Baseline analysis for your SEO strategy - Search Engine Land

Every campaign must begin with comprehensive research.

From making sure that your initial benchmarks are correct to performing an in-depth competitor analysis, you must make sure that your data is accurate and complete from the start.

• How is your site currently doing?
• What keywords are you ranking for?
• What keywords are your competitors ranking for?
• How many links does your site currently have?
• What backlinks do your competitors have?
• What errors does your site have from a technical standpoint?

Launching an SEO campaign without gathering this data is like scuba diving at night without a headlamp. You will have no direction and can end up anywhere, possibly inside a shark’s mouth, instead of at the top of Google results.

This next section will go over various data points and where to get this information. For all of these data points, we use Semrush or Google products.

Benchmarking using Google Analytics and Google Search Console

If you already have Google Analytics installed and acquire data, you can get various data points by clicking on Audience Overview, Acquisition Overview and Audience Benchmarking.

There are numerous tutorials on understanding Google Analytics, and most of the data is simple to understand.

If you are a Google Data Studio user, you can create a report to track and benchmark your data using one of the available templates.

Here are a couple of suggestions:

All-in-one Search Console template

Google Analytics Acquisition overview

Once you have...

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