.png)
How do you get high quality users to find you?
Organic search traffic
When you are building your brand, you will get customers from all sources. But those that find you themselves as a solution to their problem will be the most loyal. The traffic that comes from stumbling across your website through a search result are called ‘organic search’ traffic. Note that if these users clicked on your ad in search results, they will be called as ‘paid search’ users.
Organic search traffic is acquired when users visit your website from a search platform. Your website would have shown up as a result of their query. If you have optimised your website for the right keywords in SEO, then this audience will be relevant to you. These users are acquired at no cost, are more relevant and are of higher quality. That’s why these users are the most valuable to any business. A business should aim to keep increasing its organic search traffic over time. In order to do that, it is important to monitor the results of organic search traffic. In this blog, I will show you two tools where you can track the performance and make improvements using that data. These tools are free and can be enabled for your website easily through your business’s Google account.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps you monitor your website’s performance in search results. This includes everything from technical issues to search result analysis. From the marketing perspective, we are more concerned with the search result analysis.
Overall performance
The ‘performance’ tab provides a summary about the search results of your website for a default 3 months duration. You will get to know how many people visited your website through organic search results (total clicks) against the number of people who saw your website in their search results (impressions). You will also see the position of your website in search results (Average position).
This overall data will help you keep track of your website as a whole. When you invest in your SEO, you should see an improvement in all of these metrics.
Query performance
Scrolling down further on the same page, you will see a table with different tabs. The default tab is ‘queries’. This table shows you what people searched for when they found you. Towards the right you will see clicks and impressions performance for that search query.
In order to use this data effectively, think about what results you want to show up for. Are the queries relevant to you? If not, you need to improve your SEO for keywords that you want to rank for.
Page performance
The next tab in the table shows the split page wise. This will help you to see which pages of your website show up most often in search results.
This information is helpful when you have a large website. You can determine which type of pages (e.g. categories of products, blog topics) resonate most with your audience.
Google Analytics
If you are already familiar with Google Analytics, you know that it gives you information about the user’s behaviour on your website. In order to gather more data about what your organic search users do on your website, you have to link your Google Search Console to Google Analytics. This can be found under Admin -> Property -> Property Settings. Scroll down to ‘Search Console’ and follow the steps to link them.
All the information can be founder under Home -> Acquisition -> Search Console. The fields and menu options are the same as Google Search Console. But once you link the two, you can see additional data like how much time users spent on the website, goal completion etc. This information will help you understand what keeps your organic search audience interested in your website. You will be able to develop a content strategy for your website based on these metrics.
To build up an organic search user base will take time. And any action you take to improve the performance will also show results gradually. However, these users are high-quality users. Even if they do not become customers, they will help you spread the word about your business. So, start your organic search user analysis to reap benefits from that data.
This article is the last of marketing analytics series. And it's also the last from the Season 1 of my blogging :) I'll be back in a few weeks with new topics.
If you liked this post and would like more tips on other tools, then please subscribe to my blog.
And if this blog helped you, please share it with your friends.