In this Conversion Wednesday I take on a very interesting lesson: How can you analyze the quality of your organic traffic, using the Yahoo Web Analytics tool?

The source and quality of traffic can drastically affect your websites’ conversion rate. On average Google’s organic algorithm sends our client’s up to 60% of their traffic. Our clients rely heavily on Google sending them quality traffic in order to grow their businesses profitably. We also find that organic traffic from Google often has some of the lowest conversion rates of any other source. Without a doubt, search engines like Google provide an extremely robust algorithm to serve fairly relevant results.

But if Google’s algorithm is so advanced then why are the conversion rates so low?

Before answering this complex question, let’s find out if your organic search engine traffic has a low conversion rate. Again, these instructions are for business owners who utilized Yahoo Web Analytics. Once signed in we click on Marketing, Conversions, SEO & SEM, and click: by Search Engines. We then click Customize Report, delete the existing Group from the groups section. Then under the groups tab click on Marketing, then click and drag Traffic Sources to the group section. Now we must add our custom metrics, first delete all the current metrics in the metrics section. Add the new metrics by clicking on the Metrics tab, then Marketing, Conversion, click and drag SALE Conversion Rate to the metrics section. Then add the amount of visits by clicking on Visitors, then click and drag the visits metric into the metrics section. Click on Show Report once you are finished. As we zoom in, your screen should look similar to this screen shot.

As you can see, the Organic Search traffic by far has the lowest conversion rate.

Now we must ask ourselves “why?”

While you are still on this report, click on by Organic Search Phrases on your left navigation, then click Next on the popup. This will open up a report that will show you all of the search phrases coming into your website from organic traffic. In order to determine why organic search phrases have a low conversion rate, we must see where the Search Engines are sending your visitors to on your website. In order to find this information, we must again click on the Customize Report link at the top. Click on Pages & Files, then click and drag the Entry Page URL into the Groups section. We also must add the following metrics: visits, conversion rate and bounce rate. Delete any unnecessary metrics and click Show Report. Your report should look something similar to this.

As we analyze the report and open each Plus sign we begin to find an interesting pattern. The homepage or a general category page ranks for our most of our popular terms. Unfortunately most our homepage or general category page is not the most relevant page for each term, and many times these pages do not contain actual orderable products the customer is looking for, making them think by clicking on subcategory after subcategory before finding relevant products. This begins our journey into answering one of the more complex questions regarding search engines. Are your organic search engine visitors receiving the ideal user experience?

Our testing service, Conversion Booster, aims to address this major concern as well as many other perplexing questions regarding your conversion rate. Addressing these concerns in a scientific manner can have a drastic improvement in your overall conversion rate and improve your overall knowledge and awareness of the issues and opportunities facing the growth of your ecommerce store.

We offer free conversion opportunity audits to qualified website owners who feel it is necessary for them to identify their next steps in improving conversion rates. If you are interested, please feel free to call us at 800-504-4324. Thank you and have a wonderful Conversion Wednesday.