Organic Search Traffic

Google Analytics is free—which means pretty much everyone and their grandmother has it installed on their website. But it’s also really dang complex (and constantly improving changing), so the average business owner can get a little lost in the different reports and even the reporting metrics.

And even once you find the right report and understand the reporting metrics, you’re still left with the challenge of finding actionable takeaways from the plethora of available data.

To put it simply, there’s a reason why it pays to have someone analyze your data (even though Google Analytics is free).

What Is Organic Traffic?

People find their way to your website in many different ways. If someone is already familiar with your business and knows where to find your website, they might just navigate straight to your website by typing in your domain. If someone sees a link to a blog you wrote in their Facebook newsfeed, they might click the link and come to your website that way.

But say someone is unfamiliar with your business and is looking for one of your products or services. For example, say I’m looking for a garage door company in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I ask my good pal Google who I should call.

Why Organic Traffic Matters

Now that you know what organic traffic is and how to dive down to several different valuable organic traffic reports, let’s talk a little bit about why it matters.

If you want to grow your business, you want to market your products and/or services to people who aren’t already familiar with your brand. While repeat business from your existing customer base is extremely valuable, it’s tapping into the aforementioned market that’s really going to help you grow.

NON-BRANDED ORGANIC TRAFFIC

For the most part, organic traffic is a good representation of people coming to your website who aren’t already familiar with your brand. Of course, there a few exceptions. For example, some people will search for your business name to find your website.

And while filtering your business name out of your organic traffic keyword report can give you a somewhat better picture, it doesn’t account for all of those [not provided] searches that could contain branded keywords.

One way we get around this is by filtering out landing pages that typically would be triggered by a branded keyword—pages like your home page, about us page, meet the team page, contact us page, etc.

We refer to this as non-branded organic traffic. Tracking and growing this portion of traffic is key for growing your business and widening your customer base via the web.

How to Increase Your Organic Traffic

There are two main ways I recommend growing your organic traffic:

1. Optimizing your current pages for search engines (SEO)
2. Adding more pages to your website optimized for keywords and phrases relevant to your products and services (starting a blog is a great way to do this!)