Find Invisible Pages Using Google Analytics

Jan 14, 2010 by

Posted by wrttnwrd

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

One often-ignored part of SEO is making invisible pages visible. When I say ‘invisible’, I mean pages that have received zero clicks from organic search results.

If you can find those pages, you can decide:

• To keep them, but work to raise their organic search profile;
• To keep them, but use more of their link juice to help other, higher-profile pages on your site; 
• Get rid of them, and 301 redirect them to higher-profile, higher-value pages on your site.

Soooooo, how do you find ‘em?

Turns out, a new Google Analytics feature can make it happen: Pivot table reports

Here’s how you do it:

1. In Google Analytics, click ‘Content’.
2. Click the ‘Top Content’ report:You’ll see a list of the most-viewed pages on your site. Not much help just yet.
3. Now for the good stuff. At the top-right corner of the ‘Content Performance’ tab, click the ‘Pivot’ button:
   

4. Change ‘Pivot by’ to medium. Leave ‘Showing’ set as ‘Pageviews’. You’ll get a new table showing pages as the rows, and the mediums (media? mediumses?) as the columns, like this:
   

5. Now, sort the ‘organic’ column ascending (lowest values first). You’ll see a nice, clear list of pages that haven’t received any clicks from organic search:
   

That’s it! You can take a look and find the pages getting zero organic clicks.

A few cautions:

1. This report will not show pages with zero pageviews overall. If a page never received any pageviews, then the Google Analytics tracking bug never fired, and the page isn’t in Google’s reports.
2. This data is a lot more helpful for pages that otherwise get lots of traffic. If a page gets 1 view overall and zero organic views, that may mean it’s got SEO issues. Or, it may mean that the page just sucks overall. Use your judgment.
3. This is only 1/2 the battle. Don’t assume the invisible pages need optimization, and that all will be well. It’s possible that these pages simply shouldn’t be there, or that there’s a problem with how you’re linking to them, or something else. Use this report as a starting point. Not an end point.

Happy Analyzing!

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