Every time we speak with an operator their underlying goal is the same, they want to increase website traffic from search engines in a hope to increase their website conversions and make more money. The further we investigate the situation it becomes apparent; while they may know how much traffic their website gets (thanks to Google Analytics) and some even know how many of these people turn into customers, the majority of people don’t know what their potential traffic is and how they stack up against their actual competition – put simply if you want to increase website traffic this is your starting benchmark, without it you are flying blind.

It’s one thing to say you want to be at the top of Google, increase website traffic and blow away the competition, but when it comes down to it, you will never know just how well you are doing, if what you are doing is worthwhile and if your money is well spent unless you are tracking your actual website traffic compared to your potential website traffic.

Finding your potential website traffic from Google’s organic results

I am sure many of you have already seen this, but for those who haven’t the data is staggering. Using trend analysis, Optify has found the following usage statistics for Google and the web traffic received from each level of the page:

CTR = Click Through Rate, the amount of times the website in each position was clicked on directing the viewer to the linked page

Yes you saw right, the number 1 position on Google receives 36.4% of the web traffic for the searched term, and the further down you get the less and less traffic you are receiving, while we all covet the number one page on Google the true way to increase website traffic is to climb higher up the page towards the number 1 and 2 spots .

Applying Google’s Organic CTR to your business

Lets picture the following scenario: You manage holiday apartments on the Gold Coast and you want to increase website traffic from Google. You have had an seo analysis report and keyword research completed and from this you have found that your number one term to optimise your site for is Gold Coast Holiday Apartments. According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool the term has 720 monthly searches (using the exact match traffic), so in the grand scheme of things you assume landing anywhere on the first page in Google for this term will land you visitors and the phone will be ringing go off the hook (that’s what you may have thought before seeing the above statistics).

Now consider this, you find your website is currently ranking on page 3 so your SEO agency uses an SEO tool to increase your position and you land on the first page in Google, your ranking at position 8! – you are ecstatic only you still aren’t getting as much traffic as you had first thought.

Let’s calculate what has just happened; you have moved from page 3 (i.e no-wheres-ville) receiving less than 1% of searchers (7.2 people per month) and now you are at position 8 on the first page – you are now getting 3.5% (25.2 visitors per month), it’s a nice little jump of an extra 18 people. Unfortunately though, this is as far as it often goes, you don’t keep climbing the page because that is all your contract committed too (i.e. 15 keywords on page 1 for $500 a month), or as far as your SEO agency tells you they can go with your current website.

Knowing the statistics we’ve provided above, you now know that based on the term Gold Coast holiday apartments, you could increase your web traffic by up to 30.9%, that’s 222.48 website visitors per month, from one keyword term alone! Don’t forget though that once you get them to the site you need to battle the silent rejection – you can read that one next 🙂

Now, without knowing your current position, how much web traffic it’s generating, the best position you could be in (#1) and the potential web traffic you could receive, it would be forgivable for you to think that once you have landed on page 1 your job is done, but alas..

Using a Digital Dashboard to manage your SEO strategy

You need to keep reaching for the number one position and that takes a lot of effort: keyword research, link building, potentially using an SEO copywriter to include your keywords throughout your site content (or our awesome SEO wizard that is integrated in the Smart Tourism Website), an ongoing content strategy, social media marketing to increase the credibility of your business and most of all, tracking to ensure that all of the effort and money you are spending is actually working.

It’s a lot of work to do, and to really maximise your website you should be using a powerful SEO tool and doing this for each and every one of your keywords, or paying an SEO agency a sum of money to do this for you, either way you go, you need an easy to use digital dashboard to ensure that your positions are climbing for all of your keywords (or that you are very much aware if your positions are going down and why this may be).

Over the last few months we have been working with an SEO analysis and social media monitoring tool to track the rankings of some of our clients, this tool is separate from any SEO agency and is available to everyone. The digital dashboard takes into consideration:

• your keywords
• where you are ranking for Google, Bing and Google Places (yes they do impact click through rates)
• how much traffic is actually coming to your site (using your Google Analytics data)
• the bounce rate of the page that searchers are landing on
• your inbound links to that page (and dropped links)
• your potential traffic
• your page optimisation score
• and what you need to put in place to optimise your pages.

Take a look at the above screen shot of an account we are tracking, this business has just started with another SEO agency and wanted to track the success of the optimisation via our digital dashboard. As you can see they are gaining very little traffic from their top keywords and at the moment are struggling online, as the keyword optimisation and SEO strategy for this business kicks in, we will be monitoring to ensure that all of the top keywords are improving in current rankings and traffic, and as part of our fortnightly review sessions with them we will be giving recommendations on how they can work to improve terms themselves and other online marketing strategies they should be implementing – all of which we can tell from reading their digital dashboard results.

Without going into too much details on how the digital dashboard also takes into consideration social media and dropped or picked up backlinks, I really wanted to show the importance of such a tool for your business; it is quite literally the best tool that you can have to make decisions about your website, marketing and online business practices. Make sure you measure your efforts in regards to not only what has been done so far but what else is available for your business and don’t stop until you reach the top or are so busy you are booked out for the next 12 months!

If you would like more information on the SEO dashboard that we use, or would like to discuss how such a dashboard can work for your business, simply enter your details below and we will be more than happy to book in a time and discuss it with you.

You could also check out this video (it’s 13 mins but very comprehensive and you get to see all of the ins and outs of the dashboard).

In summary: don’t just start an SEO strategy and let it run on it’s own, back up all of your money and effort with a comprehensive digital dashboard so you can keep track of your results and make educated business decisions.