Leveraging Analytics for SEO Performance

To effectively optimize your digital solution for search engines, you must first understand how your content and experiences perform. Analytics is the key to achieving this. It provides crucial insights and enables informed decisions that drive SEO effectiveness. Liferay offers Analytics Cloud and integrated DXP features to collect, process, and present this data.

In this lesson, you’ll consider the role of analytics in SEO and briefly explore Liferay’s analytics features.

The Role of Liferay Analytics in SEO

Analytics plays a vital role across the entire content lifecycle. When used effectively, you can transform data into actionable insights, enabling you to determine content strategies, identify areas for improvement, and create impactful content. For SEO, analytics provides the data necessary to measure discoverability, evaluate keyword performance, and understand user behavior originating from search engines.

In these ways, analytics can help you assess whether SEO changes are having the desired effect and determine what content is performing best. Without analytics, optimization can become guesswork.

Liferay’s Tools for Measuring Performance

Analytics Cloud is Liferay’s key tool for comprehensive data analysis of user interactions and content performance. Liferay DXP also includes built-in tools for tracking content performance. Some of these tools are standalone (Content Dashboard), while others leverage Analytics Cloud for advanced features and detailed metrics (Content Performance tool). Liferay DXP is also compatible with third-party analytics solutions, though it’s built-in capabilities provide ready-to-go functionality and ease of use.

Analytics Cloud

Analytics Cloud is a cloud-based SaaS tool that aggregates your visitor data and presents key metrics like visitor count, session length, and interests. This tool provides comprehensive site-wide data and metrics, giving you a broad understanding of your portal's traffic and content performance. Beyond this high-level overview, it also offers a granular view into the performance of individual pages and specific content assets. For example, for each page on your Liferay site, you can obtain the number of individuals visiting the page and how long they’ve stayed there, while also tracking the number of times a PDF was downloaded or the average reading time of a blog entry. This helps you understand content reach and effectiveness in different contexts.

For SEO, Analytics Cloud provides crucial insights into how users find and engage with your site through search. It helps you identify popular keywords, track organic traffic trends, and understand user behavior patterns that influence search rankings.

Content Dashboard

The Content Dashboard provides you with a comprehensive overview of all content created across your Liferay sites and asset libraries. Powered by Elasticsearch, it helps you understand and manage your content effectively through capabilities like finding and filtering, analyzing distribution, and auditing content areas. The dashboard relies on content categorization to organize and display insights, so applying categories to your content is necessary for it to appear in reports.

The dashboard's UI is organized into three main sections:

• Content Audit Tool (#1): Displays a chart illustrating the total number of content items grouped by your selected vocabularies and categories. This empowers data-driven content decisions by revealing how assets are categorized and distributed.
• Content List (#2): Displays all accessible content across your sites and asset libraries. This list offers dynamic filtering, sorting (using built-in or custom filters), and includes a filter and sort selector, a filter editor, a search field, and the content list itself. This enables you to efficiently find, review, and manage content, accelerating workflows and supporting strategic content governance.
• Content Info Sidebar (#3): Provides access to critical metadata, performance metrics, and version history for each content item. This helps accelerate content management and enables faster decisions.

Additionally, you can export content metadata as XLS spreadsheets for further analysis.

For SEO, the Content Dashboard helps you audit content categorization and distribution, ensuring your content is well-organized and visible for search engines. It supports identifying content gaps and optimizing content relevance based on category performance.

Content Performance Tool

The Content Performance tool provides detailed performance metrics for individual content assets. This includes traffic acquisition channels, number of views, and more. By understanding these metrics, you can make informed decisions to optimize your content strategy and drive business value. However, the Content Performance tool is only available when your Liferay DXP instance is connected to Analytics Cloud.

For SEO, the Content Performance tool helps you assess the impact of your optimization efforts on individual assets. It reveals how users arrive at specific content (e.g., through organic search) and how deeply they engage, providing data to refine keyword strategies and content quality.

Page Audit Tool

The Page Audit tool displays performance-related information. This includes server render time, component type, component’s origin, and cache status as well as warning messages about potential performance issues. It also provides actionable insights into technical performance, which indirectly impacts SEO through user experience.

This tool uses Google PageSpeed Insights to provide specific recommendations regarding SEO and accessibility. Selecting a recommendation redirects users to either official documentation or Liferay configurations to fix the issue. This direct guidance helps content managers quickly address technical SEO and accessibility issues that affect page ranking and user experience.

Clarity’s Analytics Strategy

Clarity’s core objective is to deliver personalized experiences and ensure high discoverability. To achieve this, Clarity can focus their analytics strategy on maximizing data capture within Liferay Analytics Cloud. They can synchronize relevant user segments, custom user attributes, and detailed content interaction data. By continuously analyzing their workflow data and leveraging insights from Analytics Cloud, Clarity can refine their SEO strategies.

Conclusion

Liferay provides analytics tools to help you understand how your content is performing. Creating data-driven content helps ensure your website is impactful and directly supports your business goals.

Next, you’ll use some of these tools to improve Clarity’s SEO implementation.