If your agency has a website, you should have a Google Analytics tracking code on all of its pages. If you don’t, see Google’s instructions on how to get started here. A Google Analytics code tracks all of the visitors to your website, collecting information such as where they came from, where they are located, how long they stuck around, how many and which pages they viewed, and more. All of this data is pulled into the Google Analytics interface, which allows you to get as deep or high level an understanding as you want.

For those of you who have been using Google Analytics, or at least receiving reports on the program’s data from your digital marketing/website provider, you already know that Google has taken away most of the keyword data for websites’ organic search visits. Keyword data was a huge help for marketers and business owners alike, allowing you to see exactly what visitors were typing into the search engines to bring them to your website.

Below are some data sources still contained within Google Analytics that can be useful when creating material for your content marketing strategy.

Organic Keywords

I know, we just said keyword data is mostly unavailable within Google Analytics, but it is not all gone. When looking at your organic search traffic within your Google Analytics account, you will typically see at least 80% of your keyword data is not provided:

However, below, you will likely see various “one-off” keyword visitors that are provided. These visits come from users who have set their Google accounts up to share data with website owners. While these visits are few and far between, if you look at your data year-to-date, you may find keywords that can help you determine beneficial blogging topics:

While the year-to-date (January 2015 – August 2015) visits this particular client received for these keywords are low, this data does give the website owner an indication of the types of queries for which search users are finding their website. If you take it a step further and add the landing page filter, you can see what pages brought in those visitors:

Through this same filter, you can also see the pages that your “(not provided)” visitors are getting to, which can give you insight into the content that is bringing in organic traffic:

In this client’s case, five out of the top seven pages bringing in organic traffic were blog posts! That can help you determine topics for the future, like revisiting the already popular topics if there are any updates to provide, or writing on a related topic that you can link back to the popular post.

Visitor Locations

Google Analytics provides geographic data that can also help you in determining your content marketing needs. From the program, you can find the top languages of visitors to your agency’s website as well as top locations. For the locations of your visitors, you can segment them by continent, country, state, and city. For the purposes of your content marketing, we suggest looking at the top states and top cities bringing in your website traffic. For example, this agency located in North Carolina:

While the majority of their website traffic comes from North Carolina, you can see that the agency receives traffic from surrounding states as well. If your agency is licensed in multiple states, or is willing to get licensed in multiple states, this data can be invaluable. You can also drill deeper and see which cities within your state(s) are bringing in website visitors:

For this North Carolina client, while NC cities bring in much of their traffic, you can see that outside cities like Atlanta and New York are also bringing them traffic. This can give your agency a better idea of how to target your content marketing. If you are involved in your community and surrounding communities, make sure you are writing about what you are doing on your agency’s blog, social media accounts, etc. Are there any important events coming up in any of your top cities or states? Write about them! Help further position your agency as a pillar of your community, while catering to the audience your website already has.

Stay tuned for part two of our Google Analytics series, where we talk about using social media referrals and all page traffic information in your marketing efforts!