Launching a new website can be stressful. Most of the time, your content is untested and for the first few months you have little or no data to base revisions and improvements on. It’s like an author releasing a first edition of a book. You have no idea how prospects will react to your website, and there’s minimal feedback to help you refine it.
Six months after its release however, there will be plenty of data to mine. Sometimes, as was the case with our manufacturing client Flow Management Devices LLC (FlowMD), your website comes out of its honeymoon period looking squeaky clean.
30% increase in organic traffic quarter over quarter
If you have an established online presence, the number of visitors that arrive at your site from unpaid search results (“organic traffic”) is not something you should worry about without more context. For example, if you sell a niche product and you’re getting 500 page visits per day, that seems like a pretty big deal, but without details about those visitors you don’t really know how satisfied they were or how they spent their time on your site. However, organic traffic as a standalone statistic is immensely helpful for new websites and domains.
When a website first goes live, site visits are the best way to uncover any glaring SEO mistakes. Something is fundamentally wrong if your site visit numbers aren’t growing steadily and approaching a large enough sample size to start analyzing bounce rates, time on page, and other useful metrics. In the case of FlowMD, we saw exactly that:
FlowMD’s website went live in June of 2016, and for the first four months it was averaging 510 visits every 30 days. From that benchmark, the Pronto team could get to work fine-tuning everything from title tags to page layouts. By winter of that same year, the FlowMD site was averaging 665 visits per month — a 30% increase compared to the previous quarter.
Leads numbers that mirror site visits
One of the best ways to gauge whether an increase in organic traffic is valuable is if it corresponds to an increase in the number of leads your site is capturing. Take a look at FlowMD’s lead generation statistics:
That may look like a downward trend, but new sites will always capture above-average lead numbers at their outset. After the honeymoon period has passed, we start to see FlowMD’s lead numbers match up with its organic traffic numbers.
For example, in October the site received 690 visits, followed by a dip to 623 in November and 552 in December — and finally a record high of 794 in January. Leads captured followed the same trend: an average performance in October, a dip in November and December, and a spike in January. Clearly, FlowMD’s organic traffic is directly correlated to leads.
Lead sources
A great way to confirm this correlation is by charting lead sources. From the Pronto Insights dashboard, both FlowMD staff and Pronto Marketing employees can keep tabs on how new leads arrived at site. There are three lead categories for tracking site performance:
- Organic: Leads who filled out a form or provided contact information after finding flowmd.com on a search results page
- Direct: Leads who filled out a form or provided contact information after typing the URL directly into their browser’s address bar
- Referral: Leads who filled out a form or provided contact information after arriving at the site by clicking on a link in an email, social media post, or other peer-to-peer invitation
The Flow Management Devices LLC website captured 99 leads in eight months, averaging around 12 new leads per month. As we saw when we compared site visits and total leads, organic traffic is the driving force behind these numbers, which confirms a solid SEO base, but also reveals that there is room for growth in the referral category.
Keyword rankings
Usually, the Pronto Insights – Keyword Rankings dashboard is all about tracking how a site’s keyword rankings change over time. For example, if your business ranks fifth for one search phrase and first for another, that’s a good indication that you should be focusing on establishing more content authority in the lower ranking category. You can experiment with refining your copywriting and site structure to improve that ranking, and keep an eye on it via the Keyword Rankings dashboard.
In FlowMD’s case, the brand new site ranked 1st for seven of the nine targeted keywords. Usually, there would be a green up arrow and a number indicating how many rankings the site ascended since its debut, but after some SEO monitoring and a few copywriting tweaks the site has yet to relinquish its competitive rankings:
As this company’s website approaches the one-year milestone, it’s critical for FlowMD and their partner Pronto Marketing to continue to perfect and promote its performance. Customer search habits, SEO algorithms, and the list of competitors are all constantly shifting, which means the work never stops. In this case, FlowMD pays a small monthly fee to make sure professionals are the ones to manage, monitor and optimize performance. If that sounds like something you could benefit from, contact us today.
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Tags: Pronto insights, flowMD, case studies, leads, organic traffic, keyword rankings,
