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Use Google Analytics 4 to Find Blog Pages Driving the Most Organic Search Traffic

Use Google Analytics 4 to Find Blog Pages Driving the Most Organic Search Traffic

It is useful to know which content drives quality organic traffic to your website.

For many websites, blog articles are a main way to attract visitors from organic search. A user may search for a question, problem, product comparison, guide, or informational topic and land directly on one of your blog posts from Google.

Knowing which blog pages generate the most organic search traffic can help you answer important questions, such as:

  • Which blog articles are bringing users to the site?

  • Which topics appear to perform best in organic search?

  • Which articles may deserve internal links, content updates, or stronger calls to action?

  • Which posts are attracting traffic but not contributing to deeper engagement?

  • Which content areas should we expand with additional blog articles?

In this article, we will use Google Analytics 4 Explorations to find blog pages that drive organic search traffic.

The steps below assume that your blog articles include the word blog in their URLs. For example:

  • /blog/example-article/

  • /blog/category/example-article/

If your blog URLs use a different structure, such as /articles/, /resources/, /news/, or something else, you can still follow the same process. You will simply need to adjust the landing page filter later in the report.

Log into your Google Analytics account, and click Explore: 

Google Analytics dashboard sidebar highlighting the Explore menu tab.

From there, start a new exploration by clicking Blank:

Google Analytics Explorations screen showing the option to create a blank new exploration.

This will open a blank Free-form Exploration. In the Variables panel, click to add a new segment. We need a segment because we want to isolate one specific type of traffic: Organic Search traffic: 

Google Analytics variables panel showing exploration name, date range, and segments settings.

In the segment selector, select Session segment:

Google Analytics custom segment options for users and sessions.

A session segment is the right choice here because we want to analyze sessions that came from Organic Search. In other words, we are not trying to isolate users whose first-ever visit came from Organic Search. We are trying to review sessions where the traffic source for that session was Organic Search.

Since we are interested in Organic Search traffic to our blog pages, that is the type of segment we need to create.

Click to add a new condition: 

Google Analytics organic search traffic source menu options.

Give the segment a descriptive name, such as Organic Search.

In the list of dimensions, click the Traffic source group, and then select Session default channel group.

Session default channel group tells us the default channel group associated with the start of the session. For this report, that is exactly what we need because we want to isolate sessions that started from Organic Search.

Once you select the dimension, you will see the Add filter dropdown:

Google Analytics filter configuration for organic search sessions.

Add a new filter condition to isolate only traffic where Session default channel group exactly matches Organic Search, as shown below: 

Google Analytics condition set to exactly match Organic Search

In the top right corner click on the Save & Apply button:

Google Analytics save and apply screen with the build an audience checkbox.

You will see your newly created and applied filter in the Tab Settings field:

oogle Analytics exploration panel with Organic Search segment.

Next, we need to add the dimensions and metrics we want to use in the report.

Specifically, we are interested in:

  • Landing page + query string

  • Entrances

The Landing page + query string dimension will show the page where the session started. This is important because we want to find blog pages that users landed on directly from organic search.

The Entrances metric will show how many times users entered the site through those pages:

Google Analytics dimensions and metrics section.

Use the plus buttons to add those items to the Variables panel. Search for their names, select them, and click Import:

Google Analytics dimensions and metrics with landing page and sessions.

To apply these items to the canvas, double-click each one in the Variables panel.

Double-click Landing page + query string to add it as a row.

Double-click Entrances to add it as a value.

Once you do that, the Canvas section of the report will update and show a table containing your data:

Google Analytics free form landing pages report.

If the table does not populate, make sure you have selected an appropriate date range:  

Google Analytics date range and organic search segment

At this point, your table may include URLs that are not blog pages. For example, it may include the homepage, product pages, category pages, service pages, or other non-blog landing pages.

To fix this, we need to apply a filter that only includes landing pages containing the word blog.

Scroll all the way down the Tab Settings panel until you see the Filters section:

Google Analytics values and filters configuration section.

Click Filters, and then select the Landing page + query string dimension that appears in the popup: 

Google Analytics dimension dropdown menu highlighting landing page and query string.

For the Match Type, select Contains.

In the Expression field, enter:

blog

Then click Apply:

Google Analytics filters section with landing page applied.

The table should now show only landing pages whose URLs contain the word blog.

This gives you a list of blog pages that generated organic search entrances during the selected date range.

From here, you can review which articles are bringing the most organic traffic into the site. The pages at the top of the table are the blog pages that generated the most entrances from Organic Search.

It is important not to look at traffic volume in isolation.

A blog post that brings a lot of organic traffic is valuable, but you should also consider what users do after landing on that page. For example, you may want to review whether those users continue to other pages, sign up for a newsletter, view products, submit a form, or complete another meaningful action.

High organic traffic is a good starting point, but the best-performing blog content is usually content that both attracts visitors and helps move them further into the customer journey.

By default, the Visualization section of the Tab Settings panel has Table selected, which means the data appears as a table.

You can click other visualization options to present the same data in different ways. For example, clicking the Line icon will show the data as a line graph:

Google Analytics tab settings visualization options.

Here is what I see:

Google Analytics breakdowns with landing page and anomaly detection line graph.

The many lines on the canvas represent individual landing pages and the number of entrances they generated each day.

This can be useful if you want to compare individual blog pages over time. For example, you may be able to spot a blog post that suddenly gained traffic, lost traffic, or performed unusually well on a specific date.

However, if you are only interested in the overall organic traffic generated by all blog pages together, you may want to remove the Breakdown value by clicking the cross icon, as shown above:

Google Analytics organic search sessions line chart showing data trends over December.

Once the breakdown is removed, the chart will show the total Organic Search traffic generated by blog pages, rather than splitting the data by individual landing page.

The blue line represents Organic Search traffic generated by the blog pages included in your filter.

This view is useful to understand the overall organic performance of your blog section. For example, you can see whether blog traffic is trending up, down, or staying flat over time.

You can also use this report before and after major content updates. If you update old posts, publish new articles, improve internal linking, or make SEO changes, this exploration helps you monitor whether organic traffic to the blog section improves over time.

This provides a practical method to identify which blog pages generate organic search traffic in Google Analytics 4.