SEM Rush Review: Analyzing Web Traffic

Atiba de Souza: So, traffic is coming to your website, you believe. And you've done some work in SEO, and you think it's working, you believe. But, you're at this precipice moment now that so many of us get to, even those of us who are seasoned. Where we say, "How exactly are we supposed to analyze this web traffic? How do I figure out what's going on?"

There are a couple of ways that we can do that. And we're going to dive into one of them today. My favorite one, today, here on Traffic Keys. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Traffic Keys. I am your host, Atiba. And if you're looking to drive more eyeballs to your website, well, you're in the right place because that's what we talk about here.

And today, we're going to be talking about how you analyze some of those eyeballs and figure out what's going on with some of that traffic that's coming to your website. Now, full disclosure. This is a very, very big topic, and we're only going to cover a very small sliver of it today. I'll do more videos on this because there's a lot to talk about when we start looking at analyzing web traffic now.

There are various tools. I mean, thousands of tools online today that can analyze your website traffic. Now, the number one is going to be Google analytics, right. And if you don't have Google analytics set up on your website already, you need to get that done. You need to get your analytics account set up and then set it up on your website.

So, go to Google, search for Google analytics, get your account set up, it'll give you a little snippet of code that you need to put onto your website. And what that's going to do, it's going to track every single person. Now, here's a deal, any tool that you use outside of Google Analytics worth it's salt is going to want your Google analytics data, because it is the rawest data.

If it's not looking at your Google analytics data, then it's just giving you estimates. And yeah, we're in business. We don't want estimates. We want actuals. Right. So that's number one. Google analytics will give you a lot of data. They've got an interface that— they've made it better, but it's still really hard to use and it's a lot of data and you can get very, very, very confused.

That's why so many of us use third-party tools that help us to massage that data, add in more data and really look at the picture the way we want it to look at. So, can you go learn analytics? Absolutely. And I think you should and if it starts to hurt your head, realize that's why. There are tools out there.

And today we're going to dive into the tool that I use literally on a daily basis. And it's called Semrush. Semrush. And there's a link for it down below. Now, full disclosure, full disclosure, the link down below that is an affiliate link. Okay. So if you do use it, I do get a little bit of credit for that and it helps support the channel.

So if you would please do and while we're here talking about the channel. Do me a favor, hit that subscribe button, hit that like button, hit that little bell, get notifications, because if you're really serious about driving traffic to your website, this is the place to be. I'm here to answer all your questions and teach you everything that I've learned over the last 15 years.

But, that's not what we're here for today. Today, we are here to jump into Semrush. So, I am logged into Semrush here. Okay. Now you can get a free account to Semrush. I don't suggest it. It's pretty basic until you do need the paid account to Semrush. The basic level for most people is going to be enough.

Okay. The basic plan is going to be enough. Where you will come in here and you put in a search term, right? Say fam— or not a search term, sorry, you can't put a search term. In this case, we're looking for a website. So, we're going to put in a website here, if I can type. Alright, I'm not going to type. Bottom line, you know how put it in a website and you hit search. Once you hit search, it's going to take you over to this page, which is the domain overview. Now, there's a ton of information and a ton of pretty stuff on this page. And we're going to go over some of it really, really quickly. All right, I'm going to give you it's authority score and this is a Semrush-created metric.

It is not a Google metric. It's a Semrush-created metric, but it kind of gives you an idea of where you stand. For this website, on a scale of 1 to 100. Okay. This site's at a 14. And the average side is about a 42. So, it's got a long way to go. It's got a lot of work to do, and that's okay.

The point is it gives you a baseline, it gives you an idea of where you are. It tells you how much organic traffic you're getting. So this site's getting 1200 visits per month, right? They're not doing paid search, they've got almost a thousand backlinks and they're not doing display advertising. Give you more information here about where your traffic's coming from.

You see it, the organic traffic as it's grown, this is over the last two years as it's kind of grown here kind of nicely, talks about SERP features and I'm not going to go into all the details. Of all of these different sections, but what I'm going to show you here is just, you've got a lot of information here, right at your fingertips that you can just see very, very easily, right?

Even your organic keywords, how they've grown over time, it will show you what your top organic keywords are, et cetera, et cetera. Lots of great information. However, here's what I will tell you. This is all pretty, and it's not actually very actionable. Okay. But it is pretty, and sometimes you might want to look at the pretty graph makes you feel good.

Sure, go for it. But let's get into some actionable stuff in which we do. I come down here to this top organic keywords and I click on details. I click on "view details here". Which will hop us over to this page that shows us all of the keywords that we are ranking for, for this website right now. So there are 408 keywords, and I do want to say this page is geo- targeted at the U.S., you can do other countries if you'd like. And so when you come in here and you see, okay, 408 keywords and 739 in traffic. I thought you said it was 1200 in traffic. How does that work? And that's because the first page, the domain overview page up here, this is giving you worldwide traffic.

This is just giving you traffic here in the U S. or whatever country that you choose. Okay. This one, traffic. This is keywords —traffic, here. Alright. So it's actually the keywords and the traffic for the country that you chose. So you can see here what's going on and you can sort this report by any of these columns here and kind of get a sense of how your keywords are doing, so that's good.

That's good. That's a good start. It gives you a little bit more. In-depth information. The next thing here is this "position changes". Position changes. So that's the next thing that I take a look at here because the position changes gives you a day-by-day breakdown over time of— and if you'd pull up one of these here, it will show you, how many new keywords did you get today. Today, or whatever day that was.

How many of your current keywords improve in ranking? How many of your current keywords declined in ranking and how many of your current keywords from the day before did you lose. Now, what does lose mean? This is calculating where the keyword falls in the top 100 positions in Google. So that means when it says, " 21 lost", there are 21 keywords that fell below position 100 in Google.

That's what that means. Now, this graph tells you kind of what's going on and it also gives you point in times that you should really pay attention to like, look at this one. On January 22nd, two days ago, look at this, it's 64 new keywords, 64. That's huge as compared to all the other days, that is huge.

Might want to go back and look at— and which I'm going to be telling the team to do. Go back and look at what happened. What were the 64 keywords? What happened? How do we capitalize on that? Okay. So the position changes gives you a real sense of what's changing day-by-day, day-by-day in your organization, okay— not on your organization, on your website, excuse me, on your website.

Right? And then it will come in and show you the actual keywords and say, okay, this one fell by six, this one, and this one is new, et cetera, et cetera. And it's new and it's at position 99. In other words, ain't nobody finding that. Barely new, nobody's finding and that's okay. But it gives you the ability to see this.

'Cause maybe you see this at position 99 and you realize, "Oh my gosh, this is a keyword that I had never considered using before. And this is really— this should be a really important keyword to us." We want to rank for this keyword. So then, what you can look at over here and which page on your website ranked for this keyword.

This page ranks for this keyword. Alright. Well, this keyword is really important. Maybe what we ought to do is create a new piece of content all about this keyword and then link it from this page, for this keyword over there. So Google realizes, Hey, we've got even more content and maybe this new page will rank for that keyword too.

Right. And I know you're going to ask me a question because people talk all about keyword cannibalization, and yes, keyword cannibalization is a problem, and it is a big deal if your keywords are ranking on page one or page two. Page 10? Nobody cares. There is no cannibalization on page 10.

There's no cannibalization really past page 50. I mean, past position 50, which is page five. Okay. So, you don't worry about keyword cannibalization here. What you're worried about is, "Can I create a better piece of content that can rank better for this keyword and link the content that Google already thinks has something to do with this content, to it, to boost the rankings of the new page?" Of the new page.

Okay, so that's what you would do here. This is how this becomes actionable data. You can actually put a plan around this. But wait, I'm not even done yet. Not even done yet. Because the position changes tells you a lot of good stuff, but this next page is here, which is called "Pages" coincidentally enough.

Might actually be my favorite. Okay. Might actually be my favorite because the Pages page shows you every single page. So, this is not keyword specific. This is now showing you the pages of your actual website and how much traffic they're getting. What percentage of traffic. That is for your entire website.

And then it tells you, here are all the keywords attached to this page. This page ranks for 125 keywords. What are those 125 keywords? Wouldn't you like to know? It also will show you how many backlinks this page has. So in this case, this page has 69 backlinks. And then you can click here and go see the actual backlinks.

You can also click here and go see the keywords just for this page. And as we're looking at the keywords, just for this page, again, back to actionable data. We can sort this by, say, the difference— this column here, and it's going to show you that, okay, personal health care went up by 23, we liked that. Okay.

That's good. Still, I paid position 39, so it's still not doing well. And so if we want to get the page while we may need to do something different. If I sort it again, it will show me the news. So here were the new ones, but then here, all the ones that declined as well. And so I can look at the new ones here and say, okay, personal care, this is new.

It came in at position 8— 82. Right. How much does this page have to do about personal care? Maybe, like we said, with the other keyword, maybe we need a different page for this, or maybe, as the site does, we already have a page on personal care. And so, what we need to do is now link this page over to our personal care page, right?

So it gives you actionable intel that you can use. Same things with the keywords that declined. Now, we can start looking at why are these keywords declining and, or do we care? Do we care? So this key— this page declined for personal healthcare providers, or guess what? This page had nothing to do with personal healthcare providers.

So we have zero care that it declined, no care whatsoever. However, maybe we care about home personal care and it declined. Maybe we need to look into figuring out why it declined, what's going on. And if it declined, who rose? Whose content became better than ours? That we may need to edit our content so that we can regain our footing.

And if you don't know how to edit your content and you don't know how to do a content audit, I just did a video a little while ago on Surfer SEO, which is the tool to use. I'm going to link that video up above, that's the tool to use. Okay. To audit your content, you got to go watch that video. It is so worth it.

It's my number one tool for content creation and editing. Semrush is my number one research tool. Okay. Alright. So, this is why I love the Pages tab, guys, cause you can dive in and you can get so much more information. Alright. But here's the bottom line. Here's the bottom line. You want to do research and figure out on a periodic basis.

And so you can either do weekly, or monthly, what's going on on your website and analyze the traffic from your website. Super, super, super important. Okay. As you just saw, which was really just, like I said, this is a really big topic. We've only covered this much of it. And if you just did, even the little bit that I just showed you in Semrush, one you'll have such a better understanding of what's going on on your website.

Number one, and then number two, you will have real actionable intel that you can use to improve your website. So guys, this is where you need to start. We'll talk about all the other stuff that you can do, and you've probably seen a ton of it out there. Ignore it all. This is where you need to start. Go sign up for Semrush.

Get the— you only need the base level plan. Put your website in and start doing this research. Now, let me give you one last thing before I go. If you thought that was cool. Remember, we just typed in a website and hit search. That means you can also type in your competitors website and see all of the same data. Now, because you're with your competitors website, you're not going to have their Google Analytics.

Like we talked about it in the beginning. It's going to be more general data and it's going to be more of an estimate data, but it still gives you a picture and a window in to what your competitors are doing, too. But that's a whole another video of competitor research and we're going to do that really, really soon as well.

Alright, everybody, I will talk to you later. Go get Semrush right now. Bye-bye.