One of the most powerful (and often overlooked) components of SEO analytics is user behavior tracking. It’s so important that we’re dedicating a whole blog to it – and how to do it in Google Analytics 4. Because why pay for more digital tools than you need to?
By the way, hi! If you’re new, here’s a friendly reminder to read part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this blog series to get the most out of it. We’re covering all the most useful ways to use GA4 for SEO in this series, so it’s basically a free crash course. Be sure to bookmark it so you can easily reference these tools later.
Back to GA4: Understanding how users found your site is a GREAT start to SEO, but it’s not enough. You also need to know what those users did next. Did they scroll? Did they engage with your content? Did they convert? We touched on behavior tracking in the last blog, but now we’re diving in deep to understand exactly how valuable this is. Plus, we’re providing a clear road map on how to do it.
So, let’s dive.
Credit: Awesome Planet
Behavior Tracking: A Refresher
What does behavior tracking mean? In GA4, behavior tracking refers to the ability to measure how users interact with your website content once they arrive from an organic search. In other words, it tells you what they did on your site once they got there. It’s similar to a heatmap, except you don’t have to pay for an additional service to see it. (Score!)
Within GA4, you can track:
- Scroll depth (how far users scroll down a page)
- Tells you how interested they are in your content, or if they’re looking for something specific.
- Button clicks/filters usage on things like “dropdown menus.”
- Tells you how useful your User Interface copywriting (the copy that helps your visitors navigate through your website easily) is, or if it’s dragging your website down.
- Link or CTA clicks
- Tells you how many people clicked (check out our guide for writing content that converts here)
- Video plays or interactions
- Are your videos beneficial to the conversion? If the number of times a video is played is close to the number of conversions, this could signal a correlation.
- Time spent on page
- More time on a page = they’re finding what they were looking for. This also sends a message to Google to rank your page higher, meaning more organic traffic. You could use this data to structure all other pages similarly to this one.
- Engaged sessions (sessions with 10+ seconds, 2+ pageviews, or a conversion)
- Helps you measure your quality traffic over quantity. This is another way to determine if you’re attracting the right people.
This behavioral data turns your SEO analytics into real insights by showing you if the right people are landing on your page and what they’re looking for. With this data, you can better cater your website to your users, resulting in higher conversions.
For example, if you find that one product page is converting better than others, you can analyze why that could be happening and tweak the other pages to increase conversions. If you find a page has a high bounce rate (users are leaving immediately) you can investigate why and make necessary changes there.
User behavior insights help you:
- Identify which SEO landing pages are truly engaging visitors (not just ranking).
- Ranking = a lot of people land there. Engaging = they’re staying. If they’re not staying, they landed in the wrong place. This means you’re not attracting the right people with either your messaging or your ad spend.
- Spot UX or content bottlenecks like high drop-off after a weak headline or CTA.
- Align conversion events with actual engagement signals, not just traffic volume.
- In other words, instead of correlating conversions with how many visitors landed on your page (often by using a target ratio to determine success), behavior tracking lets you correlate them to what users did while on your site. This is a much deeper insight to how your site is leading them through the virtual sale.
- Determine if your content satisfies search intent, especially on informational or product pages.
- Are you what they were looking for? If not, you may need to adjust your keywords.
Behavior data bridges the gap between visibility and performance. Without it, you’re optimizing in the dark.
Credit: Giphy
How do you do it?
So, how do you actually get GA4 to track all of this?
Start with Engagement Reports
Go to Reports > Engagement > Pages and Screens to see how individual pages are performing.
Focus on:
- Average engagement time
- Engagement rate
- Bounce vs. conversion behavior
Next, set up Custom Events (for deeper insight)
Use Google Tag Manager or GA4’s built-in features to track:
- Scroll depth (e.g., 50%, 75%)
- Clicks on key CTAs or outbound links
- Interactions with embedded videos or forms
Connect the dots with Exploration Reports
Identify the correlation between behavior and conversions. Build a custom Exploration Report to combine:
- Organic source traffic
- Landing page
- Behavior events (scrolls, clicks)
- Conversion events
This view helps you identify which organic search pages drive not only clicks, but actual on-page engagement and goal completions (when users perform the intended actions on a website, like buying a product or signing up for a newsletter). This is a core principle of strong SEO analytics.
Pair this with conversion events and landing page data to understand the full journey from search to conversion. When you combine behavior data with keyword trends and conversion tracking, you gain a true performance-based SEO strategy grounded in data that moves the needle.
What GA4 Can’t Do
We know we said why pay for another tool when you can learn how to use the one you have to its fullest power, right? While that’s true, everything comes with limitations – and GA4 is no exception. There are certain areas where GA4 falls short, no matter how well you use it. Luckily, we can point you in other directions for those areas.
Precise Keyword Tracking
GA4 doesn’t show you the exact search queries that led users to your site. If you’re trying to understand which keywords are driving traffic or which ones need improvement, you’ll need to integrate with Google Search Console (GSC). Don’t worry – GSC is completely free to use!
GSC fills the keyword visibility gap with insights into:
- Top queries by page (most commonly asked questions that lead to your page)
- Click-through rates by keyword (which keywords are converting)
- Average search position (where you’re ranking against your competitors)
Together, GA4 and GSC provide a much fuller picture of SEO analytics by connecting keyword visibility with on-site performance.
On-Page SEO Auditing
On-Page SEO refers to how easy your page is for Google and other search engines to scan or “crawl.” It’s important to understand how to structure your page properly for higher SEO rankings, and certain tools can help you with that. GA4 is, unfortunately, not one of them.
It doesn’t audit:
- Title tags or meta descriptions
- Header structure (H1, H2, etc.)
- Internal linking strategies
- Image alt text
To audit and improve your on-page SEO, use dedicated tools such as:
- Yoast SEO (ideal for WordPress users)
- All in One SEO (another WordPress-friendly option)
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider (for in-depth technical audits)
- SEMrush (for comprehensive site audits, keyword tracking, and competitor analysis)
Backlink Data and Authority Metrics
When other websites link to your site, it’s called a backlink. These are links that lead back to your website. The more quality backlinks you have, the more reputable you appear to Google, making this an important component to a robust SEO strategy. GA4 doesn’t monitor who’s linking to your site or how those backlinks influence authority and ranking potential.
For that, you would need to rely on tools like:
- Ahrefs
- SEMrush
- Moz
These platforms show you the exact domains referring back to you, anchor text distribution, spam scores, and more essential data for technical and off-page SEO strategies.
GA4: Your SEO Superpower
Credit: Giphy
GA4 is like your performance dashboard. It tells you where you’re doing it right and where you’re doing it wrong. But it won’t tell you how to fix it.
If this all sounds mostly like gibberish to you, or you still don’t know how to go about fixing these issues, we get it. SEO analytics can be a fulltime job, and if you have a small or even midsized marketing team, it can become overwhelming fast.
That’s why we’re here. At GreenCup Digital, we partner closely with you to achieve your business growth goals – while handling and translating all the gibberish. We can help you optimize your website and either stay on board to manage it for you or give you the tools to take over yourself. Our solution packages are fully customizable to your business needs.
Connect with us at any time to get started.
In the next (and final!) blog in this series, we’ll dig into the value of Google Search Console and how to use it. So make sure you check back next month!
