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You’ve been putting a lot of heart and effort into your work. Your website is now complete, your ads are up and running, and you’re constantly adding more useful content to satisfy your target market.
Everything is moving at a fast pace, but do you know how many people are visiting your site or if it’s being visited at all? Well, there’s only one way to find out, and that means measuring organic website traffic.
Today, we’re going to talk about that so you’re guided and properly educated about the terms and the things you need to prepare before moving forward.
Organic website traffic is essentially free traffic. These are visitors that don’t come from any ad sources. Here are the following search engines where organic traffic is usually sourced:
Many factors contribute to organic website traffic, so it’s essential to know what proper ranking can do. If you want to improve organic traffic on your website, you should study more about search engine optimization (SEO).
Gaining traction in improving your numbers for organic website traffic is one of the most important things you should do as a marketer. It’s more important than social media and paid traffic.
Here are a few reasons why:
There are many more benefits to organic searches, but let’s discuss that for another day.
There are many ways to determine organic website traffic. Here are a few simple ideas you should take note of.
When you work with one or more organic websites, your goal is to increase traffic to these sites. To do this, you must first understand what your own website is worth and then determine if it can help you gain visitors via other websites.
If your site has low domain authority (DA), it will be difficult for you to acquire DA-high domains, such as Craigslist, because people search using keywords that are contained in their URL. If you don’t have any keywords, you won’t have an opportunity to rank for them.
To find out how much your website is worth, look at the current price range of your domain name. It should also include some type of measure for ranking. Likewise, you can add together all of the total pages related to your business and calculate your loss expectancy if you were to close down your operation.
Once you’ve determined your website’s worth, you can evaluate its value to potential customers. There are several ways to do that.
Value is defined as the sum of benefits and expected cost savings. Benefits here could be improved efficiency, productivity, job satisfaction, etc. Cost savings could come from better technology, equipment, processes, products, services, etc. Measure the difference between before and after periods, such as where you would track revenue versus expenses. Try to break up your results into individual experiences, events, or factors that affect your company’s performance.
Search engines give you a way to reach out to their users through social media channels, advertising, blogs, etc. They’re also available for mobile devices, which are becoming more common.
These users that visit your site can be found through keywords in the URL or via Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are two main types of search engine traffic – internal and external:
It’s important to distinguish between these two categories because they have different benefits and drawbacks. For instance, if you receive many visitors from other websites using your keywords but they aren’t coming through your own portal, it’s not considered organic traffic.
That said, there are ways to increase the likelihood of another website having people click on your links. One way is to include targeted keywords in the text of your articles and posts.
Another way is by providing quotes from authorities on your topic. Your readers will trust your words and opinions more quickly if they know you are trustworthy.
In order to be sure that you’re measuring what matters, you need to know your keywords.
If you use them correctly, then you should have no problem with accuracy.
The most common mistake of people who use keywords is using too many. It’s also one of the reasons why they get poor results.
You want to use several keywords in your content and metadata (the metadata are the tags that tell search engines what the page is about). You can also use synonyms for these keywords.
Don’t use keywords that just make sense; instead, rely on quality that helps readers connect your message with their own experiences.
That way, you’ll catch buyers at a deeper level and help them take action faster.
It is important to understand that all websites experience an increase in organic traffic during the early stages of marketing.
This phenomenon, called “the peak of ignorance” happens when people are unaware of how effective their website is at reaching out to customers.
As your website starts gaining more and more visibility, consumers become aware of it and start searching for products from you or clients seeking services from you, leading them to contact you directly.
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) has its benefits and drawbacks. For example, as your site increases in popularity, so does its ranking in the search results.
That means more visitors can convert into sales. However, paying attention to what keywords bring up your content before doing so with random keywords also helps prevent any backlinks from being wasted.
Additionally, once you have established a top rank in the search engines, you will need to keep tabs on your competitors. Finding similar posts they have published can give you an idea about other content they use for outreach campaigns.
You can then copy those same techniques to help grow your own business. Each month, new businesses join our social circles, which eventually leads to success.
The key is to develop relationships one on one by connecting with others and providing value, and this applies to anyone – not just entrepreneurs.
One of the biggest challenges that most online businesses face is measuring their success. It’s easy to get caught up in the many different factors that determine true success. While more traditional metrics, like numbers of visitors or sales, are important, so is something called “traffic,” which can be defined as the total number of times people visit your website.
There are several ways to measure traffic. Some companies use social media statistics tools, for example, while others look at data from Google Analytics (provided by Google), which tracks how people find their site.
But what if you could do even better?
What Session Street does is it gives you a visualization of this traffic. You can actually see who is coming to your website from specific sources. For example, you can choose whether to display the source code of your web page and identify each visitor manually (which is hard work but very helpful).
Alternatively, you can focus on certain types of content and track related visits, like readership, revenue events, downloads, shares, etc. – anything that can help you measure the performance of your web page.
This is one of the most important ways to measure organic website traffic. When people come from your site to another, you want to know about them.
More often than not, they came for a specific reason – to buy or download something or to enter their email so they can receive special offers.
You should also track whether or not those visitors who arrived by means other than the custom search engine went on to purchase anything or sign up for any programs. It’s easy to find out how many visits result in purchases or leads when you use Google Analytics.
Google allows you to see all of this information in two views. One view is called “Lookouts.” Here, you can easily see which method of tracking referrals produced the highest quality lead – whether a person signed up for your newsletter, for example, or checked into your tour online using their phone, etc.
The second view helps you check the consistency between referrals and conversions. For instance, if you have several different types of newsletters you send out, you could then compare each version to the others to determine which is the most effective.
This will take some effort on your part, but it’ll be worth it in the end.
Even if you aren’t using one of the major website trackers, it’s still possible to measure organic traffic. There are many ways to do it, but they all require some form of coding.
There are services that can make this process easier, like Spy Tools. These tools collect data without you having to dig into your browser’s code itself.
There are many simple tips to keep in mind for measuring organic traffic, so keep reading while I discuss them further below.
Take note of which pages have generated the most clicks. If you have multiple pages of content, see how page 2 is doing compared to page 3.
These are great places to start when it comes to finding topics people want to read about.
It also helps to know where your readers are coming from, so you can try to send them to another spot. This could be by linking to a different article or posting on Facebook.
This way you can attract more visitors and, as their numbers grow, get a better sense of who those people are. It also makes it easier to reach out to certain locations to find out more about why they clicked what you wrote.
You can use tools like AddThis (for blogs) to help with this, or you can use Tracking Code, a free tool created by Google that allows you to look at trends and patterns in your browsing history.
You can also turn to software programs like StatCounter for small businesses and Web Track/Webmaster Tool for large organizations.
These products were made to measure and record statistics related to web visits. You will need to sign up or log in to access these tools.
They will automatically track your unique Internet browser during your visit. Thus, there is no requirement to set off warnings because someone might be tracking you.
When you search for information online, do you go straight for Google or Yahoo? If you’re looking for informational content, then probably it’s Yahoo. However, if you need medical help, then you should head over to Google.
Negative words can help you out in this situation. Negative words are words that tell Google (or any other searcher) what not to find.
For example, imagine that you have a website selling shoes. You want to increase traffic to your page featuring reviews of your most popular shoe models. But first, let’s consider negative words like “don’t,” “shouldn’t,” and “cannot.”
These words can prevent people from doing something. For example, someone who doesn’t follow directions may decide that they don’t need to read all the review results.
That is why you must use positive words when describing things. In the case above, some examples of positive words would be “find out more about” or “learn more about.”
These words convey that you are asking a question and want them to act upon what you are offering. If you ask anyone which route is better, they will likely choose one map over the others.
According to Jimena Alva from Blue Fountain Media, it’s impossible to measure organic traffic if you don’t update your efforts.
You can observe how much more effort people put into tracking their paid visits vs. organic searches, because they know there’s a payoff.
Organic search results often have one or two hits at the top of the page before the next set of results. In comparison, paid visits tend to rank higher off the page and get more clicks.
Tracking what works and doesn’t work for you is where it starts.
Jimena had some suggestions for measuring organic traffic.
She suggests using Webtrends to see what websites are capturing your users’ most common searches. This way, you can learn about topics that might interest them.
It also helps you understand which keywords are most useful for getting visitors to pick up the phone and call you (or buy what you sell).
Alva also recommends searching for blogs and forums that cover similar topics to yours. That way, you can find out what types of content will appeal to your audience.
Now that you know how to determine organic traffic, pay heed to the call to further improve your website’s performance. The challenge is making sure your products and services are found – not that of your competitor.
Here are a few quick tips you can follow:
Garnering knowledge on how to measure organic website traffic is a huge step in understanding how SEO works and why it’s important to your business. While your goals are unique from others, you are free to uniquely optimize your website in a way that gathers more attention from customers.
The road to a high-ranking website is long and winding, but it’s well worth it if you continue to be patient with the process. Don’t hesitate to partner up with the experts to maximize all your resources.
