How to Track Organic Keyword Conversions in Google Analytics

by Shahzad Saeed on Nov 2, 2017

Is your SEO investment paying off? Just because your site rank for some random keywords doesn’t always mean that you’re going well in terms of SEO. If you want to measure the success of your SEO investment, you need to enable organic keyword conversions tracking. By tracking organic keyword conversions, you can figure out how well your organic search queries are driving conversions.

In this article, we’ll show you how to track organic keyword conversions in Google Analytics.

Why Track Organic Keyword Conversions?

Oftentimes, marketers assume that if their site ranks for certain keywords, their SEO efforts are paying off. This isn’t always true.

When it comes to SEO, your ultimate goal should be to generate sales and revenue by driving organic traffic. But if your organic visitors are not converting, there’s something wrong with your SEO strategy. Either your website ranks for wrong keywords or your website isn’t optimized for conversions.

To properly measure the ROI and success of your SEO efforts, you need to track organic keyword conversions in Google Analytics.

How to Track Organic Keyword Conversions- Step by Step

Step 1: Create a Goal in Google Analytics

As the first step, you need to set up a goal for conversion tracking on your site. The conversion can be anything including form submissions, ebook downloads and generating sales.  For a step by step guide, read how to create a goal in Google Analytics to track conversions.

Step 2: Set Up Organic Keyword Conversions Tracking

After creating a goal for tracking conversions, the next thing you need to do is to find what keywords are driving conversions.

By default, Google Analytics doesn’t come with a report that lets you find organic keywords conversion data. To measure which keywords are driving conversions, you need to create a custom report in your Google Analytics account.

Here’s how to create a custom report.

Log in to your Google Analytics account, and select the right website from the list.

Then, click the Customization / Customisation tab in the left panel.

You can now click the + New Custom Report button.

Now you’ll need to tell Google Analytics what to include in your report.

To create the report, you’ll need to add the following metrics to Metric Groups.

• Goal Conversion Rate
• Sessions
• Goal Completions
• Organic Searches

Next, you can add Search Query to the Dimension Drilldowns section. Also, be sure to provide an appropriate title for the report.

When you’re done, click the Save button at the bottom.

Now you’ll be redirected to your new report.

Anytime, you can access the report by navigating to Customization » Custom Reports » Conversions by keyword (organic).

That’s it!

We hope this guide helped you enable organic keyword conversions tracking in Google Analytics. If you want to know what your visitors were looking for on your site, you may set up site search tracking on your website.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Google Analytics tutorials.