Yesterday (06/10/11) Google made the new 'search engine optimisation' reporting section of Analytics available to all Google Analytics users. The name of the reporting section is certainly exciting to webmasters, but does it really offer website owners an insight into Google's SEO secrets?
Well, the answer to that is very slightly yes, but mostly no. The new report is certainly useful, if not only because it brings Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics closer to each other, which means less clicks to see the data that both tools offer if nothing else, so for that I like it.
Where the new reports do frustrate however is in their 'high on promise, low on actionables' approach. Take the 'average position' metric for example. On the face of it this is a fantastic metric. One would expect this metric to tell them where in the search results their page appeared. But no, it is not that simple (as Cyrus at SEOmoz points out in his Analytics blog post), average position does not report your ranking, it reports the average across all of your impressions for a keyword. To clear it up a little better, here is Google's own description:
"To calculate average position, we take into account the ranking of your site for a particular query (for example, if a query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, then the average position would be 1.5)."
This means that if you show up in 2nd position and 50th position, your average is 26! Not really a true indication of how well you are ranking for that keyword.
This essentially renders the average position metric useless, although it could be a good 'yard stick' when looking at extremes. If you spot a high performing keyword in terms of conversions that has an extremely low average position, perhaps there is an easy win to be had. I do wish that Google would report on average highest position though, that would be much more useful!
More exciting from my point of view is the inclusion of impression data, which shows you how many impressions you had for a given keyword, or how many times your page showed up and in what countries. This is all data that is extremely useful in Google Analytics and I for one am glad Google has included it. It will allow you to see where your page titles and descriptions are failing to bring in clicks and will allow you to hone in on areas of potential weakness.
All in all, these new reports are interesting but are not going to change the world of Analytics. They are, however a nice step in the right direction and I for one am pleased that Google is looking at new ways to help webmasters, particularly now that the search results are becoming more and more personalised and harder to keep track of, the more information the better I say!
Image by mike3k on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons licence.
