Your website is at the center of all your digital marketing efforts. It would just make sense that you’d want to know how you can measure the traffic that comes to your website through search engine rankings.
But before that, let’s first define the term and know its importance.
What Is Website Ranking Traffic?
Website ranking traffic pertains to the traffic to your website, which comes from the search engine results pages. In other words, a click on any page of your website in the SERPs contributes to your website’s search traffic. Therefore, it’s crucial to find out how many visitors arrive at your site after they see it in the search engine ranking.
Search traffic is just one of the many types of traffic that comes to your site. There’s also traffic from emails, social media, and paid ads, among others. Out of all these, the most important is the organic traffic from search engines when it comes to SEO.
Why Should You Care About Your Organic Search Traffic?
Organic search traffic can tell so much about the performance of a website. By looking at the analytics report, you can easily tell which parts of your SEO strategies are working and which ones need improvement.
If you’re not confident with dealing with analytics reports, or don’t have enough time to look at them, you can ask for help from SEO consultants. You may wonder “What does an SEO consultant do?”, you’ll soon find out the answer when you work with them.
So, How Do You Measure Website Ranking Traffic?
Fortunately, you can measure how much traffic a website gets from search engines with the help of analytics tools. Here are some of them:
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that tracks the activities of a user on a website. This includes session duration, bounce rate, pages per session, and more.
To get started, you need to set up your Google Analytics account and give it enough time to gather data from your site.
Once the data is ready, you can go to Reports > Acquisition > Users. There, you can check how much traffic your website gets, where it’s coming from, what devices were used, and what strategies are working that affect the organic search traffic.
2. Ahrefs
With its friendly interface, Ahrefs is one of the easy-to-use SEO tools. It gives you an idea about the keywords, monthly visits, ranking position, and others.
To use Ahrefs, simply input your website’s URL in the search bar and wait for the tool to completely pull out the website data. The search overview report should appear in a span of seconds. It will show traffic-related results, such as organic traffic, traffic value, and the number of organic keywords that your website ranks for on a global scale.
You can further investigate the data by clicking on the tabs or using the filters. You can explore the traffic distribution by country and all the keywords that drive traffic to your site. To make things easier to grasp, some data are presented in graphs that are interactive.
3. SEMrush
SEMrush is another popular tool in SEO. Like Ahrefs, SEMrush can give you details about your website’s monthly volume of visitors, keywords that bring the most traffic to your site, and traffic allocation by country.
Additionally, SEMrush’s Traffic Analytics tab details the number of unique visitors, number of page views, average visit duration, total visits, and the bounce rate the website gains over time.
Like Ahrefs, SEMrush is a paid tool and has a limited day trial period. It has also a free plan with access to basic website data.
How to Improve the Search Traffic to Your Website?
Getting and analyzing the data about your website ranking traffic is just the first step. The second step involves taking action about improving your site’s traffic based on the data you’ve gathered. Here are some suggestions.
- Optimize Meta Tags
The title tag and the meta descriptions are the first ones that users see when they make a search. The title tag refers to the title of the page that appears on SERPs. On the other hand, the meta description refers to the blurb or short description just below the title tag.
Make sure to write unique and captivating title tags and meta descriptions to compel users to click on the link to your website.
- Satisfy the User Search Intent
Each user has a reason for searching for something on Google. Your goal is to understand the objective behind that search query. You can fulfill that intent by providing valuable and relevant content.
For example, if the user intends to buy something, give him an article with a range of products to choose from. Include every detail you can find about each product, like description, sizes, colors, and prices.
- Minimize Website Downtime
Website downtime kills SEO. Whenever a website is down, it prevents GoogleBot from crawling and indexing its pages. Worse, that site will be removed from the index if the downtime takes several days. Moreover, downtime leads users to an unavailable page which can discourage them from visiting your site again.
One way to minimize downtime is by deploying a backup server. You can also hire a company that provides comprehensive managed IT services in Toronto. They’ll take care of keeping your site online all the time as part of their service. This move is not only helpful in keeping your SEO alive; it’ll also improve your company’s overall productivity.
- Improve Page Load Speed
Page speed affects user experience and page ranking. If your page loading time takes more than four seconds, you’d better work on shortening that time. Else, your visitor may leave your site before its content is displayed.
You can optimize page speed by compressing images, using a content delivery network (CDN), minifying codes, caching web pages, and limiting redirects.
Knowing how much traffic goes to your website via search engines is important. Working on some aspects of your website to increase your traffic is even more vital. Bear in mind that the results in your SEO campaigns take time. So make sure to revisit your analytics report regularly to find opportunities to improve.
