In short, search traffic are the website visitors you gain through search engines. Tracking it through services such as Google Ads and Google Analytics allows you to be able to view how people have come onto your website, be it via organic, paid, or another medium. This then allows you to better track the efficiency of your SEO and paid search strategy.
What is search traffic (Paid VS Organic)
Organic search traffic is when people have come straight from the search engine onto your website, this therefore reflects how efficient your SEO strategy is. The better your SEO, the higher you will rank and therefore more traffic will come through to your website.
Paid search traffic focusses on paid rankings such as Google Ads. These are listed at the top of Google search rankings and the company or hotel will have to pay for anyone who clicks on these ads. This is called Pay Per Click or PPC for short.
Which key metrics are relevant?
In order to know how effective your SEO and paid search strategy is it is important to analyse your data and stats. For paid search, you can find all the information you need in Google Ads, such as total clicks, total impressions, average click-through rate and much more. The same information can be found in Google Analytics for organic search. There are some statistics such as the average position that we don’t focus on so heavily at Umi. This is because it is highly dependent on location, device and search history.
How can I improve my stats?
To improve your statistics for organic search the key is a strong SEO strategy. This can be done through many different approaches such as regular updates, meta data, alt tags to name a few. For paid search, there are many different factors that help to create an effective PPC campaign. Some things to consider to ensure that your campaign is as successful as possible and gains as much traffic are relevant keywords, a highly relevant landing page, a sufficient daily budget, specific targeting. These will all ensure that your rankings in the search engine are as high as possible.
Through implementing a successful SEO and PPC strategy you will see the metrics discussed earlier increase. Thus pushing more people through to your website, increasing the number of direct bookings you get to your hotel website. Having said that it is important to not only focus on the numbers of visitors but also to ensure that your target audience has been reached and driven to the site.