I’ve been reading Beth Rawlins’ newsletter for a while now. It’s fortnightly, it’s practical, and it consistently makes me think about website strategy from angles I don’t always consider. If you own or manage a B2B website and you’re not subscribed, fix that.
A recent edition and the webinar that followed covered key website metrics Beth recommends every business tracks. Beth walked through a real website’s analytics live, and it was exactly the kind of no-nonsense practical content that should be compulsory viewing for anyone who’s ever stared at their analytics and felt nothing but mild dread.
It also got me thinking. Because every metric Beth covered has a direct SEO dimension that’s worth understanding alongside the website strategy angle. So with full credit to Beth for the framework, here’s what those stats tell you from an SEO perspective – and why they matter together.
Unique visitors – do you have a traffic problem or a conversion problem?
This is your starting point. How many individual people are arriving at your site in a given period?
From a website perspective, Beth’s point is that this figure gives context to everything else. From an SEO perspective, it tells you something even more specific: whether your visibility in search is actually translating into real people landing on your pages.
If your unique visitor numbers are low and your enquiry numbers are low, you probably have a traffic problem. Your Search Engine Optimisation isn’t bringing people in. If your unique visitor numbers are reasonable but your enquiries are still low, that’s a conversion problem – people are finding you but something’s putting them off. These are very different problems with very different solutions, and confusing one for the other is expensive.
Traffic sources – is your SEO earning its keep?
This one is straightforwardly important for SEO. Where are your visitors actually coming from – organic search, social media, direct, referral?
If you’re investing time or money in SEO and your organic search traffic is flat or tiny, that’s not something to quietly ignore and hope improves. It’s a signal that something isn’t working – either the strategy, the implementation, or both.
One caveat worth knowing: GA4 has a well-documented habit of misattributing organic search traffic as direct. I wrote about this in detail in the blogpost I just linked to. So if your direct traffic looks suspiciously high and your organic looks suspiciously low, the two might be more connected than they appear. Check Google Search Console alongside your analytics – if GSC shows significantly more clicks than GA4 shows organic sessions for the same pages, your organic performance is probably better than it looks.
Entry pages – are your SEO’d pages actually doing their job?
An entry page is the first page someone lands on when they arrive at your site. For most B2B businesses, the pages you’ve put SEO effort into – service pages, key blog posts, location pages – should be showing up consistently here.
If they’re not, it’s worth asking why. Either they’re not ranking well enough to drive traffic, or they’re ranking but nobody’s clicking through. Both are fixable, but they’re different fixes.
When a page is consistently pulling people in from search, treat it accordingly. Make sure it’s doing proper conversion work. A page that ranks brilliantly and then dumps visitors into a wall of text with no clear next step is wasting every bit of SEO effort that got people there.
Top visited pages – are the right pages getting attention?
Once someone’s on your site, which pages are they actually looking at? This tells you about intent. If lots of people are making their way to your services or pricing pages, they’re considering whether to work with you. That’s good. If almost nobody is, something in your site structure is getting in the way.
From an SEO angle, this is also useful for spotting pages that are quietly doing well – getting traffic and engagement – that you might not be giving enough attention. Underinvesting in a page that’s already performing is a common and easily fixed mistake.
Views per visit – are people finding what they came for?
The average number of pages someone looks at in one session. A low number isn’t automatically a problem – someone who lands on your contact page and fills in an enquiry form in one visit is not a bad outcome. But consistent one-page sessions across the board suggests people aren’t finding enough to hold their interest or navigate towards next steps.
For SEO, this is interesting because it’s partly a content question. If someone arrives from a search query, reads one page, and leaves, did your content answer their question well enough that they didn’t need more – or did it fail to engage them at all? The answer affects what you do next.
This leads into…
Bounce rate – what is it actually telling you?
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without taking any action. It’s also one of the most misread stats in analytics.
A high bounce rate on a blog post can mean the post answered the question well. The person got what they needed and left satisfied. That’s fine. A high bounce rate on your main service page is a different matter entirely – it suggests something about that page isn’t working for the people landing on it.
The SEO question to ask alongside the bounce rate is: who’s landing on this page and why? If people are arriving from a search query that doesn’t really match what the page offers, the bounce rate will be high regardless of how good the page is. That’s a keyword targeting problem, not a page quality problem. Get the intent right and the bounce rate usually follows.
These six stats won’t tell you everything, but they’ll tell you enough to have an informed conversation about what’s working and what isn’t. If you’d like someone to look at your analytics alongside your SEO and give you a straight answer about which problem you’re actually dealing with, that’s exactly what I can cover in my SEO 1:1.
(Update – after I wrote this, and while it was sitting in drafts, Beth wrote a follow-up blog post that’s definitely worth a read)
