Why isn’t my organic traffic converting?
It takes a thorough audit to diagnose why your organic traffic isn’t converting. Before you start digging into your data, take a look three common scenarios. If any sound like you, they’re likely contributing to organic performance issues.
1.Your keyword strategy is from the outside-in.
Too often, businesses decide that they have a broad range of capabilities and don’t know how to narrow them down for SEO. Sometimes they fear that pouring resources into one focus area will mean losing business in other areas.
To avoid tough decision making, these business leaders may look to keyword performance to see what the market is doing, then optimize their content and services accordingly.
But SEO is saturated and keywords are competitive. You shouldn’t make keyword decisions based on whichever terms get the most search. When you take a reactive approach to scramble and keep up with the keywords that already have search volume, your competitors already beat you to the punch.
Ideally, you’ll start by defining your personas and competitive niche. Then, you can find keywords that fit into this niche. Trust me, they’re out there!
2. You haven’t optimized your site for conversions.
Is your website clean, modern, and well-organized? That’s a good start, but there’s so much more to optimize UX and drive conversions. Here are some best practices for web page optimization:
Place clear, relevant CTAs throughout content.
Recommend additional relevant content to keep people on your site longer.
Add social proof - like testimonials, case studies, and logos of well-known partners.
Include employee bios and office pictures to give your brand a more personal feel.
You also need to make sure the copy on each page follows best practices.
Content should be relevant to targeted search queries.
Content must provide a solution that isn’t run-of-the-mill.
Content needs to be in-depth enough to answer any question the buyer may have (or direct them appropriately).
And finally, consider the journey a user will take on your website. What pages draw them in the early phases of buying? What pages do they read to research your product and compare you to competitors? What pages do they touch right before converting?
You’ll want to guide users throughout this journey. For example, on the pages early in the buying cycle, add links to pages that would push them along to the next phase. Or, set up retargeting ads to these pages.
3. You aren’t analyzing keywords performance.
Take a look at Google Analytics. Unfortunately, it doesn’t give you data on which organic keywords drove conversions, but following this process can help you fill in the blanks.
First, determine which pages are generating the most organic traffic in Google Analytics. Then, head over to Google Search Console. You can filter by these pages and see which keywords are bringing people to them. Just note that paid keywords are mixed in as well.
Are relevant queries bringing people to these pages? If you like the queries bringing people in, make sure your content is as relevant to these terms as possible.
Another way to see how keywords may perform is to use paid ads as tests. If a keyword performs well with ads, they’ll probably perform well as organic keywords as well.
Don’t worry, all of these problems are fixable.
The good news is that the SEO work you’ve done isn’t useless. Any sort of keyword optimization, linkbuilding, and internal linking strategy is helpful! But if you’ve been going down any of these risky paths, it’s time to change direction.
