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If your website is driving a lot of organic traffic, it means your content is on point: it’s visible, readable, and answers the questions your audience has. But the ultimate goal for all that traffic is to eventually convert into leads, and move further down the funnel—ultimately helping you drive more sales opportunities and paying customers.
Now, it’s rather easy to look up your visitor-to-lead ratio or the number of website conversions. But how do you know if these numbers are good? Having a reference point can come in handy to prompt a deep dive into website analysis and discover what’s working and what could be improved.
In this article, marketing pros are sharing what they consider a good organic traffic conversion rate in different industries, what factors affect your traffic CR, and how you can improve it.
Jump right to the section you’re most interested in:
To learn more about what marketing experts consider a good organic traffic conversion rate, our team polled 58 companies from the following industries:
As we don’t have enough respondents in each category, we cannot make conclusions per industry, but we will present aggregated data. Just shy of 60% of our respondents stated that their organic traffic conversion rate is 10% and under.
When we asked our respondents whether they are satisfied with their organic traffic conversion rate, most of our respondents said yes – 31% are very satisfied and 47% are somewhat satisfied.
This leaves us with a question: what is a good organic traffic conversion rate? Most respondents agree that a good organic traffic conversion rate is between 2% and 5%. However, for some of them, 20% or even more is considered to be good. This difference in opinions is completely normal as “goal conversion rates” can be affected by many different factors and they generally vary from industry to industry.
“If potential customers are in the research stage, a 2% conversion rate is good,” says Calvin Jacob of Vilop Digital.
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers explains that what you consider good depends on where people land on your website. “if they visit an educational blog post, having a 3 or 4% conversion rate is good. But, if they arrive at a product page, you should aim for a 5% conversion rate and if they visit a landing page, the goal would be to reach a 20% conversion rate.”
To get the full picture, we also pulled data from our Google Analytics benchmark groups.
For B2B companies, the median value for goal conversion rate is 1.42%, based on data from 432 contributors. This is significantly below the expectations set by our contributors. If you are a B2B company and want to compare your goal conversion rate and other important metrics like sessions, bounce rate, average time on age and more against similar companies, join for free our Google Analytics Benchmark Group for B2B Companies.
For B2C companies, the median value is higher — 2.5%, based on data from 250 contributors. B2C companies that would like to compare their Google Analytics metrics against other similar companies can also join our B2C Google Analytics (UA) benchmark group for free here.
Paid search conversion rate varies a lot, which is expected due to the number of industries our respondents belong to. Still, the most surprising thing is that about 13% of the respondents do not know this value.
According to the data in our Google Ads benchmark groups, the median Google Ads conversion rate for B2B is 3.34%, based on data from 260 contributors. To compare your Google Ads metrics (Impressions, clicks, average CPC, CTR and more) against other B2B companies, join our B2B Google Ads Benchmarks group.
For B2C companies, the median value is 3.66%, based on data from 185 contributors. If you are a B2C company that wants to compare the performance of its Google Ads campaigns against others, join our Google Ads Benchmarks Group for B2C Companies.
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In the previous section, we only tapped into factors that may have an impact on how successfully your traffic (whether organic or paid) converts. Now let’s dive deeper and take a look at what causes fluctuations in your organic traffic conversion rates.
As you’ve seen from our survey, the percentages marketing experts list as “good” when it comes to organic traffic conversion rate vary a lot by industry. What would be considered as excellent in one sector might indicate a traffic conversion rate decline in another.
These differences are expected—take SaaS and retail industries as examples. SaaS customers may visit the website while still in the awareness stage (and many SaaS brands create a lot of top-of-the-funnel content to attract potential customers), so they’re unlikely to convert (usually book a demo) during their first visit. However, if a person is exploring a retail brand website, they’re much more likely to make a purchase right away, given the nature of the product, a broader niche, pricing, and the visitor’s search intent.
The better you’re ranked, the more traffic you’ll receive, which will create more opportunities to convert website visitors into leads.
Over 25% of people will click on the first result they see on their search results page, and this percentage exponentially declines as you scroll down. People usually trust that the top-ranked result is also the best one; otherwise, it wouldn’t rank first. If this result is also aligned with the search intent the visitor had, they’ll become more likely to convert.
But note that there’s a catch here. Don’t get discouraged if your organic traffic conversion rate doesn’t look impressive despite a high ranking.
“We dominate search results, so we tend to get a lot of traffic from customers who are just searching for information but aren’t actual buyers which drags down our conversion rate,” warns John Frigo of Best Price Nutrition.
“We also create a lot of content on products that aren’t necessarily easy to monetize, for example at times we’ll get 80k visitors from a blog post about an energy drink, but the shipping costs are so expensive, and the drinks are available at grocery stores and gas stations that that traffic is never going to convert which drags down our conversion rate on paper,” explains Frigo.
A click on your content doesn’t guarantee that the person reading your landing page or blog post will necessarily become your client or make a purchase. A lot of website elements need to be aligned for the conversion to happen, and content quality is one of the most critical ones.
Quality content is often defined as relevant for the reader, up-to-date, and with clear and concrete answers to the reader’s questions. If your content is too vague, doesn’t exude expertise, and leaves the website visitor without a clear idea on what to do next, you’re losing a conversion opportunity.
Low page loading speed, complicated design, and confusing website navigation can also negatively affect your organic traffic conversions.
Even if a person lands on your content, they might shortly give up on reading the whole landing page or making a purchase if they don’t know where they’re supposed to click or it takes too long to place items into the cart.
Related: How to Conduct a DIY Technical SEO Audit: Start with These 17 Questions
To drive conversions, your website content should be aligned with the search intent for a specific keyword.
Say most search results for a keyword you’re targeting are landing pages. You’re less likely to rank with an informative blog post, given that a brief SERP analysis reveals that users are clearly looking to buy a product or a service, not educate themselves about it.
If you don’t manage to rank with your content, fewer people will be able to find you through organic search and your organic traffic conversion rate will decline.
Websites with more pages rank better and drive more traffic, and if you include a greater number of landing pages, whose main goal is to get people to convert, your organic traffic conversion rate may increase. Landing pages can also be optimized for search engines, just like blog posts, and with compelling copy and a clean layout, you can boost your conversion efforts.
PRO TIP: Are your landing pages designed to encourage your visitor to take action? Watch the video to learn how to build a landing page performance dashboard that will show you how:
What do you consider a conversion? A newsletter signup? A purchase? This can significantly affect the percentage of users who convert after finding your website organically.
Your organic traffic conversion rate “depends entirely on the nature of the page and how a conversion is defined. If we’re defining a conversion as a contact form submission or phone call, a 5%-10% conversion rate would be good for a service page,” Frank Olivo of Sagapixel comments.
“If we’re talking about a blog article that addresses a middle-of-funnel topic—and we’re defining a conversion as a lead—a conversion rate of 1% would be great. Now, not all conversions are a lead. If a business defines a conversion as a newsletter signup or webinar signup, these numbers could be much higher.”
Frank Olivo
Founder at Sagapixel
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If you’ve noticed a decline in the number of leads your organic traffic generates, don’t worry. There might be several reasons behind it, like seasonality: many professional services see a drop in sales every December as it’s considered a slow month.
However, there are a number of things you can do to optimize organic traffic conversion rate. We asked experts to share what worked best for them.
Identify top-performing content on your website that’s already driving conversions and come up with ways to optimize it ever more.
“A proper SEO technique is useful for good organic traffic conversions. With better SEO, users can click on your link when it appears in the search result and, ultimately, drive traffic to your website. I kept refreshing my top pages with new data and information,” shares Peter Varadi of MarketGap.Pro.
Other than doubling down on optimization efforts, you can also use these top performers as an example of what works for your target audience. Analyze these pages to learn what particular elements are driving conversions so you can apply the same strategy to your other pages.
Don’t rely on one CTA per page to drive conversions. In long-form landing pages, several CTA buttons are a must: repeating them as the reader scrolls down the page increases the chance of conversion because it won’t be necessary to scroll all the way back up to complete the desired action.
In blog posts, both text-based CTAs and banners are recommended. Banners are visually attractive, but there’s a phenomenon called banner blindness: people might automatically skip the banner because they’ll think it’s an ad, which they usually scroll past when reading online. This is where text-based CTAs step in, and you can use them to recommend further reads on your website or round up the blog post with a clear call to action.
PRO TIP: Listen to our podcast to learn how Peyton Walbeck of Nectar increased their landing page conversion by 55% in just 30 days.
Split testing is always a good idea, whether you have a new email campaign or a social media ad. The same goes for landing pages: create at least two versions and test different elements of the page to determine what layout and messaging drives a higher number of conversions.
What can you split-test?
Chat support doesn’t only help you speed up the sales cycle and skip some initial steps in pairing the website user with the right representative, but also optimize your page for conversions by removing friction between the content and the reader.
After reading the page, your visitors might have additional questions they don’t see answered in the content. If you facilitate the experience of reaching out to support, it can lead the visitor down the funnel and help them make the purchasing decision faster. Data shows that website visitors who engage with chat support are more likely to purchase and even spend more money on your product or service.
Related: 12 Customer Support Tools for an Unstoppable Service Desk
Visitors who engage with retargeting ads are much more likely to convert, according to research, so many marketers turn to this tactic to boost their conversion rates, which can grow by over 100% on average. These visitors are already aware of your brand and might be further down your marketing funnel, so the retargeting ads prompt them to take action. Retargeting can be particularly successful if you choose to target users who visited your top-performing pages.
Ivo Iv of Decor Home Ideas advises marketers to try retargeting ads, as they’re an excellent way “to get people back to the website again,” Iv comments.
“We attribute retargeting conversions 50/50 between organic and paid because, without the initial organic visit, the leads wouldn’t have entered the retargeting pipeline. Even though retargeting is paid, it’s significantly cheaper than paid search or display.”
Ivo Iv
Founder at Decor Home Ideas
Choosing the right keywords to target can be tricky: even if a keyword seems easy to rank for and its search volume is high, it’s not always the right one for you. If the user intent related to the keyword is misaligned with the content on your page, it most likely won’t be driving many conversions.
“We always start our planning process with content intentions, then determine the best medium to communicate it,” explains Maximilian Wühr of FINN. “It wouldn’t make sense to set out to create a video and then pick a topic—the content often ends up mismatched to user needs and preferences. When we choose the content intent first, we then research whether a blog, landing page, video, or other content type provides the most effective way to communicate it. The more well-matched your content to organic traffic visitors, the better your conversion rate.”
This just goes to show that user or search intent is the vital element of good SEO. Combining it with high-quality, well-formatted content is key to success.
“To improve our organic traffic conversion rate, we are focusing on optimizing our website for search engine crawlers. This means ensuring that our website is properly coded and that all of our content is relevant and keyword-rich Additionally, we are using the latest SEO techniques to boost our website’s ranking. By doing so, we increased our organic traffic and improved our chances of converting those visitors into customers,” shares Kate Wojewoda-Celinska of Spacelift.
Fast-loading website pages, simple navigation, and high-quality content aligned with your users’ search intent are among top prerequisites for generating leads from website traffic. However, there are many other factors that can affect your conversion rates, including your industry and sales cycle length. If you compare your performance to companies that aren’t similar to yours, you might get the wrong impression that you’re underperforming or doing better than you actually are.
They say we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, but let’s be honest—how else are you supposed to know what numbers are considered good? Or what to look into if there’s a sudden drop in your conversions? Sure you’d like to see the big picture.
This is why Databox came up with Benchmark Groups, one of our latest features that allows you to set realistic, but motivating goals and see how you stack up against your peers and competitors. Our Benchmark Groups allow you to compare your performance to companies similar to yours in terms of business type, industry, revenue size and more, so you know exactly where you stand within.
If you’re interested in tracking your website conversion rate success, we suggest joining the following groups (for free):
Measuring your performance against your peers and competitors is just one signup away!
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Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.
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