What Percentage of Your Traffic & Conversions Should Be Organic?

How much traffic does SEO bring?

At Indago, we've seen time and time again how a well-executed SEO strategy can transform a brand’s online presence by turbocharging its organic traffic.

Done right, SEO can rank you higher in search engines and drive an influx of potential customers to your website. Beyond bringing in more traffic; it's a reliable way to keep your business relevant and accessible to your audience.

However, to truly measure the value of your organic search traffic, it’s important to first understand the reality of Google's playing field.

The Google mission

Google’s mission statement is to:

To achieve this, it aims to provide the best results and user experience to its primary customers — the non-paying people who use it to search for information.

If Google loses these users, it loses its advertising dollars and its main revenue source. That’s why Google will naturally rank sites that offer an excellent user experience and why it’s in your best interest to ensure your site is up to scratch by investing in SEO.

How can SEO improve your website’s UX?

A properly SEO’d site and providing a great user experience go hand-in-hand. In fact, you can’t really achieve one without the other!

By investing in SEO, your site will:

• Load quickly
• Contain quality, useful content
• Be easy to navigate

Organic traffic vs paid traffic

So, now that you're aware of Google's preference for sites with great UX, what does the data say?

Back in May 2009, comScore produced a study showing the percentage of clicks going to paid and organic search, broken down by generations. Although it's an old study, it remains a classic.

Overwhelmingly, younger users were more likely to visit a site through Google’s algorithm rather than by clicking on a paid ad.

At Indago, we felt that we needed a more up-to-date data set.

Using our data and analytics team and access to numerous tools, including Google Search Console and Google Ads, we ran a new test.

Our findings? A split of 72% SEO traffic and 28% paid search.

Obviously, this will vary greatly depending on the search term and the web pages that feature those search terms, but this 70 / 30 split serves as a solid baseline to work off.

What percentage of traffic should be organic?

We now know the split between paid vs organic search but how does SEO traffic compare to your site’s total traffic?

To figure this out, our data and analytics team analysed Australian data from just shy of 100 analytics accounts to provide you with the averages across our client base.

At Indago, we believe a healthy website should have around 60-80% of its traffic coming from SEO. However, keep in mind that there's no one-size-fits-all answer.

Your ideal percentage will depend on the following factors:

1. Your vertical - For certain verticals, classifieds (e.g. an Indeed or CarSales ad) play a stronger role.
2. Reasons to visit your website - Maybe clients log in on your website so there is more direct traffic.
3. Marketing budgets - Larger advertisers are likely to have more paid traffic.
4. Unique channels - Small revenue products are less likely to use affiliate websites.
5. The strength of your brand - Stronger brands are likely to produce more direct and organic traffic.
6. Competition - If you’re the only player in your space it’s easier to drive organic traffic.

Calculating the ROI of SEO

It's common for businesses to opt for PPC (Pay-Per-Click) over SEO services. Even with the growing importance of UX, SEO can seem like less of a priority in the face of quick wins generated by paid search.

To test this theory, we also need to look at the conversions generated by SEO vs other channels.

The average conversions from SEO

While conversions can vary significantly, we found that for our clients, organic search traffic tends to generate more conversions than any other channels (e.g. Direct, Referral, Social, Email, Display and Paid).

When assessing the ROI of SEO vs. PPC (Pay-Per-Click), SEO generally offers the highest long-term return. This is particularly true for our clients in the Banking & Insurance, B2B and Education sectors who all had over 50% of their conversions coming from their SEO efforts.

Is SEO a better investment than PPC?

Paid search is the most heavily invested channel in the country and for good reason. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is an efficient way for companies to display highly targeted ads to potential customers at critical stages of their purchasing journey.

However, users trust organic results more as they find them more relevant to their queries, and Google will only continue to bolster the visibility of well SEO’d websites as it’s in their best interest.

While PPC can yield immediate results, it stops as soon as you stop paying. On the other hand, a well-executed SEO strategy can continue to bring organic search traffic and conversions long after the initial investment.