Understanding Why SEO Traffic Is Not the Same as Organic Traffic in Analytics
All of the traffic coming from search engines (excluding paid traffic) is considered organic. A widespread view considers organic traffic SEO traffic, implying that SEO performance can be evaluated by looking at the organic traffic figures.
But such a view would actually be wrong:
The confusion between the two can significantly alter the accuracy of measuring SEO performance.
The total of organic traffic is composed of both brand and non-brand organic visits, but only the non-brand traffic is connected with and dependent on SEO. Therefore, in order to accurately track and measure SEO performance, the non-brand traffic data needs to be isolated from the brand traffic, which is just another form of direct traffic.
But with Google encryption hiding most of your organic traffic under the ‘not provided’ label, filtering these is next to impossible.
If you’re doing SEO on a small scale, several workarounds might work for unlocking the not provided, such as extracting conclusions from Google Analytics by looking at either the landing page reports or the queries under the Search Engine Optimization area, or analyzing Google Search Console’s data. However, these techniques require a lot of time-consuming work and don’t offer an accurate breakdown of the not provided data.
But, if you’re doing SEO on a large scale, an automated solution will give you more accurate data and save time, so you can focus on strategy. This is where SEOmonitor comes in.
Due to its algorithm of revealing the not provided Google data, SEOmonitor is able to distribute organic traffic back into keywords and split it between brand and non-brand. Therefore, after defining your brand keywords, you can switch between the two traffic segments and get insights into both types of traffic.
The algorithm is based on pulling the traffic data from your Analytics via API and matching it to the keyword data from your Google Search Console (GSC), using the landing pages as the connector.
The keywords from GSC are mapped on the landing pages from Analytics, proportional to the clicks they generate. The traffic from Analytics is then redistributed back into the keywords and displayed in the Organic Traffic module.
This process is repeated every day.
Not only does this algorithm distribute the not provided traffic data into keywords but, above all, it facilitates the brand/non-brand traffic segmentation, which is crucial for measuring SEO, allowing you to focus on the non-brand traffic, which is the real result of your SEO efforts.
Thanks for sharing great article about SEO organic traffic. This helps to increase the website SEO performance in search engines.
I am working for a digital agency. I handle the off-page SEO section for them. And I completely agree with this article. I have built thousands of links. But all the organic traffic we get is not from SEO or off-page seo. We gain a lot of traffic from social sharing and other ways as well. I really enjoy ready your article. thank you for sharing such useful information with us.