KPIMarketing

Organic Search Traffic

Number of website sessions driven by unpaid search engine results

What is Organic Search Traffic?

Organic search traffic is the number of website sessions that arrive from unpaid results on search engines. It is a core measure of how visible a site is for the things people search for.

Because the traffic is not paid for per visit, growth in organic search compounds over time and lowers the average cost of acquiring visitors. It is a leading indicator of future leads and sales from search.

How this KPI is measured

Function: Marketing
Sub-function: Web & SEO
Industry: All Industries
Type: Leading
Impact: Operational
Unit: #
Measurement frequency: Weekly / Monthly
Formula: Count of sessions with source = organic search in analytics platform

How to calculate it

Count the sessions in your analytics platform where the source is organic search, over a given period.

For example, if analytics shows 18,000 sessions from organic search in a month, that is your organic search traffic. Compare it with the previous month and the same month last year, since search demand is often seasonal.

Break it down by landing page and by branded and non-branded queries, since growth from people already searching for your name means something quite different from growth in new topics.

Where it is used

Tracking SEO progress
See whether work on content and technical health is bringing more visitors from search.
Finding topic opportunities
Identify which pages and subjects attract traffic and where there are gaps.
Reducing dependence on paid
Measure how much of your traffic is earned rather than bought.

How to improve it

Research what people search forFind the questions and terms your customers use, and check how well you cover them.
Create useful, well-organised contentPublish pages that answer those questions thoroughly and link them together sensibly.
Fix technical issuesMake sure pages load quickly, work on mobile and can be crawled and indexed.
Update existing pagesRefresh older content that is losing traffic, since improving a page is often quicker than writing a new one.
Earn links and mentionsCreate material worth referencing, so other sites point to it.

Tips and common mistakes

Separate branded from non-branded traffic. Non-branded growth is the better sign of real SEO gains.
Traffic is not the goal. Track conversions and revenue from organic visitors too.
Allow time. SEO improvements usually take months to show fully.

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