Competitive Analysis With SEMRush and Summit Community Bank

  Summit Community Bank is a nearly $4 billion regional community bank. It provides banking, lending, and trust and wealth management services at 44 banking locations across three states. While primarily focused on maintaining its strong footprint in legacy locations, Summit Community Bank has used a successful merger and acquisition strategy to encourage steady growth over the last six years. As it continues to grow in new markets, new opportunities bring new, diverse challenges, including exploring new peers and competitors, expanding brand awareness, and capturing market share. In the digital landscape, competitive analysis is especially important when it comes to optimizing one of an organization’s most valuable online resources, its website.  Competitive analysis, as SEMrush notes, can help benchmark a business’ current SEO performance, identify areas of improvement in SEO strategy, reveal any competitor gaps or weaknesses, and discover competitors' winning strategies (Sl...
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How Google Search Console Can Complement Google Analytics 4 in an Analytics Stack

 An analytics tool that I find valuable and one that I plan to use as my company migrates toward the full adoption of Google Analytics 4, is Google Search Console. Google Search Console is a powerful analytics tool that helps data analysts understand how a website is performing in Google Search. Along with Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console can provide an in-depth look at how a website is performing in Google Search and provide insights for optimizing websites for search engines (Vanhee, 2022). 

According to SEMRush, Google dominates the worldwide market share of search except in China and Russia, with almost 83% of the United States’ desktop search traffic coming from Google Search (2021), and as of September 2022, SimilarWeb reports that Google is still ranked as the most popular website in the world (SimliarWeb, 2022). Even with how search is changing with privacy concerns, and with the younger generations increasingly searching on mobile devices and with other apps such as YouTube and TikTok (Huang, 2022),  Google Search still remains the primary way that people search online. For a marketer, using a tool like Google Search Console is invaluable because being able to see how a website is performing in search, what search terms were used to bring a user to a site, and what they saw in search results, are all important metrics that can be used for optimization.

Search Engine Journal reports that in July 2022, Google released an update to Google Analytics 4 that allows its properties to be compatible with insights from Search Console, something that was previously unavailable up until this year (Southern, 2022). AnalyticsMania further confirms that there are a number of Google Search Console dimensions and metrics that are available for import to Google Analytics 4 including search queries, landing pages, devices, and countries, as well as engagement rate, engaged sessions, conversions, users, organic search clicks, impressions, CTR, and average search position as metrics.  It is noted, however, that as with other data tool migrations to Google Analytics 4, there are some discrepancies with the mapping of this data in relation to how it appears in the Google Analytics 4 reporting (Fedorovicious, 2022). Other discrepancies are also mentioned by Google Analytics Help on its Google Search Console integration page for Google Analytics 4, and it specifically lists other caveats, limits, and availability concerns that data analysts will need to consider when connecting their data streams with Google Search Console including: 

  • Search Console reports are unpublished by default on Google Analytics 4 and must be enabled manually

  • Analysts must select the correct web data stream when a link is created between Search Console and Google Analytics 4 and changing the data stream will change the data ranges for reporting

  • Only one web data stream can be connected to a Search Console property and a Google Analytics 4 property can have only one data stream connected to a Search Console property.

  • Search Console reports in Google Analytics 4 do not support the time series chart.

  • Depending on when the data stream is created and when verification is completed determines when data will be available.

  • It takes up to 48 hours for Search Console data to show up in Google Analytics 4 Search Console reports (Analytics Help, n.d).

And although “organic search query” is a dimension that can be pulled into Google Analytics 4 reporting from Google Search Console, Google Analytics does not support search keyword reporting on its own. Understanding which keywords your website is ranking in Google’s SERPs is another example where Search Console can provide incredible insight that complements Google Analytics 4, and can easily show, in-depth, how those terms are actually ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to other search terms (Vanhee, 2022). Under Search Console’s Performance report, data analysts are able to see the specific search queries that led users to your site, as well as sort them based on performance, and filter them based on specific details like page, time period, device, search appearance, and search type (Vanhee, 2022). While some of these insights are able to be linked to Google Analytics, I prefer to use Google Search Console independently of Google Analytics when I’m assessing keyword data. 

Optimize Smart gives specific examples of when having a Google Search Console account linked to Google Analytics 4 can provide value for marketers showing that  “you can identify landing pages on your website that have good clickthrough rates on search results pages but have poor average ranking positions” and explains with that insight, analysts could determine that “these could be pages that people want to see but have trouble finding” which allows marketers to then work on improving search engine rankings for those landing pages (2022). OptimizeSmart also notes that in a similar analysis, identifying search queries by landing page by CTR can help determine search engine ranking not just by ranking positions, but by their specific keywords as well (2022).

Another useful set of metrics that complements both Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 is the Google Organic Search Traffic: Landing Page report in Google Analytics 4, which generates the following useful insights: the trend of Google organic search clicks over time and understanding the top landing pages that generated organic search traffic (OptimizeSmart, 2022).

In addition to providing details about traffic, search queries, and keywords, Search Console can also provide technical information about your site and help you make changes to your site that can directly influence search engine coverage that Google Analytics cannot, such as the ability to submit sitemaps and review technical issues with your website. Plus Search Console can help marketers and analysts understand on a technical level how Google Search sees a website’s pages via the crawling, indexing, and inspection of individual site URLs (Google Search Console, n.d.) allowing for greater control and more precision in SEO strategies.  For these reasons, Google Search Console is an essential tool in the marketing and data analytics stack.

Comments

  1. Mark TietbohlNovember 7, 2022 at 5:40 PM

    Great post! GSC is an interesting choice and one that can make a difference in improving your site.

    ReplyDelete

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