internal linking and site navigation are taken for granted and are given little credit or less credit than backlinks. In reality, these signals are some of the most important. They allow Google to effectively crawl your website, allow you to signpost the most important pages on your site and support users on their journey to finding core pages as well as helping users to find supporting information and additional resources that could enhance their experience. 

Internal linking strategies can be really effective campaigns to boost your SEO efforts. So, let’s look into what an effective internal linking strategy for SEO looks like and how you can go about creating one for your website.

What Are Internal Links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that point from one page to another within the same domain. They usually appear within content on a page or in the main navigation menu and footer as clickable links that take you through to another page on the same website.

How Can Internal Links Help My SEO Efforts?

Internal links can help your SEO efforts as they are crucial to signposting important pages for both users and search engines. They can help search engines such as Google to crawl through your site efficiently and understand the relationship between your pages which will help them to get indexed and ultimately ranked better. 

Clear and relevant internal links also help to create a greater overall user experience and can even improve user engagement if you provide links to useful and relevant resources. For example, providing clear and clickable links to buying guides or related articles for a product or service that you offer.

Why Should You Create An Internal Linking Strategy?

Creating an internal linking strategy is important as effective internal links can: 

💡 Help search engines to find and crawl new pages to rank your content better

💡 Improve user experience by providing a clear navigation through related content

💡 Disperse link equity between pages and around the site

💡 Outline the importance of a page on a site and establish hierarchy 

💡 Create hubs that display topical authority by linking between related pages and content

What Are The Use Cases of Internal Linking Strategies?

The strategy that you choose to create can depend on what your goal is and what you want your outcome to look like once the recommended internal links are in place. 

For example: 

Creating An Effective Internal Linking Strategy

Once you have decided what the goal of this strategy is for your individual website, you can start to look at opportunities for internal links. 

It is always good practice to take a step back and evaluate the state of your current internal linking strategy before suggesting new links are added. 

There are several housekeeping steps you can take to audit your site’s existing internal linking. 

Below, I have outlined the 3 most important initial steps to take:

❕ Check For Orphaned Pages

❕ Evaluate Existing Anchor Text

❕ Tidy Up Broken Internal Links

To check these on your site, I would recommend using a crawling tool such as Screaming Frog.

Check For Orphaned Pages

Orphaned pages are pages that exist on your website but they are not linked to from within the same domain, are not included in the sitemap and do not have any external links or backlinks pointing to them. In essence, these are standalone pages that would struggle to be found by a user or a search engine. 

To check for orphaned pages on your website, you can use Screaming Frog’s guide and follow the steps on How To Find Orphaned Pages.

You can also use Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser together with the main crawling tool to compare data sets and identify orphaned pages easily. Here, you will also be able to see which of these pages are being accessed but not linked which may be causing issues. 

Evaluate Existing Anchor Text

Anchor text is the visible text that a hyperlink is attached to. On a page, this text is usually formatted to be underlined, bold or italicised to signal a clickable attribute. 

If the goal of your strategy is to perform some housekeeping on your existing internal links, you can simply assess anchor text across your site. Here, it would make sense to focus on the pages that are most important for SEO first.

If you have a list of priority pages that you are looking to boost through your internal linking strategy, it would be a good idea to audit the existing internal links that point towards this page. Here, you should review what the anchor text for these internal links looks like as there may be opportunities for improvement here.

In terms of best practices for anchor text, Google has recently released guidelines on writing good anchor text which should be followed. This includes examples of bad anchor text which includes text such as ‘Click here,’ ‘Read more.’ 

Tidy Up Broken Internal Links

Broken internal links are links to pages that cannot be found by the user or pages that no longer exist.

Using free tools such as Google Search Console can help you to identify any broken links or 404 error pages. Alternatively, using an effective paid tool like Screaming Frog will crawl all internal links on your site and highlight those that are broken. With any broken links, you can look to update these to a similar new page, another similar relevant page or remove the link if there is not a suitable alternative. 

Clearing up these broken links can help to improve user experience and also help ensure that crawlers don’t end up on a broken page which could waste crawl budget.

Methods To Find Relevant Internal Links

If your goal for this strategy is to boost the importance or authority of certain pages, you will want to highlight opportunities to link to relevant pages. 

To find suitable internal links within your site there are several ways to do this. Below I have outlined the two methods that we have found are most effective for this: 

Method 1: Site Search

The first method is one that can be done by anyone and is free. This would be best for smaller sites with less pages or could be used alongside Method 2 for larger sites.

This simply involves using the search bar to conduct a search for your chosen keyword and should be searched for using the following command: ‘site:yourdomain “chosen keyword” or as pictured below. 

This method will help you to see pages that mention or are related to your chosen keyword that Google has indexed. This would be great for smaller sites that have limited content as you will be able to easily see all related pages. When shortlisting these related pages, just make sure that they don’t already include an internal link to your chosen page!

Method 2: Screaming Frog Custom Search

For this method, you will need the paid version of Screaming Frog to get all of the results. This method is better for larger sites and will provide a larger dataset for you to work with. 

In this method, we will use the Custom Search function in Screaming Frog to search for keywords that are utilised within pages on the site to spot linking opportunities to relevant pages. For example, if one of my priority pages for this strategy was our SEO service page,  I would want the crawler to search all pages on my site that include the anchor text ‘SEO’ within the page content. 

Steps To Take For Method 2:

1. Set up Screaming Frog to run a crawl as usual but take an additional step to set up Custom Search by selecting the following pathway ‘Configuration → Custom → Search’ from the top menu as imaged below. Select ‘Search.’

Once the below image has popped up, you can start to input your selected keywords in the section marked ‘Enter search query.’

2. Input your list of keywords based on your priority pages. In the example below I have chosen to create custom searches for the service pages that we have at Cedarwood Digital. To add more searches, simply click ‘Add’ in the bottom right of the pop up. 

Here, you should also instruct the crawler to focus on ‘Content Area’ by selecting this option in the dropdown.

3. Once you’re happy with the keywords that you have input, press OK and start the crawl. The Screaming Frog crawler will then crawl the site to identify pages that show instances of the individual keywords you have entered and will return these for each of the keywords.

4. Check the results of this crawl by selecting ‘Custom Search’ in the drop down as pictured below. In the left hand corner dropdown entitled ‘All’ you will be able to filter between each of your keywords with specific results.

5. Export your results for each keyword into an Excel spreadsheet and create a new tab for each focus keyword.

6. At this stage, I would suggest an additional step of also exporting all Inlink data from the crawl. You can do this by following the pathway: ‘Bulk Export’ → ‘Links’ → ‘All Inlinks’ in the top menu. 

This will allow you to evaluate which of the Custom Search pages already include an internal link to your chosen page. To cross reference your Custom Search results against the Inlink data, add a tab to your spreadsheet that includes the copied Inlink data and simply filter by the chosen page and cross reference using a formula such as VLOOKUP. 

Tip: Inlink data will also include internal links from the main navigation menu so I would suggest that you filter the data just to include links found in the content. 

7. After cross referencing your data, you should now be left with a list of pages that include the relevant anchor text and do not currently include an internal link to your chosen page. These are the key opportunities to update and include internal links that point back to the page that you want to boost. 

As an additional step, you may also want to combine efforts and use Method 1 to highlight any additional opportunities.

As you can see, reviewing internal linking and creating a strategy for this can be really beneficial in terms of elevating your SEO efforts and there are a number of ways in which you can do this. Above, we have outlined some actionable recommendations on how to create or improve an effective internal linking strategy. 

Whatever your goal is, improving link signals throughout your website might just be the perfect place to start when thinking about your next SEO strategy. Above all, a focus on user experience and how they navigate through your website should be at the core of your strategy. 

To find out more about how an effective internal linking strategy can boost your website or help with your SEO,  we’d love to hear from you! 

So, you’ve landed your first role specialising in search engine optimisation (SEO), or you want to further develop your business’ digital marketing efforts by targeting organic search, and have spent some time learning the basics of SEO. Once you’ve formalised your grip on the basics, it’s important to understand how to get ahead and keep up with this ever-changing but exciting marketing channel. 

To help with that journey, we’ve compiled our top pieces of advice on getting the most out of your strategies and how you can keep up with this ever-evolving sector. 

These tips are based on my own experience as an SEO professional and the things I found most useful when entering the industry as a beginner.

1. Optimise content for the user first 

One of the most important things to consider when making content optimisations or reviewing a site is the overall usability and user experience.

Google is constantly evolving and adapting to make search engine result pages (SERPs) the best possible by including quality content that real-life users actually want to view. For example, Google recently announced the Helpful Content Update which will target sites that have content ‘made for search engines.’ It is thought that sites with poor quality content or overly optimised copy will be penalised and could lose their rankings in the SERPs. This highlights the importance of creating readable content designed for a user rather than creating copy to try and ‘trick’ a search engine into ranking your site highly. 

Old-school tactics (or, simply, bad SEO!) were more focused on trying to ‘trick’ search engines into ranking their landing pages higher. Tactics, such as keyword stuffing, and having thin content creates a poor user experience and it is, as you can imagine, not something that search engines are fond of either. It is of course important to include the keywords that you want to rank for, however, these should only be used in a natural way where it makes sense within the context.

2. Create Quality Content

Essentially, to create quality content, you have to know what the user is searching for and which information they will value most. This means relevant and factually correct content that isn’t a carbon copy of another website or one that is noticeably optimised for search engines. This type of SEO focuses on the concept of expertise, authority and trust, or E-A-T. You can help users to trust your sites by displaying your expertise in your industry, and providing accurate and original information that answers a searcher’s query fully. 

A great piece of written content will answer the user-query and beyond; not only will this prevent the user from clicking off the page to find any additional information, but if they find all of the information they need they may click on your site first in the future.

3. Build relevant links

Link building is an important factor in increasing your site’s authority and improving your domain ratings. The more relevant the links are to your site, the better signals it sends to search engines. 

Backlinks, or links pointing from an external website to your site, can send great signals to a search engine depending on the quantity of quality links from relevant external sources. Relevancy is very important here. When an external source links to your site, the source should be a publication or brand that aligns well with your industry or speciality and is of a similar nature. Not only will this send quality customers or leads to your website, but these relevant links showcase what your site is about and help to display your expertise within a certain sector. 

Would you rather have 1,000 poor quality, irrelevant sites linking to your pages or 10 relevant sites with a high domain rating? 

10 relevant sites with a high domain rating linking to your website would be a strong indicator to Google, or any search engine, that you could be considered an industry leader and that your expertise is valued. Combined with a strong SEO strategy, this puts you in a good position to rank higher, receive more quality traffic and achieve more conversions or goals. 

This also goes for internal linking on your website. When linking internally, only provide links to relevant pages. For example, if a page on a Veterinary website focuses on dog breeds, they could include internal links to another page on their site about the diets of certain dog breeds. 

4. Keep up to date with the latest SEO news

One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I started in the industry was to set up a dedicated Twitter account and follow a variety of thought leaders within the SEO-world. From the likes of SEO-expert Dr. Marie Haynes to Google’s Danny Sullivan, the digital marketing communities on Twitter can be an insightful and easy way of keeping up to date with the latest tactics or changes, including Google algorithm updates.

As well as Twitter, there are heaps of informative podcasts and subscription newsletters with discussions on the future of digital marketing and analysing best practices. There are also amazing learning resources on YouTube, including video series from Google Search Central, which help to gain a wider understanding of what search engines are looking for when it comes to organic search.

By consistently updating yourself on the newest tactics or the latest news, you’re developing a well-rounded knowledge base of SEO and its workings. This puts you in a great position to discuss changes with clients if you work for an agency or to explain strategy decisions to board members. 

5. Always measure your results

Without measuring your results, it can be difficult to know which of your optimisations are succeeding and which ones just aren’t working (it happens and that’s okay). Identifying any drops in performance after a recent optimisation can signal that a search engine bot has reassessed the page or site and believes that the page is no longer valuable for a specific query. If you’re able to monitor and identify these issues early, you have a better chance of trialling a different approach to regain rankings or lost traffic. 

I would recommend tracking your targeted keywords in a dedicated tool such as AHRefs, SEMrush or SEO monitor to identify any increases or declines over time. This can also help you to identify any potential ranking fluctuations that could be due to a Google algorithm update. If you then spot any patterns or losses in the position of your keywords, you can likely locate the cause and take action.

6. Keep Learning

Outside of best practices when doing actual optimisations and audits, it’s important to be aware of the wider SEO world to best understand it. This marketing channel is constantly evolving with new algorithm updates and changes happening all the time. It’s therefore crucial that you stay ahead, or alongside, the curve to really make the most of your optimisation efforts. The above tips are definitely a great way to monitor this!

Browse our SEO services if you’re looking for more advice and direction for your SEO strategy or check out more from our Manchester-based SEO services.