Why I'm not using Google Analytics anymore

Emily Gertenbach
Oct 25, 2022

It may sound strange that an SEO writer doesn’t use Google Analytics on her website, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t need to. While I do sometimes use clients’ Google Analytics accounts when conducting an SEO audit, it’s very, very rare that I dip into GA data when working on SEO writing projects.


Because data privacy is important to me, I ultimately made the decision to fully remove Google Analytics from my website. Now that it’s gone, it’s a lot easier to comply with privacy laws like CCPA and GDPR, and I just feel better about my processes.

The decision to move away from Google’s analytics software

I had Google Analytics tracking code installed on my website for years by default. I figured I might need it, or I might want it. But as time went on, I very rarely looked at it. And it isn’t something I needed from my clients, either, when working on SEO content. So why did I still have it on my website?


As time went on, I continued to become more disillusioned with the level of data that Google Analytics collects. And when Google Analytics 4 rolled out, it was game over for me.


The certifications I’d gotten thus far were going to be less valuable, everything about the rollout seemed like a mess, and Google itself hadn’t even updated their Analytics Academy at the time (it’s since moved to Skillshop). Plus, an increase in ad-blocker usage across the board has reduced the level of data you can get about every website visitor, mobile app user, or e-commerce shopper.


When I relaunched my website with a new CMS, I decided to make a break and do a clean start, away from Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

Google Analytics alternative: Fathom Analytics

After uninstalling Google Analytics, I started playing around with alternative web analytics tools that were meant to be more privacy-friendly. Fathom Analytics emerged as the best google analytics alternative in my research, and I did sign up for one of their paid plans for a while. (Remember: if you aren’t paying for a product, you and your data are the product.)


There are two versions of Fathom’s analytics solution: the standard SaaS product you manage through the Fathom website, and an open-source self-hosted one for the real technical folks among us. There’s a WordPress plugin, too!


Fathom Analytics is user-friendly and great for anyone who needs or wants to see simple analytics like page views. It also lets you track campaign URLs, which is essential if you’re running ads or want to see which of your social media campaigns generates the most traffic.


The Fathom platform does not track user journeys across different sites, show you detailed recordings of user actions, or generate heatmaps. It’s a platform that is well suited for solopreneurs or small businesses. (If you’re part of a large company running targeted campaigns across multiple platforms, you’ll still probably need to use Google services—I recognize that this is the landscape we live in, and don’t fault anyone for it.)

Why I decided not to use website analytics tools at all

An old Mac computer

As a solo business owner who wants to contribute to data privacy online, I definitely preferred—and could get away with—the Fathom Analytics platform over the Google Analytics suite. I still wasn’t using it that much, though!


In my work, I predominantly rely on search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Ahrefs. These tools show me search engine data, not specific website data or identifiable user data. They aren't using cookies  to track visitors.


It’s that search engine data that really makes a big difference to me and my clients. I need to know what people are searching before they ever encounter a site. This way, I can figure out how to get my or my client’s site to show up for specific searches.


The optimization that takes place after someone clicks on a website is more conversion rate optimization (CRO) than search engine optimization. While CRO can involve further adjustments to SEO content, it also can involve UX elements such as changing the placement or design of a call to action (CTA). That’s the point at which Google Analytics is more essential.

How can SEO content be privacy-focused?

While I understand that my clients are typically using analytics dashboards and tools to track customer behavior, I am not privy to that data. What I do remains as privacy-friendly as possible.


Here’s what my process looks like without using Google Analytics data—both for myself and my clients.

1. Conduct SEO research using Ahrefs and Clearscope

First, I access search engine metrics and keyword data from two tools that are not reliant on tracking codes embedded in websites.


Ahrefs is an SEO tool that shows me how many searches were conducted for certain terms. The data includes the search term, approximate number of searches per month, and countries from which the searches originate. You can also use Ahrefs to see what terms people searched to find your content, and about how many clicks it generated. Ahrefs does not show me any information about where these searchers went online, and it doesn’t know anything about actions they take once on a website.


Clearscope uses artificial intelligence to figure out what groups of keywords are common across top-ranking content for specific searches. I used to manually pull all of this information by combing through Ahrefs reports, but Clearscope speeds up the process. (Yes, it’s Ai, but it’s not an AI writer, so it passes my test!)


The data I get from both programs is anonymous and broad. While I may know that 100,000 people from the U.S. searched for a specific term last month, I won’t know anything else about who they are.

2. Establish who I’m writing for—and why they’re searching

The next step is to establish who I’m writing for, and why they’re searching for this content.


I have my own information about my target audience that I keep in mind when I write content for myself. If I’m writing for a client, they’ve already completed UX research and understand their customer segments.


I can then pair what I know about the intended audience with SEO data to figure out the type of content we need to create. By looking at search engine results in Ahrefs, I can determine what keywords tend to generate searches by people who are researching, getting ready to purchase, or looking for specific recommendations.

3. Create the content

From here I’ll move forward with creating the content. I’ll keep referring back to my Ahrefs and Clearscope reports to evaluate the content’s potential performance.



While this isn’t set in stone—SEO often requires a little tweaking, updating, and revising down the line as people’s preferred search terms are constantly changing—it typically performs well out of the gate. All without digging into Google Analytics data.

4. Assess actual content performance

Without GA or another analytics platform I don’t have access to daily and monthly page views but I can use SEO tools to see what keywords and URLs are driving traffic to a client’s website.


I can also see if something I’ve written with a particular keyword and search intent in mind is actually ranking for that term, and get an idea of the traffic generated. It’s not exact, but it’s a strong and reliable ballpark figure.


This is the user behavior I need to know: what people are doing in search that leads them to click on a link to content I wrote. I don’t need to know their entire customer journey in order to continue creating well-ranking content for my clients.

The first three search engine results for a search are shown in a list. The first result is circled in red.

Here you can see that an article I wrote, without accessing any Google Analytics data, outranks the domain of the email company whose services it references. 

The one Google service I still use

Admittedly, I do still use Google Search Console. This particular offering from Google is more aligned with the type of data collection I do require (i.e. it shows me information about searches that lead to website clicks, not actions taken on my website). This is similar to the data I pull from SEO tools like Ahrefs, and it’s important for making sure my webpages are actually being picked up by search engines.

A list of search terms are shown in Google Search Console with the number of impressions.

As you can see in this picture, Search Console is showing me the terms that my website has been showing up for in search results. I don’t have any information about where these searchers came from, though, or what they did after clicking on my website.

Why I’m confident this is the right decision

When I realized I wasn’t touching Google Analytics when creating my content, or my clients’ content, it made sense to create some distance between me and GA. Continuing to use such an intrusively data-heavy program—if I didn’t need to—felt at odds with my personal increasing concerns about data ownership.


I feel that if I’m going to talk about my interest in, and the importance of, data privacy, I need to walk the walk and just talk the talk. I also wanted to show that it really is possible to achieve excellent SEO results without tracking your users around the web. And I did this, with no negative impact to my work for clients.


Plus, the world is moving away from the broad use of data mining tools and platforms like Google Analytics. Entire countries and states are enacting laws to protect customer data from companies like Google.

Do I miss anything about Google Analytics?

Sometimes, I do miss a few features found in GA. It would be nice to continue to see bounce rates (aka how quickly someone leaves a page after they arrive on it, without making any other page clicks). I could get this data back if I reinstalled Fathom Analytics, though, so it’s not gone forever.


Google Analytics also has a neat page flow feature that’s cool—it shows you how people navigate through your website—but it’s not essential for SEO, and I’m willing to give it up in favor of supporting better data protection.


Accessing page flow data and other parts of Google Analytics is definitely still necessary for many parts of digital marketing, including complete A/B testing, predictive advertising, user experience design, and conversion rate optimization. Hopefully, we’ll collectively move toward less data-intrusive practices across the board one day. Until then, I know many digital marketers can’t fully separate from GA.

Interested in learning more about how you can achieve higher web traffic volumes through organic SEO that doesn’t require new tracking pixels and code injections? Check out the blog archive, or pop over to my services page to learn more and get in touch. (And no, I won’t know if you click here or not—that’s totally between you and your browser!)

Can You Use AI for SEO in 2024?

By Emily Gertenbach • 05 Apr, 2024
I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to talk about how AI has evolved over the past year—and whether or not you can reliably use AI tools for SEO. How is AI changing? Kevin: There's been some changes to AI since we last spoke about it, right? Let's talk about them. Emily: We have seen a lot of changes recently with AI. I know you and I had talked about AI in the past. And at that time, ChatGPT, which is a really big AI tool that lots of people are using, wasn't able to regularly connect to the Internet. And now it can if you pay for their premium subscription. You can use ChatGPT to browse Bing right while you're chatting. So I see a lot of people starting to ask, you know, "now that it can connect to the Internet, can this really replace doing a Google search? Can I use it for business research? Can I use it for SEO?" And there's still a lot of unknowns that a lot of people are experiencing around that topic. Which AI tool should someone use? Kevin: I've been seeing commercials for different AI tools. How do I know which one to use? Is one of them better than the other at maybe writing content? Emily: That's a good question. There are some tools that are specifically designed to write content—but they actually all use the same technology that either ChatGPT or one of its biggest competitors, Claude, uses. Those two programs built the backbone of most of the AI writing tools you see today. So, personally, I don't really think it's worth it to pay the premium for an AI writing tool. If you really want to try and do AI writing, I would just use ChatGPT or Claude—you're going to get similar results. Now that said, it's not good for all kinds of writing. It still tends to fall off a cliff, we'll say, when you try to write something long, and there's a reason for that. It's based around probability and how many different variations something can have—it's math. But you can explore using it for really short form things, like an email or maybe the summary for one of your YouTube videos. Can AI help with keyword research? Kevin: Can it help me determine what keywords I should be focusing on? Emily: Unfortunately, no. Not yet. Now if you try to ask ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, or Claude to give you keywords, a lot of times they will produce an answer that has keywords, and it'll tell you how many searches there are per month. And it looks good on the surface, but what you're actually seeing is called hallucination. The AI tool is just making something up. I have tried this many times by asking different AI tools to help me with keyword research, and give me some information about how popular different terms are. They are always wrong. I go and I check these keywords against paid SEO tools that I use. They're wrong, and not by a little bit. I'm talking by, like, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of searches a month wrong in the estimation they're giving. So while you could try using ChatGPT to write headlines for your SEO blog posts, or, like I said, emails, you still need to do your own keyword research using Google or work with someone who can give you a report of keywords. Kevin: It still seems a little scary, to be honest. If I'm relying on it and it's not correct, I'm thinking, "Hey, wow! You know, I'm learning all these new keywords I should be using"…and then find out that I may be putting my efforts in the wrong area. Emily: Yes. It is definitely scary that it can give you answers that seem confident, so to speak, and seem correct, but they're actually really wrong. And I personally am nervous that a lot of busy business owners are going to put time into using this tool, and then creating content and doing SEO things based on what this tool tells them, and they're actually going to be wasting their really valuable time because it's all wrong.

SEO Trends and Expectations for 2024

By Emily Gertenbach • 08 Jan, 2024
I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss the SEO Trends and Expectations for 2024! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post! Biggest Trend of 2024? Kevin: Today I want to play crystal ball with you. I want to talk about 2024. And what do you see as the trend? So I guess the big the first question, what do you think's gonna be the biggest trend of 2024. Emily: So I think the biggest trend of 2024 is something that we've already seen happening, but we're gonna see on a different scale. And that is, a lot of first person user generated content. So you know, if you get on like, Instagram or Tiktok, of course, you're seeing a lot of ads from brands and content from brands that show people who are apparently their real users using that content. And up to this point, a lot of that has been isolated to those video based social media platforms. But Google has rolled out a new search filter, like where you can click like shopping, or news. It's one of those called perspectives. And when you click on perspectives you get, you're supposed to get real people's first person accounts, and a lot of those come from, say, Reddit, or Instagram, but it is possible going forward for individual websites to show up in there. So I think we're gonna see a lot more companies posting that kind of content on their own owned channels, like on what might be their blog now, or their YouTube page, you're gonna see more first person content rather than slick marketing videos. AI in 2024 Kevin: That'd be nice. So you and I have been joking for the last few months about AI. You know, so what do you think AI is going in 2024? Emily: Well, it's definitely not going away. It's something that people are still interested in. And companies like Google and meta are pouring tons of money into developing it. But in all honesty, it's not quite yet at the point where it's truly going to revolutionize the way we do marketing like in the immediate future. Most of the tools that you and I have access to are still using old data from a few years ago, they're still trying to figure out how to make AI like connect to the internet and pull information in real time. And there's definitely some bumps to be ironed out. So companies like Bing and Google are working on adding AI into search. But it's not a finished product. yet. I think that over the course of the next year, we're gonna need to keep doing what we've been doing in terms of marketing, don't throw out what's been working for you start paying attention to some news about AI and search and AI tools and marketing, and just thinking about how you might leverage them in different ways in the future. And I think by the end of 2024, if we do this crystal ball session, again, I think by the end of 2024, looking forward in the following year, we'll be seeing more of a direct impact in the way we think about marketing in the way we do our marketing. Content: Quantity over Quality? Kevin: Emily, one of the pressures as a business owner is to develop content, you know, to use the Content is king expression was so we hear it all the time, you have to have content gotta keep it out there, that sometimes we don't think about the quality of our content. So might that's my question for you. Is it quantity over quality? Which one should win? Emily: At this point? That's a really good question. At this point, quality should win. So in the past, like even just like 5-10 years ago, quantity was really important. You needed to have a lot in order to be able to like it was evolving. It was a numbers game, it was sheer volume, could you produce more content than your competitors? If yes, then people are gonna see you more. Now that's not the case. Search engines have gotten a lot smarter. The people doing the searching have higher expectations now, because we've all just have years of like crappy content thrown at us. So whether you're creating video, audio written content, stuff for your blog videos for YouTube, you're gonna want to focus on high quality. That's what people want. It's what's going to keep them engaged. And bring it back to AI. My initial testing that I've done around how AI search will work in the future shows that these tools are trained to look for high quality content, they're not looking for fluff. So in the future when people searching Google AI is going to return a result for them and you'll be able to have a conversation with the search engine results page. And those tools are showing all the signs of looking for high quality, not volume.

Common SEO questions (and answers!)—part three

By Emily Gertenbach • 13 Dec, 2023
I recently sat down with Kevin Willett of New England B2B Networking to discuss some of his questions about SEO—and I'm happy to answer yours, too! Check out the conversation below, then submit a question of your own for me to answer in a future blog or LinkedIn post! Does domain type matter? Kevin: One of the things I'm confused by is people's blogs. So sometimes I see, you know, .com/blog, sometimes I see blog dot, and then the domain. Does it matter? Emily: It depends. So it's really good question. And it's not something a lot of people think about. So Good going. If you have a relatively small sites, I would say and smallest relative, I would say, under 1000, total pages, I know 1000 Sounds like a lot. But when you think of a site like Amazon, it is expansive. If your site is is like under 1000 pages, you really want to have it structured. So it's like New England B2B dot com slash blog. And what that does is it includes the blog as part of your main domain. So your homepage, and your blog pages, search engines consider them all to be the same entity. Now, sometimes you'll see some businesses especially really, really, really large companies, like big international enterprises, they'll have, you know, company.com, and then they'll have blog.company.com, those are actually treated as two different websites by search engines. Now, these companies are so big, and they have so many pages on both sites that to them, it doesn't really matter. And it actually helps them. There's certain technologies they can use to manage that high volume of content that work better in that way. But for the average person who's out running a multinational conglomerate, you're going to find it more difficult to get your site to rank for search terms. If you have blog, dot your website instead of your website slash blog. That makes sense. Yes. The first two positions when searching Kevin: So we wouldn't be trying to do that to get the first two positions when someone's searching, is that why we would want to have the blog is kind of a separate entity? Emily: So if you if you're a really big company, and you have the blog and a separate entity, then yes, you could wind up getting the first two positions, because you do technically have two websites, the likelihood of that happening is getting slimmer and slimmer because search engines are getting smarter about figuring out when two sites are owned by the same company. But, you know, that's something that I expect might change some more in the future. But right now, that's what could happen. Backlinks and how they work today Kevin: I got a question about backlinks. Cuz I'm dating myself a little bit. I remember 10 years ago, that was the thing, you know, hey, Emily, put it back link to my website, I'll put a backlink to yours. Whether it was websites like hey, these this list of all my friends and it was 30 or 40 backlinks they're valuable is that is a really as important as we thought it was Emily: 10 years ago, totally right. That was a big thing. I remember having to do that for websites I worked for. And at that time, that was a big thing that was really important. Now, it's less so you know? I get messages on LinkedIn, sometimes from people saying that they're backlink experts, and they can help me get lots of backlinks to my site. Working with those folks can actually hurt your site more than help it in the long run. Because the only kinds of backlinks that are really good for your website today in this year, are ones that come about through more of a public relations exercise. So if you're paying someone to just make sure you get links in a lot of pages, search engines are wise to that they know what's up, they're gonna figure out what they're doing. They're gonna be like, hold on, went from having like 100 backlinks to now 15,000. What what is going on here? Something's not right. So what you want to do is, you know, backlinks are great, but you only want to get them from people you really know like, you give me a site back up on your website, you give me a link back to my web page. And that's great because we know each other, and we're associated with each other. Sometimes I answer questions from journalists and bloggers, and these aren't my answers go into articles posted around the internet. Those are valuable backlinks because I was engaged in that process. If a news site wants to link back to you, great, if a big company loves what you do, and you work with them, and they want to link back to you also great, but you don't have to take time out of your day to try to seek them out. Only focus on the ones that come naturally. What does is mean Google is crawling my site? Kevin: You use an expression that Google is going to crawl my site, and I go okay, okay, no idea what that means. What does it mean? Emily: Okay, well, you know, how we call the Internet, or at least he used to call the Internet, the World Wide Web. So think of a spider web. Google has these little, I say little they're not really real entities, but they are software programs called bots, crawl bots, and they go out onto the internet and they figure out what web pages exist, how they relate to certain topics, how they relate to each other. So we call it crawling. Because back when we called it the World Wide Web, the idea was that these bots were like little spiders that would crawl out on the spider web and collect this information, just like a real spider might collect bugs in its web. That term has persisted today, even though we don't say a world wide web as much. So what happens is, these crawl bots or spiders go out and they start with a link. And then they go to the next link and the next link, and then they jump over here and look at a new topic. And they map how all sorts of information fits together. So search engines know that you and I know each other because I'm linked on your website. And I now share these videos that we do on my website. So it's making those kinds of connections, we now have a string of the web drawn between us. But going back to my previous answer, once again, you don't have to worry about amassing the most possible web the most possible connections, you just want to get really strong ones that's based on people you know, and by talking about topics that you're an expert in.
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