What is Organic Data?

How frequently do you open up a search engine and type some random words looking for something? Daily?? Hourly?? Or even more frequent than that? 

Have you ever thought that, in a full-fledged web-based company there would probably be a 15-20 member team who would call themselves Search Engine Optimizers and are paid a hefty amount to just keep analyzing what you typed in your search engine?? If you have no clue about it, you can probably again “search” for SEO job openings and see the demand all by yourselves.

Well, the terms you enter in the search bar of google, yahoo, bing, seznam, baidu etc. are called search keywords. When you enter the term “web analytics” into google.com the search engine starts crawling through the websites, which are already indexed, to look for the two keywords “web analytics” that you typed in.

A well-organized website, with all meta-tags (html or JavaScript) in place, listing all possible keywords that depict the website and match the keyword searched by you, will have a better chance of being found easily by the search engines thus being listed in the top results. 
 
From a company perspective, a good website with an intelligent web analytics team would have around 30% to 40% of its traffic coming from Organic channel and the SEO’s strive to increase that percentage as much as possible. 

Remember, we are here talking about Organic traffic. You can also pay to get into the top results, but that would be Paid search and not Organic. Read who visits your website to understand the difference between paid and Organic.

Organic traffic is the best set of visitors you can ever get because,

• Visitors land on your page because they were looking for something which you can provide and
• Organic is free. You need not spend money to get people to your website, ofcourse you have pay salary to your SEO’s

More the organic traffic less is the money you need to spend on external partners for ads and campaigns.

So what do the search engine optimizers do? 

They firstly organize the website in such a manner that it becomes easy for crawlers to find the keywords being searched by people. This includes

• Adding meta-tags and labels into the website which lists the products or contents that are available on the website.
• Making every page of the website reachable to the crawlers. Remember crawlers are codes which search for keywords, they do not execute any scripts (javascript or html) present on the website
• They analyze the keywords that direct people to the website and webpage and make the user experience better. Imagine you search for a women’s clutch in google and clicking on the top search result page takes you to shoe section of the website how would you react?

Well, the above list is very long and these three are just the basic part of what SEO's do. Though SEO is a part of web analytics, it is an ocean in itself. 

Now, Let’s quickly see how these web based companies get the keyword information that you searched on your laptop or desktop or any device. Remember nothing is hidden on internet. Someone or the other knows what you are doing online.

Here is a picture of me typing the words “Flipkart Android Phones” on bing.com. Choosing bing.com on purpose as google has made some recent changes which I’ll cover in my next post. 

 

I’ll choose one of the organic results, remember the top results which are colored are paid search results.

So, this is the page on flipkart.com which opens when I click on the above highlighted search result. 

Look at the google analytics tags below in the firebug. Read Have you ever explored your cookies? to understand the firebug tool and the cookies.

The cookie collects all the information and passes on to the web analytics team of the website that you are visiting. 

In google analytics(which flipkart uses), utmctr is the variable which holds the search keyword data which you typed on your search engine, which resulted in some search results and you clicked one of those results to land on this particular page. 

Now this search keyword data is two steps back i.e. you didn’t type anything on flipkart.com. You had typed on bing.com so how come flipkart came to know those keywords? Here comes the referrer into picture.

Referrer is any website from where the visitor came to your website. The cookie stores this information too.

Read Who visits your website? on the different channel’s that drive traffic to your website. Other than the direct channel every channel will have a website link present in the referrer variable. The search engines will have their own link like bing.com and google.com etc., social media will have facebook.com or twitter.com etc and external affiliates will have the link of their own. Direct channel will have that variable set to ‘Typed/Bookmarked’ as there will be no other website which led you this this website. 

Now along with just the URL, bing.com or any website sends across some more information about the page from where you went to the website you landed on. Especially when it comes to the search engines, the main information they have is the words you literally search for. This is real gold for the company whose website you visit. This is the input data for the SEO’s.

Along with utmctr there are a lot of other key-value pairs (variables with their values are called key value pairs), but we will see them sometime later. For now, just know that the words you search on the search engines value a lot to someone.