How To Use Google Analytics To Understand And Boost Organic Traffic

Organic search traffic is undoubtedly one of the most powerful marketing tools of the decade. In general, the majority of a website’s visitors arrive organically from a search engine. The easiest way to make a significant boost to visitor count is to increase the organic traffic coming from search engines. This is accomplished through search engine optimization (SEO).

Google Analytics is a free software suite from Google that provides many useful tools for proper website optimization. It provides useful information about visitors, such as their source and how long they remained on any specific page. Then use what that information from Google Analytics to improve your SEO efforts and attract more customers.

How Google Analytics Separates Organic Traffic

With Google Analytics enabled, you can begin to identify exactly where your traffic is coming from. Any traffic that arrives from a listed search engine is considered organic traffic. If the traffic source is through paid advertisements or third-party sites are categorized as referral traffic. Every visitor to a website will have a source and thus will fall into one of these two categories.

Google Analytics gives all traffic up to five attributes. They are:

1.  Source – This is the origin website the visitor used to reach your site.
2. Medium - Example mediums include “organic”, “referral”, and “none”.
3. Keyword – The majority of Google searches use HTTPS and this will cause the keyword to set to “not provided”.
4. Campaign – If the traffic originated from a Google Ad campaign, then it will be listed here.
5. Content – This value is used to determine a specific link within the content used as an originating source.

For now, the source, medium, and content dimensions are the most important to consider. The goal of SEO is to boost the traffic coming from organic search engine sources. The most common is obviously Google, but there are many other search engines available.

Google Analytics comes prepared with a list of standard search engines. You can add or remove search engines from this list. Traffic will be identified as coming from the first source on the list with a unique query parameter.

For example, standard Google links and links originating from Google images share the same query parameter. This means that a search originating from Google Images may be identified simply as originating from Google if Google is listed first on the list of search engines. You can also modify search parameters to create a more clear distinction.

Removing a search engine from the list will cause all traffic from that engine to be categorized as “referral traffic”. In contrast, adding an obscure engine to the list will identify traffic from that site as organic traffic rather than referral traffic.

How To Boost Organic Search Traffic

If you want to improve the quantity of traffic Google Analytics identifies as organic (and you certainly do), then you will need to implement some common SEO strategies. Of course, the best way to go about doing this is to hire an experienced marketing team. Google alone has a terrifyingly complex ranking algorithm and is notoriously secretive with the details. And that is only one of the hundreds of different search engines functioning today.

However, regardless of whether or not you decide to use a marketing firm, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the basic SEO practices. This includes standard techniques like keyword research, link building, and publishing high-quality content. There are elements of these techniques that you will need to understand and implement yourself if you ever add or modify content on your website.

1.  Link building – Google looks highly on sites that are linked to by other authority websites. The process of getting other websites to link to your content is called link building. In the past, it was as simple as paying websites to add your link to their content. Today, it is a more delicate process that requires regularly publishing quality content.
2. Keyword Research – Learning how to perform proper keyword research is one of the fundamental steps to becoming a marketing expert. In general, it involves the identification of words or phrases that are searched frequently on a given search engine. You’ll want to identify popular keywords or phrases that relate to your industry and aren’t considered highly-competitive words.
3. Quality Content – This is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. There is a common expression that goes “Content is King” and it is very accurate. Without high-quality content, you cannot build strong backlinks and you won’t retain long-term visitors.

Use Google Analytics To Make An Improvement

As you push forward to publish quality content and secure backlinks you should rely on Google Analytics to measure your progress. It may take several weeks for certain changes to make a difference. But you should begin seeing a gradual and consistent climb in organic search traffic as you implement the techniques above.