Where to look, and why analytics is low
When owners ask how to check website traffic, the usual answer, Google Analytics, gives a number that is wrong in a specific way. Since consent banners became standard, analytics only records visitors who accept cookies. On a retail site we run ourselves, a month with 337 clicks recorded in Google’s own Merchant Centre showed 54 sessions from that channel in analytics. Same visitors, one sixth the count.
| Tool | What it counts | Consent-dependent? | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Clicks and impressions from Google search, by query and page | No | The truth about search traffic and what people typed |
| Google Analytics 4 | Sessions from all channels, behaviour, conversions | Yes; undercounts | Behaviour and conversions among consenting visitors; trends, not totals |
| Server logs or a cookieless counter | Every request | No | True page-view totals, if you have one |
| Google Business Profile insights | Profile views, calls, direction requests | No | Local visibility, which never touches the website |
Source: Cybrial. The Merchant Centre against analytics comparison is from a retail site we run ourselves, over one 28-day window in 2026.
For a small business the practical rule is: Search Console for how many people found you in Google and what they typed; analytics for what they did once they arrived, read as a trend rather than a total.
Good traffic and useless traffic
In Search Console, open Performance and the Queries tab. Three patterns tell you what kind of traffic you have.
- Mostly your own name. Normal for a new local site: a Rochdale shop we built gets roughly nine in ten clicks from its brand. These are existing customers. Growth means the non-brand share rising.
- Mostly information searches. “How to lay a patio” brings readers, not buyers. Fine if the page ends with a route to a quote; a problem if the whole site is like that.
- Buying searches: “near me”, “cost”, “installer”, your town. This is the traffic that converts, and it is usually a small share that deserves most of the attention.
A site with 200 visitors a month of the third kind outperforms one with 5,000 of the second. Report traffic to yourself by kind, not as one number.
What increases it, in order of durability
- Fix page two. In Search Console, filter queries to average position 11 to 20. Google already thinks you are relevant for these; a better title, a fuller answer and an internal link moves them onto page one, and the click-through difference between position 12 and position 6 is several-fold.
- Add pages for buying searches you do not have a page for. One service, one town, one page, titled in the customer’s words. The keyword research guide covers finding them.
- Answer buyer questions. Each is a page that ranks on its own and feeds the service pages. The cost and how-long questions are searched every month in every trade.
- Earn mentions from real sites: suppliers, trade bodies, clients, local press. They bring some direct traffic and they make everything above rank faster.
- Keep the site fast and stable. Google measures it, and slow pages lose the visitors that do arrive.
- Adverts, when the site converts. Instant, controllable, and gone when you stop paying. Never first.
What the increase looks like on a real site
Beds.ie, a store with around 17,000 products, is the largest example we can publish because every figure is in Search Console. Between April and August 2026, full calendar months: clicks from 672 to 7,781, impressions from 38,608 to 282,069, and the number of distinct searches the site appeared for from 5,189 to 24,054.
The order the numbers moved in is the useful part. Impressions and the query count rose first, as pages became reachable and re-evaluated. Average position across the catalogue improved next, from 17.4 to 12.2. Clicks came last and steepest. If you are trying to increase traffic and clicks have not moved after six weeks, look at impressions and query count; if those are rising, the clicks are coming.
What does not increase it, despite the sales pitch
- Posting on social media about your business. It reaches people who already follow you. Useful for retention, weak for new traffic, and none of it is searchable.
- Buying traffic packages or “visitors”. Bots, or people paid to click. It inflates analytics and converts nobody.
- Bought links and directory blasts. Google’s spam policies name these, and the sites doing it have the referring-domain profile to prove it did not work.
- Publishing thin pages for every town in the county. Google’s systems treat near-duplicate location pages as low value, and they compete with each other.
- Redesigning the site. A redesign changes how the site looks; traffic comes from what the pages say and whether Google can reach them. The redesign guide sets out when it is and is not the answer.
