Web analytics - Understanding the impact of organic search
When Google sneezes, websites get the flu. Search engine optimisation is seen by many as the Holy Grail of online acquisition. If done properly it's considered to be the cheapest and most effective way of driving high quality traffic to a website. Many people obsess and probably lose sleep over their favourite search term(s) reaching the cherished number one spot in Google’s ‘organic’ rankings. A tweak in Google’s algorithm can have a signi?cant impact on some small and mid-sized businesses.
When Google sneezes, websites everywhere get the flu. Understanding the impact of organic search is the first useful step to improving rankings and driving increased volume of organic traffic. All web analytics tools provide reports that show the top referring search terms and phrases but in most cases these reports will need some con?guration before they become useful. To begin with, if a pay-per-click campaign is being run, it's normally necessary to split out paid-for search traffic and organic search traffic.
This is done in the vast majority of cases by setting up the paid-for search traffic as a campaign in your analytics tool. Most tools will then automatically do the rest of the work for you by splitting out the two sources of traffic and dumping them in separate reports. From this point it becomes possible to view which organic search terms and phrases drive the greatest volume of traffic, which are the best converters, which pages they drive traffic to and what the bounce rate is. Being able to directly compare organic and pay-per-click in this way helps highlight gains that can be cross-pollinated between PPC and SEO.
Terms and phrases (keywords)
Most sites have a few terms and phrases that drive the core of the organic traffic, but they also have a longer tail of terms and phrases that, when combined, form a significant but often ignored source of high quality traffic. Exporting this data means that these little gems in the long tail can be wheedled out based on their high conversion rate and nurtured until they make a greater contribution to overall volume. Other measurement tools such as Hittails and Advanced Web Ranking will help in identifying search terms to focus on and monitoring actual positioning in search engine rankings.
Finally, due to the long-term nature of search engine optimisation, patience and trended data are the keys to happiness and enlightenment. It's unusual to move up the search engine rankings and drive more traffic to a site the day after making a few changes. Quite often it can take months to rise up or fall from grace.
