SEO
Website Traffic Data Analysis with Google
Website traffic is considered one of the main (if not the main) indicators of web success. But there is more to just attracting traffic- website owners and SEO professionals can benefit from doing website traffic data analysis and understanding website statistics and trends. Whether you’re still growing your site or already focusing on acquiring your target market- traffic data analysis can aid in your SEO and marketing strategies. What’s even better is that this can easily be done with free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
What are Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
Google Analytics (GA) and Google Search Console (GSC) are two of Google’s own free tools that provide webmasters the ability to track website traffic attribution, search terms, and behavior data. Although there are a ton of options for more “feature-packed” tools that can help marketers to track these things plus other SEO factors of your website, these two already provide everything you need in understanding your website’s progress- both on the big picture and on an intricate standpoint. My team at SEO Hacker also trusts these two free tools from Google providing the necessary information for analyzing a website’s data on traffic and overall SEO performance.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics can be considered your main tool for knowing the entire story behind your website and being able to piece it together so you have a clear understanding of everything that’s going on on your website. It’s focused on providing information that is specific to what your website receives and how a user interacts with it.
Google Search Console
On the other hand, Google Search Console provides information about your website specifically in the aspect of how it is performing from Google’s search results. Here, you can find information about your website with respect to the following:
- Search Performance
- Google Indexing
- Google Page Experience
- Enhancements and security issues
To put it simply, it presents data that allows you to see your website from Google’s perspective.
Google Analytics Vs Google Search Console
When it comes to analyzing your website’s data, these two free tools offered by Google provide different sets of information for us SEO professionals and marketers to utilize. The only similarity they have based on the data sets found in their respective dashboards can be stemmed from; Google Analytics providing user traffic data that can provide you an idea of your website’s authority in Google Search, and Google Search Console provides search data that can translate to traffic coming into your website.
It is very important to acknowledge that these tools track traffic differently. There will always be certain discrepancies in data but you’ll notice that the numbers presented are still very close to each other. What’s important to take note of is that these tools can give you what you need to know about a website’s growth and how it’s keeping up with certain trends.
To learn how to set up Google Analytics, click here. To learn how to set up Google Search Console, click here.
How To Approach Website Traffic Data Analysis
Whether you’re providing website traffic data analysis for a newly SEO-optimized site or a well-seasoned website with multiple SEO strategies implemented; growth should always be your priority. Information is king. And with the information that Google Analytics and Google Search Console provide, it’s all about how well you understand that information and what you can do with it.
How To Do Initial Website Audits with Google Search Console
Let’s assume that you’ve already laid out the SEO foundation of your website prior to development. Before your website traffic data analysis, the first tool that you should be closely monitoring must be Google Search Console. Starting with the Index Coverage report.
Review Coverage Section
The Index Coverage report is where you can find how much of your web page is being crawled and indexed by Google. The term “indexed” describes web pages that are stored in Google Search’s database, which allows them to be retrieved when a search query is punched in by a person using Google. There are also instances wherein Google crawled your web page, but decided to exclude it from its database. The report marks these pages as “Excluded”.
There will always be certain instances wherein an important web page that’s essential in your strategy is marked as Excluded. These are the pages that Google decided to be excluded from the list of pages that can be searched by users. As an SEO professional, this provides you with information for your next action. What should you optimize more? Should you add content to the page? Build better topical authority? Whatever the reason may be, this is a good signal for you to know what to change and improve for your website’s SEO.
The Index Coverage report also provides information for pages with SEO-related errors within them. Web pages marked with Error are more penalizing for SEO than a page marked as Excluded. Errors such as your website’s broken pages (404), pages that are set as no-index, and all other errors affecting Google’s capability in indexing your pages are listed here.
I highly recommend immediately taking action when receiving this information and then looking for ways to prevent it from happening. Learn more about the common GSC errors and how to fix them by clicking here!
Additionally, although the data found here are not directly considered “traffic”, they still play an important role in your website traffic data analysis. Web pages that Google Search Console identifies as having issues will not be indexed. Having non-indexed pages on your website will result in not being searched by users. Which will ultimately lead to less organic traffic coming into your website.
Review Performance Section
The last section that you should focus on is the Performance section of Google Search Console. This section provides you with an overview of how often users interact with your website on the Google engine results pages (SERPs).
Impressions represent how many users are able to see your website within the search results pages, while Clicks provide how many click-throughs it received from those users. The main point of analyzing this data is to provide you with a basic idea of how well your website is performing in Google’s Search Results Pages. When compared to Google Analytics website traffic data, the information is almost proportional to each other. This is mainly because whenever a website receives a high number of impressions and clicks, this is also an indication of website traffic increase.
How To Do Search Traffic Analysis with Google Analytics
Now that you’ve taken the necessary steps in optimizing your website based on Google Search Console, it’s time to further go into website traffic data analysis by understanding how it can affect performance and growth. This can be done by analyzing the user traffic data presented in Google Analytics. To start, the majority of the search traffic data that we need can be found in the Reports section of the tool. From there, proceed to navigate into Traffic Acquisition.
From there, proceed to navigate into Traffic Acquisition. The first thing you’ll notice with the tool is that traffic data is categorized into different types. Since our main focus for website traffic data analysis is SEO, we’ll only tackle Organic Search traffic for this article.
The main indicator in understanding website growth using Google Analytics is how much organic search traffic is coming into the website. This will tell you the specific number of people going into your website coming from Google search results- very similar to Google Search Console’s method of acquiring data. The only difference is that you can actually check which of your web pages people are landing on. This information can easily be taken by doing the following:
- Add filters to the tabulated data by interacting with the “+” icon, then clicking Landing Page to display what pages the users are clicking within Google Search results
- Then input “organic search” in the top left-most search bar of the data to allow the table to only display organic search traffic
After having successfully accomplished these instructions, the data presented in the table should appear similar to this,
The data appearing within the table is now comprised of the list of web pages that are garnering organic search traffic. Since the data is sorted from highest organic traffic to lowest, website traffic data analysis suggests that these web pages are considered the most visible in Google search results. But what’s most important is that through this organized information, you can also acknowledge which of your web pages are the least visible within Google search results.
Only by acknowledging these pages can you employ a strategy focused on improving the SEO of your weakest pages. Maybe consider doing a content gap analysis for these pages and see what you can improve. Learn about it here in our Content Gap Analysis guide!
As SEO Professionals, it should always be recognized that SEO is holistic by nature. Having the majority of your pages visible online equates to an overall improvement of website SEO authority. The information that Google Analytics present, provides everything you need in optimizing and restrategizing for website growth. So how can I further improve my analysis with both Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
Analyzing Website Traffic with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
One of the most volatile types of data in the world of digital marketing is organic search traffic. A lot of factors can affect the search traffic coming into your website. Some of the main factors of volatility in traffic include search algorithms, seasonal trends, an unexpected and unchecked bug in your website, and website server volatility. And all of these can be quickly figured out upon checking the GA and GSC tools. To further expound on the importance of website traffic data analysis, consider the following example.
One of our informational websites is receiving a decline in organic search traffic in comparison to the previous period. It lost an estimated 800 users in 1 month. To every website owner or SEO professional, this is considered an alarming loss in website traffic. Since the issue at hand mainly involves organic search traffic, the best tool to utilize next would be Google Search Console
Based on the data presented, it appears that it is only expected to experience website traffic since there is a particular loss in impressions for the website. And since there is a visible loss in impressions, this would also affect the number of clicks the website is receiving within Google search results. What does this mean for our website traffic data analysis?
Since there are fewer impressions coming to the website, your web pages are appearing less in Google search engine results pages. Luckily, Google Search Console also provides data on the search queries that users typed to discover your website.
Based on the keywords shown, it is quite noticeable how particular keywords received a major drop in impressions. This means that the website is either not ranking for the keyword or that the search query is lower for that particular period. And based on manually testing all these keywords by searching them on Google, I was able to discover that the website is ranking on the first page on all of them. And a website that ranks on the first page of Google is guaranteed impression data.
Based on all the data that I’ve gathered, we can only conclude that the website is undergoing a particular season wherein its keywords are being searched less by users. Rankings are going well, but there’s less traffic coming into the website. These are the kinds of conclusions that are only possible to hypothesize on when you employ tools like GA and GSC to provide the necessary information for website traffic data analysis.
Key Takeaway
It is very easy to be overwhelmed with data and information. But at the same time, as SEO professionals, we should also be grateful that we can easily acquire them through Google Analytics and Google Search Console. There would absolutely be no point in strategizing and executing optimizations if we have no information to prove our efforts.
It’s only a matter of acknowledging the issue at hand, identifying relevant data to collect, and properly translating that data for you to develop the planned course of action for your website. This exactly represents the importance of knowing how to do even the basic website traffic data analysis.
Interested in an in-depth guide for GA and GSC? Check out our Google Analytics Tutorial for Beginners and Google Search Console Guide!
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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