Organic Traffic Insights Manual

Organic Traffic Insights brings you search data for the top 50 landing pages on your domain into one easy to access dashboard.

When you first open your report, you'll notice the Google Analytics metrics for each of the top landing pages on your domain. These metrics include total Users, New Users, Sessions, Pages/Sessions, Avg. Sessions Duration, Bounce Rate, and Goal Completions. Each metric has its own specific benefit to your site’s SEO efforts, so they will be important to keep an eye on.

Users & New Users

Users represents the total number of people that visit your website over a set period of time.

This metric is a key component of your SEO efforts because it will tell you how many more or less people engage with your website over a period of time.

New users represents people that visit your site for the first time within the set time period.

When a new device or browser visits your website for the very first time, Google Analytics automatically identifies them as a new user and saves the ID using browser cookies. When the same device or browser returns to your site at a later time they will be counted as a returning user.  

However, if a user clears their browser cookies or returns to the same website from a different browser or different device, this will count as a new user again.

Both of these metrics are extremely important because they are telling you how successful you are at generating new visits to your site, as well as how often people are finding the need to return.

Sessions

Sessions represent the amount of interactions between your users and your website within a specific timeframe. The default time frame of a “Session” set by Google is 30 minutes. So one returning user can log multiple sessions within a single day. However, you can customize this timeframe by changing the time frame that is set up in your Google Analytics account.

Pages/Sessions

Pages/sessions represent the number of pages, on average, that a user visits during each session. The larger this number is, the more active a user is when browsing your site. When trying to run a successful SEO campaign, you generally want to see more action to take place on your website because it indicates a better chance of completing your goals.

However, if your pages/session number is low, it is important to be aware of that fact so you can make any adjustments. This can inform your internal linking strategy. If you know that your pages/session is less than 4, for example, then you’ll want to make sure that most pages on your website can be found with less than 4 clicks.

Avg. Session Duration

Avg. Session Duration tells you how long your audience is staying on your website, on average. Longer average duration is a good indication that you are offering content that is relevant to what your users are after and interesting enough to spend time reading and interacting with. Much like with Pages/Sessions, having users spend more time on your website increases the chance of optimizing your campaign efforts.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate tells you how often people that come to your site navigate away after viewing only a single page. This can indicate that the page they visited was not relevant to what they searched. In order to make the most out of your SEO efforts, you should try to make sure all of your landing pages have relevant content that relates to your ad titles and is focused on what your audience is interested in.  In general, content that is more relevant to what users expect to see and offers clear navigation to other relevant areas of the website will have a lower bounce rate.

Goal Completions

Goal Completions let you measure how your site is fulfilling your target objectives. Keep in mind that goals must be set up in Google Analytics in order to measure them in Semrush.

This a great way to get a visual representation of how well your pages are performing week after week. Some examples of goals include purchasing a product offered on your site or simply filling out a contact form looking for further information about your service.

Reviewing Your Landing Pages

You can analyze the statistics for each of your top 50 landing pages by traffic (depending on country or device type) and see how many keywords each page is ranking for, along with GA metrics such as bounce rate, users, sessions, and Goal Completion % of each. This helps you determine which pages are performing up to your standards and which ones have room for improvement.

In each landing page’s row you can see the number of keywords associated with each page. These keywords are broken down into two separate sections: keywords found by Semrush and keywords found by Google Search Console.

Keywords

To analyze the keywords driving traffic to each page, simply click on the blue number in the Keywords column. This action will open the “Keywords” report for that page.

Possibly the biggest benefit you can gain from the Organic Traffic Insights report is access to your (not provided) keywords. These are the keywords that you can not see in your Google Analytics dashboard, but are the source of the majority of your website's organic search traffic. This is important because these keywords are driving traffic to your site and if you know what they are you can optimize better for them accordingly.

Switch between viewing data from Semrush and Google Search Console depending on what you want to analyze. When viewing the keywords within Semrush you will see data for your position on the results page, the keyword’s volume, keyword difficulty, traffic share and the last time it was updated in our database. Viewing the keywords under Google Search Console will show you the number of clicks, impressions, CTR, and position.

By switching back and forth between Semrush and GSC you are able to get a full understanding of how your landing pages are performing for certain keywords.

Above the list of individual keywords is a chart that shows how your landing pages and keywords were performing on a daily basis (this feature is for paid users only). This will allow you to see how your SEO efforts are impacting traffic to your site on a daily basis.

If you are running a new campaign specifically for this landing page and notice that your traffic hasn’t increased the way you intended, it could be an indication that you need to tweak your SEO strategy.

Filters and Sorting

If you are looking for a specific keyword, you can easily find it by using the search bar above the list of keywords. Not only can you filter your search by keyword, but you can also narrow down your list of keywords by page position, volume, and traffic share. All of this can be done with the filters located just above each data set.

You can also filter out any keyword by the keyword type. These types include new keywords, lost keywords, as well as winners and losers. This can help you determine which of your pages are gaining or losing positioning for your target keywords.

The red and green numbers located on the right show you the recent trend of each metric. Your default time period will be set to 14 days, but you can customize it in the calendar to be able to view trends of data over any desired time frame. If you are noticing that over the past 14 days many of your analytics are trending down, it would be wise to take a look deeper into your campaigns to try and see what’s causing this negative impact.

Filtering Google Search Console data

One of the most helpful features of Organic Traffic Insights is the ability to filter your data connected from GSC. After clicking on your GSC keywords you will notice all of the different filters: type, position, clicks, impressions, and CTR.

What makes this such a killer feature is that there are no filters in the Google Search Console interface so this connection can give you that deeper insight. You can filter out by “type” to see which keywords are new, lost, winners or losers.

Send Keywords to Position Tracking

If you are looking to see how a keyword is performing compared to competitors, you can send that keyword to the Position Tracking Tool. Keep in mind that in order to do this you must already have a Position Tracking campaign set up in a Project. To find out more about setting up Position Tracking, read Configuring Position Tracking.

You can select multiple keywords to send to Position Tracking if you want to analyze more than one. After you check the boxes for the keywords you want to analyze, simply click the green Send to Position Tracking button on the top right.

Having this option can be perfect if you are running a local campaign and are looking to see how the position of a local keyword compares to some of your competitors. By combining data from Google Search Console and SEMrush, you can guarantee that you are tracking the keywords that matter most to your website.

At any point while reviewing this report, you can export both your landing pages/semrush and landing pages/google search console reports to either an excel or CSV file.