The True Value of SEO

March 15th, 2017, by Josh Bruce

When undertaking an organic SEO campaign, the purpose is to produce a positive ROI from appearing in the Google search results. One way of examining these results is by looking at how SEO is driving traffic to your website and helping to produce conversions, whether this is through goals tracking, or ecommerce transactions.

The most common way to observe this is through Google Analytics. Here there is an option to view the acquisition and behavior of visitors to your website. On the dashboard you can view a breakdown of the number of visitors to your website, and also the different sources of this traffic, such as Google Organic, Google Adwords, Email Marketing, Social Media, and more.

How to View Conversions from Organic Search Results

Step 1: On the left hand sidebar, click Acquisition > Overview. You should see something similar to the screenshot below.

Step 2: You can select a specific date range in the top right of the screen.

Step 3: If you click on “Organic Search”, you will see a breakdown of the organic search traffic for the specified date range, and any conversions that have resulted from this traffic.

This is a really useful tool to show you whether or not SEO is helping to bringing customers to your website.

However, one thing that is often overlooked when examining this information is something called Assisted Conversions.

When Google shows the number of conversions under the field “Organic”, it only shows conversions where clicking on the website through organic listings was the last channel that was used before completing a conversion.

This omits a key fact about SEO:

Organic SEO does not just complete a conversion – it also assists conversions from other channels.

How to View Assisted Conversions

To discover how organic SEO is helping to convert users from other channels follow the steps below.

Step 1: 

On the left sidebar navigate to Conversions > Multi-Channel Functions > Top Conversion Paths

Step 2: 

At the top left hand-side of the page, click “Conversion Segments” and on the right click “Create a New Conversion Segment”.

Step 3:

Set up a new conversion segment. Name this segment “Value of SEO”.

Select the first conversion path option to “Include any interaction from the MCF channel grouping” for Organic Search.

Select the second conversion path option to “Exclude the last interaction from the MCF channel grouping” for Organic Search.

Step 4:

You should then see an overview of all of the times where organic search results played a role in the conversion of a customer, but was not the final channel before the conversion.

You might be surprised at how many conversions were started by a customer finding the website on the organic search results but completed by another channel!

Get in Touch

To find out more about how we can help you with search engine optimisation, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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