Just having Google Analytics integrated with your website does not help your site get found. What Google Analytics does is compile data that can help you understand a) who is visiting your site, b) when, c) for how long, and b) how they got there.
There are four ways that people can find your website, and Google Analytics tracks each way separately.
- Organic Search: search engine results that appear because of their relevance to the search term(s).
- Referral: visits that come to your site from a source other than a search engine. This is most likely to be a link on another website.
- Direct: when someone comes to your site because they know the url (the address) of your website and they type it directly into the search bar.
- Social: all social network referrals
We have noticed recently that there has been an enormous increase in the number of referrals from Semalt.com, a crawler that gathers data from sites across the web. Unfortunately, Semalt isn’t helping your traffic at all, in fact it is probably inflating the true traffic.
Want to see how often Semalt.com visits your website? Here’s how:
Step 1: Log into your Google Analytics account.
Step 2: Select “Reporting” from the horizontal navigation at the very top of your Google Analytics page.
Step 3: Click “Acquisition” near the bottom of the vertical left-side navigation.
Step 4: Click on the “Referral” tab in the Acquisition table.
This is where you’ll see the results.
If you’d like to learn how to remove Semalt.com from adversely affecting your Google Analytics reporting, read our our Step-by-Step Guide To Removing Semalt.com from Google Analytics.