It’s easy to think that because billions of people are searching online every day, your website is bound to get some traffic if you publish online. The reality is harsher. A staggering 96.55% of published pages receive absolutely zero organic traffic from Google.
This means it's not enough to simply have a website. You need to actively measure and understand your organic reach. Are you attracting the right visitors? Are your SEO efforts paying off? Or are you speaking into the void?
Organic traffic, earned through search engine rankings, is a vital lifeline for any online presence. It brings in targeted visitors who are actively seeking what you offer. But to maximise its potential, you must learn to measure it effectively.
This guide will teach you how to measure organic traffic and optimise your SEO strategy for greater success.
Key Takeaways
Organic traffic, earned through search engine rankings, is a valuable and sustainable source of website visitors.
Measuring organic traffic effectively involves tracking key metrics such as organic sessions, users, landing pages, keywords, and conversions.
Google Analytics, integrated with Search Console, provides comprehensive insights into organic traffic and search performance.
Third-party SEO tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs offer valuable data on competitor traffic and keyword rankings.
Analysing server logs can provide a deeper understanding of organic traffic patterns and identify potential issues.
Related: How to Check a Website's traffic
What is Organic Traffic?
Image by Ahrefs
In the simplest terms, website traffic refers to the flow of visitors and their activities on your website. Each visit, page view, click, or interaction adds to your website's overall traffic count. Now, that traffic can be divided into organic traffic or paid traffic based on how the people come in.
Organic traffic specifically refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search results on platforms like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. These visitors are actively seeking information, products, or services related to your niche, making them highly valuable.
For example, if someone searches for "top SEO agencies near me" and clicks on an agency’s website that appears in the search results without them paying for an ad placement, that's considered organic traffic.
The Benefits of High Organic Traffic
High organic traffic isn't just about having numbers. It translates into tangible benefits for your website and business. These benefits include;
Increased Brand Awareness: Higher visibility in search results leads to greater brand exposure and recognition. The more people see your website in their search results, the more familiar they become with your brand.
Targeted Audience: Organic visitors are actively seeking solutions related to your niche, making them more likely to engage with your content and convert into customers.
Enhanced Credibility: High organic rankings position your website as a trusted source of information in your industry. People tend to trust websites that appear at the top of search results, associating them with expertise and authority.
Improved Lead Generation: Attracting qualified leads through organic search can significantly boost your sales pipeline. Organic visitors are already interested in what you offer, making them more likely to convert into paying customers.
Cost Savings: Organic traffic reduces reliance on paid advertising, leading to cost savings and improved ROI. You can allocate your marketing budget to other initiatives while still enjoying a steady stream of visitors.
Sustainable Growth: Consistent organic traffic provides a solid foundation for long-term business growth and success. It's a reliable source of visitors that can contribute to your bottom line for years to come.
The Hallmarks of Quality Organic Traffic
While a high volume of organic traffic is desirable, the quality of that traffic is equally important.
Good organic traffic exhibits the following characteristics;
Relevance: Visitors should be genuinely interested in your content, products, or services. Their search queries and on-site behaviour should align with your offerings.
Engagement: Engaged visitors spend time on your site, interact with your content, and explore multiple pages. This indicates that they find your content valuable and relevant.
Conversions: Ultimately, the goal is to convert visitors into customers or leads. Quality organic traffic should result in a reasonable conversion rate, to show your website meets the needs of its visitors.
Because of these characteristics, knowing how to measure organic traffic effectively goes beyond just counting heads. It's about understanding who these visitors are, where they're coming from, and what they're doing on your site. This will help you understand that traffic patterns are what separates successful online businesses and marketers from those who are merely guessing in the dark.
10 Key Metrics for Measuring Organic Traffic
As we already stated, knowing how to measure organic traffic effectively involves going beyond simple visitor counts. It's about understanding your audience's behaviour and the impact of your SEO efforts. Let's now explore the metrics that will help you quantify and understand its impact. These metrics allow you to fine-tune your SEO strategy and make data-driven decisions to improve your results.
1. Organic Sessions
This metric counts the total number of visits to your website that originated from search engine results pages (SERPs). Each session represents a user's interaction with your site within a given timeframe, typically 30 minutes.
Tracking organic sessions is crucial for understanding the overall volume of traffic you're attracting from search engines.
2. Organic Users
While organic sessions provide insight into the total number of visits, organic users measure the number of unique individuals who arrived at your site through organic search.
Measuring organic users helps you distinguish between repeat visitors and new visitors and gives you a clearer picture of your actual audience size.
3. Landing Pages
These are the specific pages on your website where visitors first land after clicking on a search result. Analysing your top landing pages reveals which content is most effective at attracting organic traffic. You can then optimise these pages further or create similar content to draw in even more visitors.
4. Organic Keywords
These are the search terms people used on Google, Bing, or other search engines that led them to your website. By tracking your organic keywords, you will better understand the topics and queries that resonate with your audience and drive them to your content. This will then help you to tailor your SEO strategy and content creation efforts to match user intent.
5. Organic Conversions
Everyone who runs a website has an expectation from their website visitors. This could be anything from making a purchase or filling out a lead generation form to signing up for a newsletter or downloading a resource.
Measuring organic conversion tracks the number of visitors from organic search who complete the desired action on your site. For example, a B2B company specializing in web design could have a free downloadable offer to help businesses identify the best web design agencies for them.
Tracking organic conversions is key to understanding the effectiveness of your organic traffic. This is even more important when you consider that not all conversions happen immediately.
Sometimes, organic traffic plays a supporting role in a longer conversion path, influencing a user's decision even if they don't convert right away. These are better known as assisted conversions. These conversions track the indirect impact of organic traffic on multi-channel conversions, revealing its hidden value in generating leads and sales.
6. Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Nobody wants to rank just for ranking. Everyone wants their ranks to rise so they can get more clicks on SERP. The CTR refers to the percentage of people who see your website in search results and actually click on it.
A high CTR indicates that your title and meta description are compelling and relevant to searchers. By tracking your CTR for different keywords, you can identify opportunities to improve your search result listings and attract more clicks.
7. Average Position
This metric shows you the average ranking of your website in search results for specific keywords. Monitoring your average position helps you understand your visibility in search engines and the progress of your SEO efforts.
Improving your average position can lead to more impressions and clicks, driving increased organic traffic.
8. Organic Traffic Value
While organic traffic is "free" in terms of direct costs, it still has immense value. By estimating the cost of acquiring the same number of visitors through paid advertising, you can assign a monetary value to your organic traffic. This helps you understand the true impact of your SEO efforts on your bottom line.
9. Pages per Session and Average Session Duration
These metrics provide insights into user engagement. A high number of pages per session and a longer average session duration suggest that visitors are finding your content valuable and exploring your site further. This is a positive sign for your SEO efforts, as search engines favour websites with engaging content.
10. Device Distribution
This metric shows you the breakdown of your organic traffic by device type (desktop, mobile, tablet). Understanding how your audience accesses your site is crucial for optimising its design and user experience across different devices.
How to Measure Organic Traffic
There are different practical methods and tools you can use to track and analyse your website's organic traffic.
Use of Website Analytics Platforms
Image by Freepik
Website analytics platforms track and record every visitor's interaction, providing you with a wealth of information on their behaviour, demographics, and more.
When it comes to measuring organic traffic specifically, these platforms offer detailed reports that break down your traffic sources, showing you exactly how many visitors are coming from search engines.
Key metrics like organic sessions, unique visitors, landing pages, and organic keywords are all readily available within these platforms. You can also track conversions and other goals to see how effectively your organic traffic translates into desired actions.
Choosing the right website analytics platform is essential. Popular options include:
Google Analytics: A free and powerful tool with a comprehensive suite of features.
Hotjar: Hotjar reports the real-time data of your visitors' behaviours, including heat maps and data segmentation.
Adobe Analytics: An enterprise-level solution with advanced features and customization options.
Consider your specific needs, budget, and technical expertise when selecting a website analytics platform. Regardless of your choice, having a website analytics platform in place is crucial for anyone who wants to understand their organic traffic and make informed decisions about their online presence.
Search Console Integration
If you're serious about measuring organic traffic, integrating your website analytics platform with Google Search Console (or a similar tool for other search engines) is a game-changer. Search Console provides data directly from the search engine, offering deeper insights into your organic search performance.
With Search Console, you can track:
Impressions: How many times your website appeared in search results for specific queries.
Clicks: How many times people clicked on your website's link in search results.
Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in clicks.
Average Position: Your website's average ranking in search results for target keywords.
By integrating Search Console data with your analytics platform, you can see the full picture of how people find your website through search, how they interact with your content once they arrive, and how effectively you're converting organic traffic into leads or customers.
Third-Party SEO Tools
While website analytics and Search Console focus on your website's performance, third-party SEO tools can allow you to gain insight into how your competitor is doing.
These tools use various data sources and algorithms to estimate competitor traffic, track keyword rankings, identify keyword opportunities, analyse backlink profiles, and benchmark your performance against that of your competitors.
Some popular options include;
SEMrush: SEMrush is a versatile tool that offers a range of features, including website traffic estimation, keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor research.
Ahrefs: Renowned for its extensive backlink database, Ahrefs also provides powerful tools for analysing organic search traffic and benchmarking your performance against competitors.
Moz: This all-in-one SEO platform includes features for keyword tracking, site audits, and link building, along with insights into website traffic and rankings.
Using Server Logs to Measure Organic Traffic
While analytics platforms and SEO tools offer user-friendly interfaces and pre-packaged reports, server logs give you a raw, unfiltered look at your website traffic. These logs record every single request made to your server, including those from search engine crawlers like Googlebot.
This means you can use server logs to:
Verify organic traffic data: Cross-check the data from your analytics platform against your server logs to ensure accuracy and identify any discrepancies.
Identify bot traffic: Filter out non-human traffic from bots and crawlers to get a more precise picture of your organic human visitors.
Analyse crawl behaviour: See which pages search engines are crawling and indexing, how often they're visiting, and if there are any crawl errors or issues hindering your SEO performance.
Uncover hidden opportunities: Identify long-tail keywords or specific pages that might be driving organic traffic but aren't showing up prominently in your analytics reports.
While server logs offer a granular view of your website traffic, they're not a replacement for dedicated analytics tools. They're best used in conjunction with other methods to gain a more complete understanding of your organic reach and identify areas for optimization.
Analysing and Optimising Organic Traffic
Gathering data is just the first step. To truly enjoy the power of organic traffic measurement, you need to go beyond the numbers and draw insights from the data to help you improve. To analyse and optimise your organic traffic data to achieve your website's full potential, consider the following
Identifying Trends and Opportunities
By analyzing your organic traffic over time, you can identify trends, seasonality, and potential growth areas. There are two things to consider in that regard.
Trend Analysis
Are you seeing a steady increase in organic traffic, or are there fluctuations and seasonal variations? Pinpointing these trends helps you understand the impact of your SEO efforts and identify areas for improvement.
Segmentation
Don't just look at the big picture. Segment your data by different dimensions like
Keywords: Which keywords are driving the most organic traffic? Are there any high-potential keywords you're not ranking for?
Landing Pages: Which pages are attracting the most organic visitors? Are they converting those visitors into leads or customers?
Device Type: How are people accessing your site? Are you optimised for mobile users?
Location: Where is your organic traffic coming from? Are there specific regions you could target more effectively?
By segmenting your data, you can also uncover hidden opportunities and tailor your SEO strategy to reach specific audience segments.
Turning Insights into Action
Once you've identified trends and opportunities, it's time to take action. Here are some key strategies to optimise your website and boost your organic traffic:
On-Page Optimization
Fine-tune your website's content and structure to make it more search engine friendly. This includes optimising your page titles, meta descriptions, headings, and body content with relevant keywords, as well as ensuring your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and easy to navigate.
Technical SEO
Conduct a technical SEO audit and address the technical aspects of your website that impact its search engine visibility. This includes optimising your site's architecture, improving its loading speed, fixing crawl errors, and ensuring it's properly indexed by search engines.
Content Creation: Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that answers your audience's questions and provides valuable insights. This will not only attract organic traffic but also keep visitors engaged and encourage them to explore your site further.
Link Building: Earn backlinks from reputable websites to boost your site's authority and search engine rankings. Focus on creating link-worthy content and building relationships with other industry leaders to attract valuable backlinks.
User Experience (UX): A positive user experience is crucial for both visitors and search engines. Make sure your website is easy to navigate, loads quickly, and provides a seamless experience across all devices.
Conquering the Search Results
9 out of 10 web pages may receive no organic traffic from Google but that isn’t you anymore. With what we've covered in this guide on how to measure organic traffic, you're now equipped to break free from that statistic and propel your website towards organic traffic success.
However, you must remember that measuring organic traffic is not a one-time task. It's an ongoing process of monitoring, analysing, and adapting your SEO strategy to changing demands.
Need help turning those clicks into conversions and those visitors into loyal customers while your website rises through the SERP ranks? Contact Bluematech today to help you kickstart your journey from zero to hero in relation to organic traffic.
FAQs
How often should I measure my organic traffic?
It's recommended to monitor your organic traffic regularly, at least weekly or monthly, to identify trends and make data-driven decisions.
Can I improve my organic traffic without using any tools?
While some basic traffic data might be available through your web hosting control panel, dedicated analytics and SEO tools are essential for comprehensive measurement and optimization.
What is the difference between organic traffic and paid traffic?
Organic traffic refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search results, while paid traffic comes from advertising campaigns where you pay for each click or impression.
How long does it take to see results from SEO efforts?
SEO is a long-term strategy, and it can take several months or even years to see significant improvements in organic traffic. However, consistent effort and optimization can lead to sustainable growth over time.
Can I measure organic traffic on mobile devices?
Yes, most analytics tools and SEO platforms provide data on organic traffic across different devices, including desktops, mobile phones, and tablets.
Comments