5 things your website data reveals that agencies typically hide
Most business owners genuinely don’t know if their website works. Not vaguely, literally: how many visitors it gets, where those visitors actually come from, or whether the marketing spend going toward it is doing anything at all. That gap in knowledge isn’t a small thing. It’s exactly what a dodgy agency, or a junior staff member with no real oversight, relies on to keep an underperforming contract running month after month.
Every piece of data in this article is free, comes directly from Google, and takes minutes to check. You don’t need to be technical. You need to know what to look for, and what it should honestly be telling you.
1. Your keyword ranking data, in Google Search Console
Google Search Console shows exactly what search terms your website ranks for, how each page performs, and any errors stopping Google from reading your site properly. You don’t need SEMrush, Moz or Ahrefs for this, Google gives it to you directly, for free.
Don’t fall into the trap of only checking whether you rank for your own business name. That only tells you whether people who already know you can find you. What actually matters is whether you show up for the products or services you sell, to people who’ve never heard of you.
For an important phrase that doesn’t include your brand name, a click-through rate above 5% is a reasonable sign things are working. Anything appearing at position 10 or lower sits on page two of Google, and more than 90% of clicks happen on page one. If a phrase is climbing in impressions but not clicks, or vice versa, that gap is worth investigating, not ignoring.
In this example from my own photography business, La Lente, the site achieved 54 clicks for “bridal shower photography” at an average position of 8.5 from 1,256 impressions, a national result for what’s actually a Sydney-based business. Compare that to “birthday photography sydney,” where the site ranks position 2 on average despite lower raw volume, a far more relevant, locally targeted result. Volume alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Relevance does.
2. Basic visitor numbers, in Google Analytics
Total visitors, bounce rate (how many people leave almost immediately), and average time on site are the starting point. On their own they don’t tell you much, but together they start to show whether people are genuinely engaging or just passing through.
3. Where your traffic actually comes from
This is the single most commonly hidden or misrepresented data point I see in agency and freelancer reporting. Organic search, social media, paid advertising, direct traffic, and referral links from other sites are all distinct sources, and each behaves differently. If a report only shows a total visitor number without breaking down where they came from, that’s a real gap, not a simplification.
4. Where your visitors are actually located, and what device they're on
If your business serves Sydney and half your traffic is from overseas, that traffic isn’t doing anything for you, no matter how impressive the total number looks. I’ve seen accounts where more than 50% of reported traffic came from the United States for a business that only serves Australian customers. Device matters too: if 80% of your visitors are on mobile, and your site isn’t genuinely mobile-friendly, that’s a conversion problem hiding behind a traffic number that looks fine.
5. What pages people actually look at
Ranking well and getting traffic means nothing if visitors aren’t looking at the pages that actually lead to an enquiry. This is the data that tells you what to build more of, and what to fix or remove.
Why this matters more now than it ever did
This article was first written in 2022, when the traffic sources worth checking were organic search, paid ads, social, and direct. That list has gotten longer, and more confusing, since. AI Overviews and AI search tools are now a genuinely separate channel, one that behaves differently to traditional organic search and needs to be tracked as its own category, not lumped into a generic “organic” number. Add social media, referral traffic, and paid channels on top, and a business owner now has more places for the real picture to get lost, whether that’s through genuine complexity or someone deliberately keeping the reporting vague.
More channels doesn’t mean more confusion is acceptable. It means the opposite: with this many sources feeding into a website, knowing which ones are actually working, and which ones a report is quietly not breaking out, matters more than it did when there were only two or three to check.
10 signs your current setup, or your agency, isn't being straight with you
- Google Analytics was never actually set up
- A report shows overall traffic with no detail on where it came from
- The sitemap has errors or broken links nobody’s mentioned
- The site ranks for your brand name but not your actual products or services
- There’s no meaningful traffic to the site at all
- Reports show visitor numbers but nothing about behaviour, which is exactly where problems hide
- Visitor location is never shown or discussed
- SEO work is targeting keywords with barely any real search volume
- The sitemap was never submitted to Google
- Typing your own business name into Google and seeing yourself at number one is treated as proof the SEO is working (it isn’t)
When it's not just underperformance, it's fabrication
Three real examples from client audits show how far this can go.
- A B2B business had spent 18 months and close to $30,000 in retainer fees with an SEO agency. My audit, detailed in a fifty-page report, found more than 50% of their “traffic” was coming from the United States for a business that only sold to Australian customers and that traffic had a 96% bounce rate with an average visit length of 2 seconds, not remotely consistent with a real human visitor.
Over 3,000 backlinks had been set up from low-quality US directories specifically to generate this fake traffic.
The agency’s monthly reports never broke out traffic source at all, so the client had no way of knowing most of what they were being shown wasn’t real. Within 6 months of fixing it, the business saw its first genuine organic search growth in 3 years, and more than 200 tracked leads followed.
- An ecommerce store owner had thousands of monthly visitors showing in her reports and almost no sales. She’d used an agency her husband’s corporate business had worked with, which built the site then referred her to a freelance SEO consultant.
My audit found the site had no genuinely unique or deep content, more than 6,000 backlinks from very poor-quality websites, and that following those backlinks led to blank, contentless pages.
Critically, the reporting she’d been given didn’t come from Google at all, it came from a third-party app and a Word document, which meant there was no way for her to independently check any of it herself. I helped her put together the real data so she could present it back to the agency directly.
After cleaning up the toxic backlink profile, organic clicks grew 7x and sales increased 84%, without a single other change being made.
- A roofing business was spending $40,000 per month on Google Ads but didn’t have access to their own Google Analytics Account. A small business in Sydney was referred to me because they were very frustrated not knowing if any of their marketing was working. They had paid for SEO services and had a new website built while also paying $40,000 per month on Google Ads to generate fewer than 300 leads per month. I started asking questions about their set up, website performance etc but they had no idea, no information, not even access to any of their own profiles or accounts to see for themselves.
For more than 2 years their contractor held back that information and they continued using their services.
While they didn’t choose me to help them no doubt they will find another big agency that will probably do the same thing and leave them in a similar position.
If you’re not confident you could answer these five things about your own website right now, get in touch and I’ll go through the real data with you. I check the real, unfiltered data behind every client’s website, not the summarised version an agency or freelancer chooses to show. If you’re not sure whether your current reporting is telling you the whole story, see how I could help.
