Measuring SEO - How Many Pages Get Organic Search Traffic?

Obviously, the most important thing to measure for SEO are your conversion events--be they sales, lead generation or subscriptions to your marketing blog.  If those numbers are low, or if they're spectacular, there are a host of diagnostic measures you can use to get a sense of how your SEO efforts are paying off. Jeff Gillis from Google gave some tips in my last post and I talked about organic search landing pages as well.  In this post, I'm going to quickly show you how to find out how many pages are getting organic search traffic using Google Analytics.

If you're spending any time on SEO, you obviously want to see if you're getting traffic to enough of your pages.  How much is enough?  Well, that depends on how many pages are on your site (not sure, try NetMechanic) and how many are indexable and currently indexed by the search engines.  Maybe you're getting a lot of organic search traffic to your homepage, but very little anywhere else.  You'll have to decide what the right target number is before you start.

Once you've got that in mind, it only takes a few clicks in Google Analytics to find out how many pages captured organic search visits.  Select your date range and click on the Traffic Sources button in the main navigation and then select Search Engines (see image to the left).

Look for the "Show" line under the graph.  Here is where you choose the segment of traffic you care about: Total (all search traffic), Paid (just ppc) and Non-Paid (organic aka natural search traffic).  Click on non-paid.  Then, in the "Segment" menu, choose "Landing Page" from the drop down list.

Now you've got a table of all of the different landing pages that attracted organic search visitors.  You can play around in here and see high-level stats about how they interact with the site (in the Site Usage tab) and whether they took a desired action (in the Conversion and Ecommerce tabs). 

Our goal is to find out how many pages got organic search traffic.  That is simply the number of rows.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the sum.  It's to the right of the "Show rows" label and near the navigation arrows.   And there you go!  Divide this number by what your target is (say total pages) and you're on your way to analyzing your SEO efforts.