Date: 30/01/2026

Let’s say you’ve had your SEO campaign up and running for quite a while now; naturally, you’ll be curious about how things are performing.

Have things gone up, down or pretty much sideways in terms of visitor numbers?

So, the art of SEO is basically about attracting more relevant visitors to your website- yet you already knew that, right?

One of the most accurate ways to check how many visitors your website has received is to use the rather brilliant tool Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is offered for the grand sum of, well, nothing- Google actually offers it for free!

Therefore, you have absolutely no reason whatsoever not to use it. Plus, don’t believe for a second that Google Analytics is just for fancy marketing types wearing designer glasses.

It’s not, it’s for all business owners, large and small. The reason is that Google Analytics is your crystal ball, your window into how well your website is doing- it tells you:

– What the dwell rate is
– What the bounce rate is
– How many organic visitors have been received
– How much referral visitors the website gets
– How many direct visitors
– And so much more (did we mention that its free? We did)

Our main bag, skill set, and passion are improving businesses’ organic search visibility- we are blooming good at this! With 10 years experience we’ve been taken businesses from nowhere to, well somewhere.

Basically, we help businesses stand out in the SERP’s, we do that through a variety of optimisation methods. We then use Google Analytics 4 to report to clients on the good job we have done every month- for that hard work and graft, they love us (we get invited to their Christmas parties).

In this article, we will discuss the following at great length (grabbing a cup of tea is advised):

 

How do you measure website traffic in Google Analytics 4?

Why it’s important to understand the different traffic metrics

How to get your mitts on the various Google Analytics or GA4 reports that show how good or bad your business’s SEO performance is.

How to measure all of your website’s traffic sources in GA4

 

How can we measure website traffic?

First things first, you need to get yourself an analytics tool; there are plenty on the market, such as Ahrefs, etc. In this article, however, we will focus exclusively on Google Analytics 4.

Now, to set up Google Analytics on your website, you will need to add a Google Analytics tracking code. Therefore, if you don’t know how to do this, we recommend asking the web developer to do it for you. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes, and it’s a lot better than having that expression written across your face, of “oh no”, where has the homepage gone if you do make a mistake adding code to the header section!

The good news is that if you have a WordPress website, well, it’s a piece of cake to set up. There are actually free WordPress plugins that help you and actually walk you through the entire process of how to do this.

 

But what is this Google Analytics tool actually used for?

Well, a whole host of stuff, such as:

Page views

Telling you, well, umm, how many page views each page and blog post has received.

Time on page

How long have you kept the average shopper on your website, or have you bored them to death, and they have quickly left?

Conversions

How many of those visitors actually converted, or did something that you want? Such as opening their wallet and making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or entering their phone number to get a call back.

 

How does Google Analytics describe customers?

Well, shoppers can be broadly split into three main categories:

• Users
• Sessions
• Engaged Sessions
• What is a session?

Google Analytics defines a session as the time someone spends on a page until they leave (i.e., “exit”).

The last page they are on is called, therefore, it is referred to as the “exit page”; a session can also end if the user has been inactive for 30 minutes.

They could have therefore popped out for a coffee, or the copywriter’s writing style has bored them to death so that they could be taking a nap on the keyboard? Therefore they have exited, because well they are inactive or now asleep.

 

What exactly is an engaged session?

An engaged session is when a shopper stays on your website for at least 10 seconds.

An engaged session is also when a shopper has viewed at least two pages.

Now, this is important for search engine optimisation because it shows Google’s algorithm that you have more engaged shoppers when they stay around longer.

They are therefore not all leaving the landing page straightaway, which is causing an increased bounce rate.

 

What are the different types of web traffic?

There are many ways a shopper can find a website; these are classified as “direct traffic”, “referral traffic”, and “organic traffic”.

 

What does organic search traffic mean?

Organic search traffic is what we specialise in at our SEO agency—the main bulk of the results on Google, well, they’re the organic results.

Therefore, for example, when you scroll past the Google Adwords and the Google Map results (at the top of the fold), you have a long list of organic results beneath those in the SERP’s.

Now businesses fiercely compete for this space, well, because sometimes it can mean the difference between millions of pounds in revenue for some companies. So, whether you rank 1st, 2nd, or 3rd organically really and truly matters.

Therefore, businesses use Google Analytics to measure the organic search traffic.

 

What does direct traffic mean?

Well, direct traffic means shoppers are typing the URL directly into their web browsers. Now this could be because, for example, you are standing at the bus stop, and a bright illuminated sign in front of you is telling them, “join the gym”, visit here for your first month free! So, you type the URL directly into the mobile phone browser.

Alternatively, it could mean people know your business, perhaps they have bought from you before.

Therefore rather than using a search engine to find it, they type the URL directly into Google Chrome, for example.

 

Referral traffic- what is this?

In your Google Analytics account, there will be a section for “referral traffic”.

It’s worth checking this out, as it shows you how many people are following backlinks and links from AI platforms.
So, if your link builder has done a rather sterling job, built some super and rather fantastic backlinks, they can all send through bucket loads of referral traffic.

 

What is organic social traffic?

Social traffic, that is, traffic that comes from your business’s social media channels. Therefore, for example, from your Facebook account.

How can we impress the boss with a Google Analytics report?

Go to your Google Analytics account and click the Reports tab. Then expand the Acquisition menu and select Acquisition Overview. You can then see estimates of how shoppers have found your website across all channels.

 

FAQ about Google Analytics

How can our business improve our organic traffic?

To do this, the best place to start is with some keyword research.

The reason is that you will want to gain a much better understanding of what shoppers are asking when they buy your goods and services that you sell.

Now, that was a rather simplistic example, so do let us elaborate a bit more. Often, before a shopper buys something, they may have a multitude of burning questions that need answering.

These could be, well, “I need a dishwasher, which is the most energy efficient product on the market”?

Now, if you write the right piece of content marketing, it could occupy the top spot on Google and attract thousands of people who want to buy an energy-efficient dishwasher.

Then you can funnel them to the product pages and sell them a Samsung dishwasher, for example.

Now, if the SEO team has done a good job with the keyword research, the content marketing, and the on- and off-page SEO, you should have many of these pages ranking high in Google’s organic results by now, all helping to promote the products that you sell.

Then, yep, you’ve guessed it, the organic visitor numbers in Google Analytics will increase.

How can our business get more referral traffic?

This question covers many aspects of off-page SEO; in a nutshell, you must do the following to improve your referral traffic within Google Analytics.

Business citations

Create these, but only the quality ones. Don’t sign up for a ton of spammy business directories, as they’ll create spammy links, which is a major “no-no”.

AI platforms

Get citations and mentions from AI platforms; this does involve GEO.

This means that today SEO companies and freelance consultants have to wear many different hats.

One hat has to be for paid advertising, one for organic and one for GEO or LLM optimisation.

However, the fact of the matter is that more shoppers are using, say, ChatGPT to purchase the wonderful goods or services that businesses sell.

Therefore, marketing managers worldwide are monitoring referral traffic more than ever before.

For example, are more shoppers coming from Perplexity or ChatGPT?
How do we get our business more visible on ChatGPT? These are the sort of questions going on within marketing teams and businesses up and down the land.

Okay, but what if my website traffic is increasing while my conversion rate is decreasing?

Well, this dilemma is more common than you might think. Copywriters, and well, SEO agencies in general, sometimes jump on the bandwagon of writing about loosely related topics, in the hope of increasing organic visitor numbers.

Let’s give you an example: the copywriter writes about a celebrity, trying to tie it to whatever they’re selling. For example, they visited a part of Wales; you run a hotel there or their client at the marketing agency does. The idea might therefore be to mention the famous actor to promote the hotel (even though the actor may not have been staying at your hotel, just visiting the area).

So, there’s an element of content marketing: dropping a keyword, such as a celebrity’s name, in the hope that organic traffic increases. Well, it might, but the reader may not want your products or services; for example, if they just saw a celebrity’s name in the news results they may have thought the blog post was worth a read, but then quickly learnt it’s a rubbish article.

Therefore, the content marketing is likely to have a high bounce rate.

This is why the content marketing must be helpful and have a high Google EEAT score. Then you can direct the visitor to a product page and get them to purchase from you if the work answers the shopper’s question.

 

How can we help?

We can help your business drum up more sales.

We specialise in organic and local SEO. It’s worth noting that neither process is a “quick-fix”.

Many businesses promise the world, but then sadly fail to deliver.

We take an altogether different approach; we have the best seo specialists around. This means that we can deliver, it takes time, but as the

Guinness adverts said, good things comes to those who wait.

Which means, that if our customers stick with us, we will rise the organic traffic, bring in the right customers who want to part with their dough. The end result a delighted marketing manager, that has a smile from ear-to-ear.

If you want to have a smile from ear-to-ear as your organic visitor numbers are taking off like one of Mr Musk’s rockets, then do call us today.