Are You Tracking Your SEO Right? Here’s How Google Can Help

Adam Gibbs

AI-free content

📅 Updated: 26 September, 2025 / ⏱️ 7 min read

Wondering if your SEO strategy works?

We are here to help you.

Did you know, in 2025, search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for enhancing your website’s visibility and driving organic traffic. However, optimizing your site is only half the battle — you also need to track and analyze your SEO performance to ensure your strategies are practical and deliver the desired results.

After many years of collaborating with clients on SEO, at Qtonix, our experts found that the most effective SEO practitioners are rigorous about measuring their SEO outcomes. It is important to them because knowing which parts of your SEO strategy are performing well and which are not allows you to scale your strategies and deliver better results.

Let’s discuss how to track SEO performance using the Google tools.

Relax, we’re here to break it down for you; simple, clear, and flawless.

Let’s get started.

What to Track?

Primary Metrics

Investing your time in irrelevant metrics is a significant reason why many fail at SEO. Examples of variably driven metrics that don’t lead to any growth include tracking keywords that don’t bring traffic or tracking blog posts that don’t convert. To avoid this mistake, track SEO metrics that directly influence your business’s profitability. Below are the essential metrics to track:

Organic Traffic: This is the most popular tracked metric in SEO. Tracking organic traffic can provide an overall sense of how well an SEO campaign is performing for you, or help you identify negative aspects, such as a Google penalty or an increase in SERP competition.

Conversions: SEO results can be directly related to conversion goals, such as form completions, account registrations, and email signups. Setting up proper conversion tracking may require additional effort, but it is worth the time invested.

Keyword Rankings: Not all keywords will give you the same results, even if you are ranking well for them. It mostly happens due to SERP fluctuations. Don’t track too many keywords and try to focus on the most important keywords that you want to rank well for.

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Top 5 Google Tools for SEO Performance Tracking

Track, Analyze, and Optimize

Google offers a range of powerful tools that enable you to measure SEO performance effectively. These tools deliver actionable insights based on everything from keyword rankings to technical site health. Here are the top 5 tools that you must be aware of:

1. Google Search Console: Your SEO Headquarters

Google Search Console (GSC) is the straightforward way to know how Google perceives your website. With GSC, you’ll gain essential visibility into search performance, indexing, and health check information. Key GSC features for SEO tracking:

Performance Report:
The Performance report shows how your website is performing in Google Search. It includes:

Total clicks
Total impressions
Position in search results
Average click-through rate (CTR)
Pages that receive the most clicks
Queries driving traffic to your site

Index Coverage
The report shows which pages on your site have been indexed by Google and identifies indexing errors. If significant pages are not indexed, they cannot appear in search results. Addressing coverage issues will make your content eligible to rank.

URL Inspection Tool
This tool allows you to view how a specific page is indexed and diagnose issues if the page doesn’t appear in search results.

Mobile Usability & Core Web Vitals
Google prioritizes mobile-friendliness and uses site speed as a ranking factor. GSC helps you identify mobile usability and page experience issues.

2. Google Analytics 4: User Behavior Insights

GA4 shows how users interact with your content once they arrive. Here are some key metrics to track:

Organic Traffic
To view organic search performance:

Go to Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition
Filter by “Session default channel group” and select “Organic Search”

It represents the number of visitors who arrived through search engines.

Engagement Rate & Session Duration
Engagement rate is the new metric for measuring user satisfaction. In GA4, the engagement rate measures the percentage of engaged sessions, or visitors who are engaged—those who spend 10 seconds or more on your site or view more than one page. Remember, better engagement rates often correlate with relevant and quality content.

Top Landing Pages
Focus on landing pages that generate the most organic traffic and analyze how visitors behave on them. You can combine them with GSC data to identify drops in organic traffic resulting from lower rankings or poor user experience.

Conversions and Goals
Set up custom conversions to help measure the business impact of SEO. Use GA4’s new event-based tracking to set up specific actions as a conversion.

3. Google Tag Manager: Seamless Event Tracking

While Google Tag Manager isn’t a traditional SEO tool, it is a good way to set up tracking scripts and custom events efficiently without needing to edit any code directly.

How It Helps with SEO Tracking:

Easy to set up custom events like button clicks, scroll depth, etc.
Micro-conversion tracking, like video plays or newsletter signups
Sending information to Google Analytics or other platforms

4. Google PageSpeed Insights: Core Web Vitals and Site Speed

Site speed is an important ranking factor, and Google PageSpeed Insights gives you detailed insight into your web performance with special regard to Core Web Vitals. Unstable pages can lead to higher bounce rates and lower search engine rankings. This tool helps you easily and promptly identify performance issues.

Core Metrics:

Largest Contentful Paint: Measures loading performance
First Input Delay: Measures interactivity
Cumulative Layout Shift: Measures visual stability

Each page is scored for both desktop and mobile devices, and this tool provides more targeted recommendations for enhancing performance.

5. Google Business Profile: Local SEO Tracking

If you operate a local business, your Google Business Profile is essential for SEO. It determines how your business is displayed on local search and Google Maps.

Insights You Can Monitor:

Search Views: This shows how many times your business appeared in Google Search.
Maps Views: This indicates the number of times your business appears on Google Maps.
Search Queries: This feature displays the keywords people used to find your listing.

Any Alternative to These Tools?

Yes, several feature-rich tools can help you thoroughly track, analyze, and optimize your SEO efforts. Here are some key examples:

1. Schema Markup:

Schema Markup is a powerful SEO asset that directly influences how your content appears in search results. It makes your content trackable in a smart and effective way.

You can use Google’s Rich Results Test to validate your markup and Search Console’s Enhancements report to track implementation.

When schema is correctly implemented, it improves visibility and increases CTR by making your listings informative and visually appealing.

Schema’s standard vocabulary enables search engines to understand the Structured Data on your page easily. It helps their algorithms serve users with content that matches their expectations.

2 Google Merchant Center:

Google Merchant Center is often used to upload product data for Shopping ads. It also helps E-commerce businesses with organic visibility in free product listings.

How does it help SEO Performance?

Free Listings Performance: When listing products through Merchant Center, they can appear in organic shopping results. The “Performance” tab will show:

Clicks and impressions for free product listings
Top-performing products
Which search queries triggered your product listings

Product Feed Optimization: An optimized product feed facilitates visibility in both organic and paid product results.

Error Reporting: The Merchant Center will help you identify issues related to your product feed, which can indirectly impact SEO if your listings don’t appear organically.

3. Google Trends:

Google Trends provides real-time information about what people are searching for. It’s not a traditional performance tool, but it can certainly guide your content and keyword strategy.

How Does It Help SEO Performance?

Seasonal & Popular Keywords Findings: Identify rising search terms in your niche. You can coordinate blog posts, product launches, or landing pages with popular topics and take advantage of search demand.

Keyword Performance Analysis: Measure relative interest in keywords over time to determine which to tackle next as part of your SEO strategy.

Local SEO Data Management: Since Google Trends allows you to see where interest is rising regionally, you can create content tailored to regional areas.

Conclusion

Using Google tools to track your SEO performance is crucial to maintaining your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages. These tools demonstrate how Google evaluates your website, tracks user engagement with the content, and provides a comprehensive view of your SEO health. By continuously using them, you will understand what works, identify and fix what doesn’t, and ultimately improve your search performance and business results.

Need assistance?

If you experience data overload or are unsure where to start with tracking, you can work with our SEO specialists to help you execute the implementation and analyze the results.

FAQs

Weekly: Check off-site metrics like organic traffic and search rankings.

Monthly: Look at content performance, keyword trends, and conversions.

Quarterly: Perform a full technical audit and review long-term trends.

The Performance Report in Google Search Console shows what queries (keywords) brought users to your site, how often your pages appeared for those queries, and what your average ranking position was. For more thorough keyword tracking across competitors, we recommend working in tandem with GSC data and third-party tools, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz.

In Google Analytics 4, you can create conversion events (e.g., filling in forms, making purchases) and filter by organic traffic at the Acquisition reports. It provides a clear understanding of how SEO directly impacts business results.

Start by checking:

Google Search Console: Do you see a decrease in rankings or a drop in impressions? Is there an indexing or manual action problem?
Google Analytics: Are specific landing pages experiencing traffic decline?
PageSpeed Insights: Has performance deteriorated?
Recent algorithm updates: A search for Google core update news may raise some flags.

The clues above will provide some indication of the possible causes of the traffic decline and the necessary corrections.

No coding knowledge is required to use Search Console, GA4, or PageSpeed Insights at a basic level. Google Tag Manager requires some technical skills to set up advanced tracking; however, if you are ever looking for advanced implementations, a skilled digital marketer could support you.

Written by Adam Gibbs

Adam is a skilled SEO content expert with a proven track record of crafting high-quality, keyword-rich content that drives traffic, engages readers, and ranks on search engines. With 10+ years of experience in digital marketing and content strategy, Adam specializes in creating blog posts, website copy, and marketing materials tailored to both audience needs and SEO best practices.

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