A small business when moving from the traditional mindset to the internet marketing mindset may have tried to implement SEO on the company website as an ongoing project. The business could have invested much time and effort into search engine optimization, and the benchmark the business owner looks at in the first place would most likely be the organic search rankings of the major (or desired) keywords of the business. i.e. The positions of the desired keywords that are regularly on Google and Yahoo search results pages. Ranking is a valuable SEO metric, but checking the search rankings of your keywords alone is not good enough for digging into the insights for more traffic growth.

Monitoring organic search traffic (that came through Google and Yahoo in the case of Hong Kong) could well be the next straightforward step when the business has the goal to build its own SEO analytics. An experienced SEO expert would mostly be able to give you the insights and roadmap to build the SEO analytics that are customized for your small business. Think of this: When your Hong Kong company website is ranking high on Google and Yahoo search engines but is not getting much traffic, then the strategy and/or implementation of your SEO campaign may have a problem.

To find out how much trafficyour company website is getting from all the traffic sources or how much traffic your site is getting from search engines organically is simple. One obvious method is to use a free web analytics toolsuch as Google Analytics. But the thing with Google Analytics (GA) is that when you are new to use it, the data and reports it provide to you can be too overwhelming. When you start, you should isolate the organic search traffic. In GA it allows you to view traffic (in the reports) to your site by traffic channel. The advantage of doing this is that you can filter out all other traffic sources that may have occasional traffic spike. An example is when you purchase paid traffic. If you don’t filter the data, one day when you stop the paid traffic campaign, your GA report will show there is a big drop in traffic. But when you filter down to only organic search traffic, you won’t see this sudden drop.

You should monitor SEO traffic to your site over time. The GA reportscan providethe view of total sessions or users to your site over a specified date range. On top of the specified data range, you canalso compare two separate ranges. For example, you may compare the SEO traffic in the month of April this year to April last year. This gives you an insight how much your company site has grown in terms of SEO traffic.You can view how many visits a particular page has received in your Google Analytics reports. This gives you the opportunity to evaluate the performance of any particular page of your company site.

Another free and official tool provided by Google to webmasters or website owners is the Search Console tool. In the reports of the Search Console tool, you can find out the queries your users have been using to reach your website. Bing has a similar webmaster tool and in the tool it can also provide the query data. The Bing tool gives you a good indication on how well your site has been doing on Yahoo search engine (which is the second large search engine in the Hong Kong market).

Paul Petersen