Website Metrics For Business Owners: Referral and Organic Traffic Sources.

By now, I hope you are getting used to our Friday metric blogs and finding them useful. If you are a new reader, please see Website Metrics For Business Owners: Sessions to be introduced to the idea. This week, we will cover referral and organic traffic sources.

Referral traffic comes from other websites that have links to your website. For example, if XYZ Corp is linking to a blog you wrote about XYZ Widgets, any traffic arriving from that source would be referral traffic. This type of traffic is extremely important because it is usually very targeted and brings engaged visitors to your site. You should spend some time each month trying to build links from other, related, relevant sites that could generate high-quality traffic. Never buy links, however.

Search engine traffic is where your “organic” traffic comes from. The more traffic you are receiving from Google, Bing, and other search engines, the higher you are ranking on those engines. You should pay close attention to your organic traffic – a sudden drop can indicate a serious problem with your website or a possible search engine penalty.

Knowing where your traffic is coming from is very important and this will help with knowing if your online campaigns are working, or if partnering with different websites for increased referrals would be beneficial. Watching your referral traffic will also help to figure out if your social media efforts are driving traffic to your website.