Measuring Organic SEO Traffic and Conversion Rates
How does a business or marketing agency correctly measure organic SEO traffic and page conversion rate? If a company is not measuring organic search results, a business is missing out on digital marketing opportunities. Several different tools can help companies understand how a website is being found organically by search engines and how it affects business revenue. SEO success will be determined by organic conversion rate, sales leads, a customers user experience, and how quality landing pages fulfill user intent. Factors for measuring SEO and converting site visits into sales will be determined by the user’s search intent and the impact of the site content.
What is organic SEO traffic?
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing a website so that it appears higher in the results pages of a search engine. This can be executed by ensuring that a website has proper keywords within content, Meta titles, and Meta descriptions written correctly.
The traffic coming from organic sources is measured in two ways: the total number of visitors or the number of unique visitors who visit more than once per month. With this data, conversions percentage can be determined.
The Best Ways to Measure Organic SEO traffic
Option 1: Google Analytics
Google Analytics, a free tool, can be used to measure organic traffic. A website owner will need the website’s tracking ID, which can be obtained by following Google’s support documentation instructions.
Then go to “Acquisition” in the left menu and then select “Organic Search.” Once there, data will be available for keywords that have been searched for, how many site visitors came through each keyword (from both mobile devices and desktop), and the pages they visited on the site after coming from the search engine result page (SERP). This information allows a web admin to find out exactly where site visitors are finding a business online. This visitor data helps to guide future SEO efforts and to make educated decisions within a marketing campaign.
Option 2: Google Search Console
Google search console is a tool that a company can use to check the different keywords that people are searching for when they find the company website in organic searches. Users can view this information by going to “Traffic” in the left menu and clicking on “Search Analytics.”
The Search Console will then show all of the site impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), position, and average ranking for each keyword. It also shows this data for mobile devices separately from desktop computers. When a business needs to track these statistics individually, look at both reports to record this data.
Google also recommends checking out their guide on how to optimize content visibility.
Option3: Moz
Moz is a paid tool that can be used to measure SEO campaigns and organic traffic. To access this data in Moz, a paid account is required. Below is a list of data points that Moz can deliver for site improvement:
- The number of keywords web users use when they find the website organically (similar to Google search console).
- The specific pages site visitor landed on from organic searches. This shows how visible each page is for different keyword searches making it easier to make future optimization and campaign decisions.
- Visibility score: this data shows how well a website ranks compared to other websites targeting the same or similar keywords.
- The position and the total number of organic keywords for each page on a website. This data set offers a broad view of how an entire site is performing in searches.
- Moz determines which pages are getting clicks from organic searches and which keywords are connected to specific pages.
There are many opportunities for SEO traffic, but using tools like Moz can help a business make more educated decisions for campaign goals within their online marketing campaign. An SEO strategy will require improving a site’s bounce rate, site rankings, and goal completions.
Option4: ahrefs
ahrefs is a paid tool that can be used to measure SEO metrics and complete competitor research. A paid account is needed to access relevant data. Ahrefs may be the most powerful tool in an SEO agency’s tool chest. Report data for ahrefs can include:
- The number of organic keywords ranking for searches for each page of a website
- The number of incoming backlinks to a webpage and the estimated authority of each of these links.
- Competitors backlink portfolio and ranking keywords per page.
- The site’s position within the search engine results (SERP) and the other top-ranking sites.
- Ahrefs is one of the best tools to complete keyword research and accurately determine the traffic and competition for each word. Ahrefs also suggests other focused keywords to consider in an SEO campaign.
Option5: SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a paid tool that can be used to measure SEO traffic. An account is needed to access all of the data it shows, but once entrance has been acquired, here is the data SE Ranking will deliver:
- The number of organic keywords people use when they find a site organically (similar to Google search console).
- Which site pages receive clicks from organic searches and which ones don’t.
- A website’s current position within the search engine results (SERP) and the number one ranking website for the target keyword. This shows how well a site ranks within search engine results and what needs to be optimized for a higher ranking.
Option 6: Download Web Server Logs
Downloading web server logs and running a search for HTTP requests containing “Googlebot” will return a list of URLs that Google has crawled on a website. However, this information alone is not enough to determine if Google has indexed specific pages on the website. Check the page’s HTML source code for meta tags that point directly to URLs to get accurate results.
Here are some common examples of these types of meta tags:
- The “Googlebot” meta tag instructs Google’s crawler to index the contents of a page.
- The “Googlebot” META tag shows which search engine and version was used for crawling it:
If this meta information is not available, checking an individual URL will give more specific details on when that page last appeared in our index, which could help indicate if it was indexed or not.
Measuring organic SEO traffic is always an ongoing process. Tools like these mentioned above will help guide future efforts.