This is an adapted excerpt from our new ebook, How to Unlock the ROI of Your Marketing Analytics. Download your free copy if you want to learn more about using data to make actionable improvements to your marketing. And don’t forget to join today’s #inboundchat on Twitter at 3:00pm EST, where we’ll discuss these juicy marketing analytics topics!

Most marketers are always looking to improve their SEO — after all, it drives free traffic to your website that you can convert into leads and customers. The thing is, to do it well, marketers must have the right metrics in place, monitor them consistently, and understand how to make agile adjustments to their daily marketing activities to move the numbers. This post will show you which SEO metrics to monitor, how to interpret those metrics, and what specifically you can do to move those numbers in the right direction. So without further ado, here’s how you can use marketing analytics to improve your SEO!

Establish Your Baseline Metrics

It’s hard to know where you’re going if you don’t know where you are. So before you begin improving your SEO, you need to establish some important baseline metrics. There are several free and paid tools out there that will let you compile this information if you don’t already have a handle on these metrics. For this post, I’m going to show you how we do it using HubSpot’s software. If you want to follow along and you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can try out the software for free and track your keywords and SEO performance. These are the SEO metrics you should know, and what they mean.