How to Report SEO on Google Analytics

Tracking your SEO performance involves more than just seeing your rankings go up or down. To truly understand its impact, you need to see how organic search traffic behaves once it lands on your website. This is where Google Analytics 4 becomes your command center for SEO reporting, allowing you to connect traffic sources directly to on-site behavior and business goals. This article will guide you through connecting your data, identifying key metrics, and building a simple yet powerful SEO dashboard right inside GA4.

First Things First: Connect Google Search Console to GA4

Google Analytics doesn’t inherently know which keywords people used on Google to find you, that data lives in Google Search Console (GSC). To get the full picture, your first and most critical step is to link these two platforms. This integration will pull valuable GSC data — like search queries, impressions, and average position — directly into your GA4 property, allowing you to analyze it alongside user engagement and conversion metrics.

If you haven’t done this yet, don’t worry. It only takes a minute.

Step-by-Step Guide to Linking GSC and GA4:

1. Log into your Google Analytics 4 property.
2. Click on Admin in the bottom-left corner (the gear icon).
3. In the Property column, scroll down to the Product Links section and click on Search Console Links.
4. Click the blue Link button in the top-right.
5. A new window will appear. Click Choose accounts to select the Search Console property you manage that you want to link. Make sure it’s the property associated with the same website as your GA4 data stream.
6. After selecting your GSC property, click Confirm. Then click Next.
7. Now, choose the web data stream for your website and click Next.
8. Finally, review your selections on the last screen and click Submit.

That’s it! It can take up to 48 hours for the data to fully populate in GA4, but once it does, you’ll unlock a new suite of dedicated SEO reports.

Finding Your SEO Reports in Google Analytics

Once you’ve linked Google Search Console, GA4 automatically adds a collection of GSC-specific reports. Sometimes, however, they aren’t visible in the main navigation menu by default. Here’s how to find and publish them so they’re always accessible.

1. In the left-hand navigation menu of GA4, click on Reports.
2. At the very bottom of the report navigation panel, click on Library.
3. In the Library, you’ll see various “collections” of reports. Look for a card named Search Console. You should see two reports listed under it: Queries and Google organic search traffic.
4. Click the three-dot menu on the Search Console collection card and select Publish.

After you publish it, you’ll see a new “Search Console” section appear in your main Reports navigation on the left. Now let’s quickly break down what these two new reports show you:

• Queries Report: This report shows the actual search queries people used on Google to discover your site. It includes valuable metrics like clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and average search position for each query.
• Google Organic Search Traffic Report: This report focuses on landing pages. It connects your SEO performance to on-site user behavior, showing you which organic landing pages generate the most engaged users, conversions, and traffic.

The Top SEO Metrics You Should be Monitoring

A good SEO report tells a story. It answers key questions like, “Which content is attracting the most valuable traffic?” and “Are our optimization efforts leading to more business?” To answer those questions, you need to track the right metrics. Here are the essentials, combining data from GSC and GA4.

From Google Search Console (Visibility & Acquisition)

• Organic Search Impressions: The number of times your site’s URLs appeared in Google’s search results. This is your top-of-funnel visibility metric. Rising impressions suggest Google sees your content as relevant for more queries.
• Organic Search Clicks: The raw count of clicks from Google organic search results to your website. This is the primary measure of how much traffic SEO is driving.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR): Calculated by Clicks ÷ Impressions, this percentage tells you how effective your search snippets (title tags, meta descriptions) are at compelling users to click. A low CTR on a high-impression page is a clear signal to test new copy.
• Average Position: Your site’s average ranking in search results for a specific query or page. While less of a focus than in the past due to personalization, it’s still a helpful indicator for tracking visibility trends over time.

From Google Analytics (Behavior & Outcomes)

• Users and Sessions: These foundational metrics tell you how many unique individuals (Users) came from organic search and how many visits (Sessions) they generated. They give you a baseline for measuring the overall volume of organic traffic.
• Engaged Sessions & Engagement Rate: An “engaged session” is a visit where the user stayed for a certain duration, triggered a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. Engagement Rate is the percentage of sessions that were engaged, and it has effectively replaced Bounce Rate as the primary metric for measuring content quality. A high engagement rate from organic traffic means your content is meeting user intent.
• Conversions: This is the most important metric. What action do you want users to take? It could be anything: a purchase, a lead form submission, a newsletter signup, or a PDF download. By tracking conversions, you can directly tie your SEO work to tangible business goals and prove its ROI.

How to Build a Custom SEO Dashboard in GA4 Reports

While the pre-built reports are great for granular analysis, a dedicated dashboard gives you an at-a-glance overview of your SEO health. Using the GA4 “Reports” builder, you can create a custom report that pulls all your key metrics into one convenient place.

Step by Step: Creating Your Overview Report

1. Start in the Library: Navigate to Reports > Library. At the top, click on + Create new report and choose Create overview report from the dropdown.
2. Add Your Summary Cards: You’ll see a blank canvas where you can add “cards.” Each card is a mini-report summarizing a specific metric or dimension. Click on + Add cards to begin.
3. Arrange and Save Your Dashboard: Drag and drop your cards to arrange them in a logical order. Give your report a meaningful name like “SEO Performance Overview” and click Save.
4. Add it to the Navigation: After saving, head back to the Library. Find the report you just created, click the three-dot menu on its collection card, and select Edit collection. You can then add your new dashboard to an existing collection (like “Life cycle”) or the Search Console one to make it easily accessible from the main reports menu.

Going Beyond the Numbers: How to Analyze Your SEO Reports

Having a dashboard is one thing, using it to make smart decisions is another. Your report is a jumping-off point for deeper investigation. Here’s what to look for:

• Correlate Traffic with Conversions: Don’t just celebrate a page that gets a lot of traffic. Cross-reference your Top Landing Pages card with conversion data. Are your most visited pages also driving the most valuable actions? If not, you may have a content alignment or user experience issue that needs addressing.
• Spot “Striking Distance” Opportunities: Look through your Queries report. Do you see any keywords with a high number of impressions and an average position between 8 and 20? These are your “striking distance” keywords. A little more on-page optimization, some new internal links, or a few quality backlinks could potentially push them onto the first page, leading to a significant traffic increase.
• Identify Content Gaps: Reviewing the queries you already rank for can often reveal topics you haven’t fully covered. Is there a consistent theme or user question appearing in your queries that you could address with a new, dedicated blog post or page?

Your goal is to move from passive reporting to active analysis. Use the data in your GA4 dashboard to ask questions, form hypotheses, and guide your SEO and content strategy for better results.

Final Thoughts

By connecting Google Search Console and building a dedicated reporting dashboard within Google Analytics 4, you transform raw data into a clear narrative about your SEO performance. This centralized view allows you to see not just how many people are finding you through organic search, but what they do next, ultimately tying your efforts directly to the business bottom line.

While building these reports manually in GA4 is incredibly powerful, it still requires setup, an understanding of GA4’s data model, and time to analyze everything. At Graphed, we automate this entire process for you. By connecting your Google Analytics and Search Console accounts one time, we enable you to instantly create real-time dashboards and get answers just by asking questions in plain English — no manual report building required. You can simply ask, “Show me a dashboard of my top organic landing pages and their conversion rates this quarter,” and we deliver a live dashboard in seconds, freeing you up to focus on strategy, not configuration.