You could have a month where your website gets more traffic than ever and still be surprised that sales barely budged.
Frustrating? Absolutely. But it’s also extremely common. A website can attract thousands of people from Google and generate very little business. On the other hand, a smaller website may receive fewer visitors but turn a healthy share of them into customers.
That is why organic traffic should not be viewed on its own.
When people search Google without clicking a paid advertisement, the visits they generate are part of organic traffic to website activity. It tells you whether your site is being discovered. Conversions tell you what happens after people arrive.
Both numbers matter. They simply answer different questions.
More visitors do not always mean more business
Imagine a local home remodeling company. Its blog starts ranking for broad searches about home improvement. Within months, its organic search traffic is up by a factor of two.
That’s huge! That’s a spectacular increase!
But there is a catch. Most visitors are looking for general advice. They read an article and leave. Very few request an estimate.
The company has improved visibility, but it has not necessarily improved revenue.
Here’s where organic keywords come in. In an SEO report, hundreds of phrases being ranked might seem impressive. But the search traffic can’t generate a profit if its volume comprises those looking for something else.
A better question is not simply, “How many people found us?”
Ask, “Did the right people find us, and what did they do next?”
Just consider how much of a change in perspective that is.
Traffic tells you whether people can find you
The first job of SEO is visibility.
That said, there is little hope of generating leads or revenue otherwise if nobody finds your websites on Google. By tracking organic traffic to website is receiving organically, you can determine whether or not your strategy is helping to boost content and visibility.
See where those visitors are coming from, and which pages they landed on. Review their search terms and then compare this to your conversions. Sales, leads, or any other activities conducted on the site.
Say there are 500 monthly visits to a service page and 5000 on an article. While the former isn’t doing as well as the latter, its 30 leads pales in comparison to the two generated by the article.
This is not to say the article isn’t doing its job. It could be informing some people at an earlier point in their buyer’s journey; it might also establish trust that encourages them to come back later.
Organic search is useful for multiple stages.
Then comes the harder question: did they convert?
Drive traffic to the website; half the battle is won. The other is letting it grow from there.
While a lead or sale is usually a desirable outcome, a conversion doesn’t have to be one of these. For some, it might be requesting a proposal for one company while for other, it could be a phone call, sign-up, or product demo.
Before beginning the analysis of this SEO, businesses that have the ambition to acquire more organic visitors for their websites ought to decide on their expectations and goals.
Say there is an online store. Google shows 20,000 monthly visitors and 100 sales for the competitor. 4,000 visits come to another and 120 purchases are made.
Fewer people are visiting the second, but its customers could be significantly closer to buying.
As such, conversions should also be a key performance indicator.
Why the keywords behind the traffic matter
Each search is made with a unique aim.
Someone researching how to clean leather shoes might only want the steps. The person looking to buy leather shoe cleaner, however, could be closer to making a purchase.
While both could appear for similar questions, they have different intents and purposes.
As such, you might want to organize your organic keywords based on their search intent. Informational searches might be used for raising awareness. Those in comparison tend to favor people weighing their options. Product research can target people who are already considering buying.
Not all ranking have to be treated the same.
One that appears in a popular but irrelevant search might not be as effective as a commercial query.
What if traffic is falling?
A drop in organic traffic doesn’t necessarily mean a failure of the SEO.
Before accepting this, investigate alternative explanations.
Did they miss out on certain keywords or ranking? Has the value of your content decreased? Has there been any substantial content published by a competitor? Have Google’s guidelines changed?
Then, make sure that a similar change didn’t happen in conversions.
The rest of your visitors might be higher quality if organic traffic dropped 15% but your revenues from these visitors remained the same. Shouldn’t you rethink the targeting if the leads decreased substantially with an increase in traffic?
Simply comparing the two can make the numbers significantly more meaningful.
Build content for people at different stages
A robust SEO strategy is not expecting everybody who arrives to make a purchase. An instructional manual can be necessary for certain individuals on their way to making a purchase. A similar piece might be interesting to another. Before making any inquiry, a returning visitor may simply want to know your rates.
It’s up to you to establish the connections between stages.
An informative piece, for instance, can naturally lead to a service page that fits the needs of the reader. There may be product specifications that they can review in-depth on a comparison page. The procedure can be clearly defined on a product page.
Without seeing traffic volume as the sole success factor, this method will be more helpful to drive organic traffic to website.
But it also provides site visitors with more convincing motives to continue researching.
Watch the numbers together
There are many elements of a sound monthly SEO report that do not require complexity.
Start with:
- Organic sessions or users
- Important landing pages
- Search queries and rankings
- Conversion rate
- Leads or sales from organic visitors
- Revenue generated from organic search
- Engagement on important pages
Then look for relationships.
Has a new page begun attracting more visitors but with little outcome? Did the old one continue producing leads but dropped in rankings? Has a modified title and description of a service page increased its visitors?
There is much more to consider in these questions than a graphical representation. In fact, growing organic traffic is one thing. Increasing website visitors through organic search is quite another.
The real goal is useful traffic
There is nothing wrong with wanting more visitors.
But when it comes to the audience that needs what you have to offer, organic traffic to website can be a wonderful sign. The problem arises when traffic is the sole measurement of success.
Where visibility and business objectives complement each other, SEO will be most successful.
Discover what people need with your organic search. To understand their intent, apply organic keywords. Take the initiative with material that will help to answer their questions. Then make it easy for those who are interested to go to the next step.
Rather than just collecting pageviews, this is how you get organic traffic to website. Traffic only shows that they are being found. Conversions, that they can generate value for the business.
To know whether your SEO is truly benefiting the company, one needs to see both sides of the story.
