Analytics & rankings

What this is

SeoKestrel does not run analytics scripts or search scrapes from your browser. Instead, a nightly pipeline pulls yesterday’s data from each source into SeoKestrel’s own EU database, and every chart reads from that store. Traffic arrives from Plausible (an EU privacy-first analytics service that collects aggregate visit data only) and rankings arrive from DataForSEO (an SEO data provider based in Cyprus, in the EU, working exclusively on public web data — see the sub-processors page).

Before you start

• The client’s Plausible site ID (the bare site domain, e.g. example.com) recorded in the wizard or in Settings → Integrations, and the tracking snippet installed on the client’s website.
• At least a handful of tracked keywords on the Keywords page — rank tracking only follows keywords you have explicitly added.

Traffic: what the tab shows

The Traffic tab (“Website analytics · last 28 days”) shows four KPI cards — Visitors, Pageviews, Avg. bounce rate, and Avg. visit duration — plus a Visitors over time chart. Behind it sits one row per page per day pulled from Plausible each night, so the tab reflects yesterday by breakfast, not this minute.

Rankings: what DataForSEO powers

• Daily positions for every tracked keyword — one live search lookup per keyword per night, stored per date and device and shown in the Keywords table and cluster pages.
• Search volume and CPC per keyword — the demand and value columns in the Keywords table, and the raw material for Share of Voice estimates.
• Backlinks — the client’s referring-link profile on the Backlinks tab, refreshed on the same nightly run.

How keywords get tracked

1. Open the client’s Keywords page and choose Add keywords.
2. Paste one keyword per line, up to 100 at a time. Duplicates are skipped, not duplicated.
3. That night the pipeline fetches each keyword’s position; the dialog itself states the cost model: “Positions are fetched nightly — each tracked keyword costs one DataForSEO SERP lookup per day.”

Good to know

• The nightly order is deliberate: traffic and rankings land first, then the AI-assisted keyword grouping and the search-insights precompute run on top of the fresh data — all before European breakfast.
• Plausible collects aggregate statistics, not individual visitor profiles — which is why the Traffic tab has no “list of visitors” and never will.
• Rank positions are point-in-time snapshots of public search results. A keyword you stop caring about can be removed — that also stops its nightly lookup.

FAQ

The Traffic tab is empty. What now?

Check that the Plausible site ID in Settings → Integrations is the bare site domain as registered in Plausible, and that the tracking snippet is installed on the client site. Data appears after the next nightly pull.

I added keywords this afternoon — where are the positions?

Positions are fetched nightly, so the first numbers land the following morning. The keywords table shows a dash until then.

Does rank tracking touch my Google account?

No. Rankings come from DataForSEO, an SEO data provider working on public search results — separate from your Search Console connection, and no Google credentials are involved.