While it’s important to always keep an eye on organic traffic, it is not a metric that should be viewed in isolation when deeming whether an SEO campaign is succesful or not.
If traffic is viewed correctly in year over year data, accounting for as many controllable variables as possible (correct installation, spam/bot/internal filtering, goal/conversion tracking, etc.), then it is a metric that can be viewed and used accurately to help support the benefits of increased organic rankings and organic leads/conversions. Otherwise, it is best to keep organic traffic as a tracked side metric, but not touted as a guaranteed byproduct of SEO.
Why It’s Important to Be on Page 1
When users type a query in a search engine, they are presented with results that include paid ads and organic search results. Organic traffic refers to visitors that come to a website from a search engine that was earned naturally, not paid for via advertising. And Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work that goes into ranking websites at the top of these organic search results.
SEO is all about online visibility. If your business isn’t in the organic search results on the first page of Google, you don’t exist to over 99% of searchers.
Ranking on the first page of Google is our #1 metric for an SEO campaign’s success. While many people see an increase in impressions as they rank higher in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP), increased traffic is not guaranteed as part of an SEO campaign.