How to Monitor SEO with Google Analytics

You’re putting real effort into SEO, but how do you prove it’s actually working without spending a fortune on specialized tools? By using the powerful features already inside Google Analytics. This article will show you exactly how to connect your data and monitor the SEO metrics that matter, so you can track your progress and see the real impact of your hard work.

First Things First: Connect Google Search Console to Google Analytics

To unlock the most valuable SEO insights within Google Analytics 4, you first need to connect it to Google Search Console (GSC). Think of it this way: GA4 tracks what visitors do after they arrive on your site, while GSC tracks how they found your site in Google’s search results. Linking them combines these two perspectives into one powerful view.

When you connect them, you're feeding crucial data straight from Google Search into your GA4 reports, including:

• The exact search queries people used to find your site.
• The number of times your pages appeared in search results (impressions).
• Your average ranking position for different queries.
• Your click-through rate (CTR) from the search results page.

Without this connection, you can see that traffic came from organic search, but you won't know which specific keywords drove it. Linking GSC is the key to unlocking actionable SEO data inside GA4.

How to Link GSC and GA4: A Step-by-Step Guide

Connecting the two is quick and painless. You just need to have admin-level permissions on both your Google Analytics property and your verified Google Search Console property.

1. Navigate to the Admin Section in GA4: Log in to your Google Analytics account and click the 'Admin' gear icon in the bottom-left corner.
2. Find "Product Links": In the 'Property' column, scroll down until you see the 'Product Links' section. Click on 'Search Console Links'.
3. Create the Link: Click the blue 'Link' button in the upper right. A new screen will appear. Click 'Choose accounts' and select the Search Console property you want to connect. Confirm your selection.
4. Select Your Web Stream: On the next step, choose the appropriate web data stream for your website and click 'Next'.
5. Review and Submit: Finally, review the configuration to make sure you've selected the correct GSC property and GA4 data stream. Click 'Submit', and you’re done!

It can take up to 48 hours for data to start populating in your new reports, so don’t worry if you don’t see it immediately.

Finding Your Key SEO Reports

After you’ve successfully linked GSC, GA4 automatically adds new collections to your reports library. To make them visible in your left-hand navigation, you need to "publish" them.

Here’s how:

1. Go to Reports > Library in the left-hand navigation.
2. You'll see a collection card for 'Search Console'. Click the three dots on the card and select 'Publish'.

Once published, you'll see a new 'Search Console' section in your primary reports navigation. This section contains two essential reports for SEO monitoring:

• Queries: This report shows you all the search queries that brought users to your website, along with their corresponding impressions, clicks, click-through rate, and average position.
• Google Organic Search Traffic: This is a landing page report focused exclusively on your organic traffic. It shows which pages are driving clicks and impressions, allowing you to see your top-performing content at a glance.

The Top SEO Metrics to Monitor in Google Analytics 4

Now that you’re set up, you can start tracking the metrics that reveal the health and performance of your SEO strategy.

1. Organic Traffic & User Trends

The most fundamental SEO metric is organic traffic. It’s a direct measure of how many people are finding your site through unpaid search results.

Where to find it: Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. This report breaks down your site traffic by channel. Look for the 'Organic Search' channel grouping.

What to look for:

• Overall Volume: Are the number of users and sessions from Organic Search growing month-over-month and year-over-year? A steady upward trend is the clearest sign that your SEO efforts are paying off.
• Trends and Spikes: Isolate the Organic Search data by clicking on it in the table. The chart above will update to show only that channel's trendline. Look for significant dips or spikes - a sudden drop could indicate a technical SEO issue or a ranking decline, while a spike might be due to a newly published piece of content hitting the first page.

2. Organic Landing Page Performance

Knowing which pages are attracting the most organic traffic is critical. This tells you what content resonates with search engines and users, and where you should focus your optimization efforts.

Where to find it: The easiest place is your newly enabled Search Console report: Reports > Search Console > Google Organic Search Traffic.

What to look for:

• Top Performers: Sort the table by 'Organic Google Clicks' to see which pages are your SEO powerhouses. These are your most valuable assets. Make sure they are up-to-date and have clear calls-to-action to convert that traffic.
• High Impressions, Low Clicks: Scan your landing pages for any with a high number of impressions but a low click-through rate (CTR). This is a significant opportunity. It means your page is ranking and getting seen, but the title tag and meta description aren't compelling enough to earn the click. A small tweak to your headline could lead to a big traffic boost.
• Declining Pages: Use the date comparison feature to see which pages have lost significant traffic over the past month or quarter. These could be candidates for a content refresh or might be facing new competition you need to analyze.

3. Search Queries and Rankings

This is where the magic of the GSC connection really shines. You can see the actual keywords people are typing into Google to find your pages.

Where to find it: Reports > Search Console > Queries.

What to look for:

• Branded vs. Non-Branded Queries: Assess the mix of traffic coming from your brand name versus generic, non-branded keywords. A healthy SEO strategy grows both - branded traffic shows brand strength, while non-branded shows you're successfully capturing discovery-phase users.
• "Striking Distance" Keywords: Filter the report to show queries where your 'Average position' is between 11 and 20. These are your low-hanging fruit - keywords where you rank on the second page of Google. Finding these gives you a clear priority list. Focusing on improving the content or building a few internal links to these pages can often push them onto page one, creating a significant traffic increase.
• Top Queries for Key Landing Pages: In the Google Organic Search Traffic report, click on a specific landing page. Then, add a secondary dimension by clicking the '+' sign above the first column and selecting 'Session Query' (this is a GA4 dimension, whereas the reports in the GSC section use 'Query' which is from GSC). This will show you all the queries driving traffic to that single page, helping you check if your page's content aligns with user search intent.

4. Organic Conversions & Business Impact

Traffic and rankings are great, but the ultimate goal of SEO is to drive business results. Tracking how many organic visitors complete a key action - like filling out a form, signing up for a newsletter, or making a purchase - is how you prove its ROI.

Where to find it: First, ensure you have conversion events set up in GA4 (e.g., generate_lead, purchase). Then, go back to the standard Traffic acquisition report.

What to look for:

• Conversions by Channel: The Traffic acquisition report has a 'Conversions' column. Simply look at the row for 'Organic Search' to see the total number of conversions attributed to your SEO efforts. Is this number growing over time?
• Which Landing Pages Convert Best?: In the same report, add 'Landing page + query string' as a secondary dimension. Filter the report to only show the 'Organic Search' channel. Now you can see not just which organic pages get traffic but which ones actually drive conversions. This helps you identify your most valuable content so you can create more like it.

Bonus Tip: Create a Custom SEO Dashboard

Instead of clicking through five different reports every week, you can build a simple, shareable dashboard that surfaces all of this information in one place.

In GA4, you can create custom "Overview reports" in the Reports > Library section. Here, you can add summary cards that pull data from your various reports. Consider creating a new report named "SEO Performance Dashboard" and adding cards for:

• Organic Users vs. last period.
• Top Organic Landing Pages by Clicks.
• Top Search Queries by Clicks.
• Organic Conversions over time.

This gives you a quick, at-a-glance view of your SEO health that you can check in 60 seconds.

Final Thoughts

By connecting Google Search Console and learning where to look in Google Analytics, you transform it from a simple web analytics tool into a comprehensive SEO monitoring platform. Analyzing your organic landing pages, queries, and conversions provides a clear picture of what’s working, what isn't, and where your biggest opportunities lie.

Manually pulling this information and building custom dashboards weekly can still feel like a chore, especially when you need to combine it with pay-per-click, social, or sales data. This is why we built Graphed. We connect directly to your Google Analytics, Google Ads, Shopify, and dozens of other sources automatically. All you have to do is ask a simple question like, "Show me a dashboard of my SEO traffic and conversions vs my Google Ads traffic and conversions for last month," and you get a live BI-grade dashboard in seconds. It allows you to spend your time acting on your data, not just wrangling it.