Where the majority of organic traffic is landing and where is best

[Calockwoody]

Our website is an eCommerce website with around 20 - 30 product categories, there are some key players which are our most popular product categories. However 95% of our organic traffic (around 10,000 per month) is landing directly on our homepage. Also around 90% of the monetary conversions from organic search landed directly on home. This is concerning me as we are constantly optimising the top level product categories as this is where search volumes have led me to believe that this is where the traffic is.

So, can anyone provide any insight on if this is normal or do I just need to do more research into our customer base?

[aristotle]

Have you looked at which search terms are producing most of the traffic to the home page?

[Calockwoody]

I have looked at our most popular terms in semrush, none of which should be landing people on our home page and of course I can't see in Analytics (not provided).

[keyplyr]

Hello Calockwoody and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Is there enough unique content on the product pages to get indexed? If they are too similar Google may omit listing them in searches.

When you do test searches using their keywords & phrases, are these product pages in the SERP?

[Calockwoody]

Hi, thanks.

Yeah there is, I have been working on the product category pages for years. We have organic traffic to them and plenty of content around each one, all with well structured internal links. We rank in the top 5 for most of our relevant searches. It's just that most organic traffic is landing on our homepage - not a product category, meaning there's more of a chance for us to lose them before they find what they want. I just can't work out why they are landing on our homepage, it would be nice if Google would tell me what they are searching.

[keyplyr]

Are your pages HTTPS?

I ask because Google Search is HTTPS and if your pages are not, then your servers logs won't display the search terms visitors used at Google.

If you pages are HTTPS then your logs will not show *all* search terms used (for various other reasons) but they will show some of them.

Your raw server access logs are the best resource for this information, not a 3rd party.

[Calockwoody]

It is HTTPS and I didn't know that, so thanks. I will ask for access to them now and have a look.

[aristotle]

Google Search Console will show you all of the top traffic-sending search terms for each page.

[keyplyr]

GSC shows very little for a high traffic site.

To efffectively manage a site on today's internet, hourly/daily inspection of the server' logs (not a 3rd party report) is essential.

[aristotle]

Actually GSC shows the highest-traffic google search terms for the site. The server logs only show search terms for a small fraction of the traffic. So GSC provides far more information.

[keyplyr]

GSC misses 90% of activity... and only shows metrics from Google Search, not traffic from everywhere else.

[tangor]

However 95% of our organic traffic (around 10,000 per month) is landing directly on our homepage. Also around 90% of the monetary conversions from organic search landed directly on home.

Your landing page is your money page (most of us want to know where the entry point is to maximize). All other pages are support pages as one cannot expect all of them to be the "landing page".

That's where you concentrate your efforts, while at the same time keeping the cat pages up-to-date and pertinent.

Use that landing page to direct your traffic in the MOST EFFICIENT AND LOGICAL direction to expand sales/conversions.

Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. If that is the page ranking, make it pay off!

Aside: All too often folks think every page on their site is a money maker ... that ain't true, particularly in ecommerce.

[aristotle]

GSC provides far more information about traffic from google search than any other publicly available source. It's easily the most complete and most reliable way to know which search terms are sending the most traffic from google and which pages are receiving it.

GSC gets its information directly from internal google databases containing records of search activity. If someone doesn't want to take advantage of this information, that's their problem.

[keyplyr]

aristotle you are missing the point. GSC can ONLY report metrics from Google Search.

If you have a site that gets ALL traffic from Google Search (and I highly doubt it) then yes, you have all the stats you need.

However, search traffic has been on the decline for the last several years. A greater percentage of any site's traffic is coming from various other sources: Social Media, Apps, Bookmarks, Site Links, etc.

This traffic can only be identified through server activity, e.g. the raw server logs.

[aristotle]

GSC can ONLY report metrics from Google Search.

Everyone here already knows that. And it's appropriate in this case because google traffic is what the OP is concerned about. We weren't talking about traffic from other sources

[martinibuster]

Google traffic tends to flow to where the links are. Acquire links to inner pages and you'll see a shift of traffic from the home page to the inner pages.