Small Traffic Gain Is Still a Big SEO Win

One of the easiest ways to measure the impact of your SEO program is to keep an eye on how much your organic traffic has grown over time. Typically, I recommend that site owners don’t start looking for organic traffic growth until they’ve got at least three months of white hat link building under their belt and their website has been fully optimized. You need to give the search engines time to recrawl your website and let the effects of your onsite SEO be accounted for in the search engines. For instance, a new piece of content needs time to age and build search engine trust. Or you might be targeting brand new keywords on your site and the search engines have to determine where your website should fall for those search terms. Sometimes you can do really well for new keywords fairly quickly, especially if your domain is very trusted, but it can vary depending on the age of your site and the level of competition.

You also want to have at least three months of link building behind you because it can take a while for those efforts to gain traction. Just because you built 10 links today that doesn’t mean that Google automatically recognizes and counts them in your SEO program’s favor. Remember, SEO is a long term process and what you do today can impact your success (or failure) for months or even years to come, but it still takes awhile to gain momentum either way.

All that being said, when you do sit down and start to look for organic traffic growth it’s important that you have realistic expectations for yourself and your SEO program. And one thing to keep in mind is that even small traffic gains can be a big SEO win. Here’s how:

New traffic from new keywords.

Take a look at your Google Analytics reports and look at all the non-branded keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Even though those keywords might have only sent 4 or 5 visitors to your site this month, they didn’t send any visitors at all last month; that’s an SEO win! The goal of any SEO program is to increase the amount of non-branded, organic traffic coming to your site. Every keyword that drives traffic one month that didn’t drive traffic the month before is a step in the right direction! Over time that 4 or 5 visitors could grow to 40 or 50 provided you keep up with your SEO campaign.

Better traffic from old keywords.

I actually had an SEO client once that lost some traffic after we implemented their SEO changes and launched their campaign because poor keywords that have been driving traffic (think super broad and unrelated keywords like “business”) weren’t sending visitors to their site anymore. And while that meant their overall organic traffic numbers went down the quality of their visitors was actually going up. Now people coming to the site were those who had searched for more long-tail keywords and were much further along in their buying cycle. So even though my client’s traffic went down the number of quality leads they were getting in a month went up! That’s an SEO win! Over time the visitors lost from removing those broad keywords was replaced with new traffic from newly targeted keywords.

Targeted traffic from referral links.

In your Google Analytics account you should be able to see all the sources of traffic that send visitors to your site. Chances are Google is one of the biggest sources, but there should also be a fair amount of referring sites listed. Some of these sites might be social websites like Facebook or LinkedIn (especially valuable for B2B websites), but if you dig deep enough you might start to find referring sites that sent 2-3 visitors throughout the month. Cross check the URLs of those referral sites with the URLs of some of the places you’ve built quality links; are they the same? It’s important to remember that a link is so much more than just another signal to the search engines—it’s also a gateway into your website. Every link you build does help with your SEO program, but it can also become a valuable source of targeted traffic. Each visitor that finds your website through a referral link is an SEO win!

When it comes to measuring the success (or failure) of your SEO campaign it’s important to not look at any one number in a silo. Take a step back and try to get the whole picture before you delve into the nitty gritty details. Sometimes success is right under your nose if you only take the time to look for it properly and realize that small traffic gains are still a big SEO win.