Search Engine Optimization Montgomery, AL

The Truth About Traffic

Website traffic comes from a variety of sources—by going straight to a website without using a search engine (direct), through linking referrals, paid ads, or social media. However, organic search is still king and is responsible for 53% of all traffic coming to a website on average. While organic search traditionally delivers far more traffic to websites than any other channel, tracking organic traffic continues to be difficult.

There are 4 core intents when it comes to organic search. Each of these intents tie into different search layouts and results. This helps the searcher accomplish their goal (or intent) as quickly and accurately as possible.

Each intent has different features that become part of the search result to make the result more useful and accomplish the intent better/faster. For example, navigational and transactional searches will likely yield map results with direct click-to-call actions and directions—while informational search results have a featured snippet or direct answer at the top of the Search Engine Report Page (SERP), requiring no further action (or “zero-click”). In fact, informational search results are often the main culprit in lost traffic—zero-click results are great for the end-user, but requires no additional action which means often there is no click or conversion tracked by your client’s website.

Other results, like research, typically yield expanded search features like Google tools (job listings widget, direct booking, etc.), related images, carousel results, and recommended videos. Each of these additional search results/features detract from a website's overall clicks and traffic, which is why we typically see a rise in impressions (the amount of times content is displayed) rather than direct visits (clicks/traffic leading to a website).

Why It’s Important to Be on Page 1

When users type a query in a search engine, they are presented with results that include paid ads and organic search results. Organic traffic refers to visitors that come to a website from a search engine that was earned naturally, not paid for via advertising. And Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work that goes into ranking websites at the top of these organic search results.

SEO is all about online visibility. If your business isn’t in the organic search results on the first page of Google, you don’t exist to over 99% of searchers. Ranking on the first page of Google is our #1 metric for an SEO campaign’s success. While many see an increase in impressions as they rank higher in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP), increased traffic is not guaranteed as part of an SEO campaign.