Reading your Analytics

Search Console tells you how people find you. Analytics tells you what happens after they arrive — and the gap between those two is usually where the work is.

What’s on the screen

With Analytics connected, this screen shows visitor behaviour for the pages that matter: sessions, engagement rate, bounce rate and average time on page, sorted so the highest-traffic pages come first.

It isn’t a replacement for the Analytics interface. It’s the slice that’s relevant to SEO work, sitting next to the issues on the same pages.

The metrics that matter

Engagement rate — the share of sessions where someone actually did something: stayed a while, scrolled, clicked. More useful than raw sessions.
Bounce rate — sessions where they left without engaging. High bounce on an informational page can be fine; high bounce on a product page rarely is.
Average engagement time — how long people stayed. Compare against content length rather than an absolute target.

Landing pages

The landing-page view is the most actionable part. A page with high impressions in Search Console and high bounce in Analytics is telling you something specific: people find it, click it, and it doesn’t deliver what the title promised.

That’s usually a content problem rather than a technical one — and it’s exactly the kind of thing no automated fix should attempt on your behalf.

The two checks it powers

Analytics data feeds two of the 46 checks:

High Bounce Rate Pages — flags pages losing visitors immediately
Low Engagement Pages — flags pages people reach but don’t interact with

Both are advisory. You get the pages and the numbers; the judgement about what to change stays with you.

Reading it honestly

Small numbers lie. A page with twelve sessions and a 100% bounce rate isn’t telling you anything reliable — it’s telling you twelve people visited. Wait for meaningful volume before acting.

Also worth remembering: Analytics measures behaviour, not quality. A short visit to a page that answered the question in one line is a success, and no metric on this screen can tell the difference.

Next: Internal links and orphan pages →