When we started working with a new client a few months ago they asked us what a “normal” organic growth looks like after a year of SEO. Could they expect to see a 10% change? 20%? 30%? I explained to our contact there that our clients have seen everything from as little as 2% change in organic to as much as 324% change in just a year. It depends on how competitive your market is, how established your website is, what kind of SEO work you’ve done in the past and a myriad of other factors (some of which we can control and some of which we can’t). I told our client, “I promise it’ll be somewhere between 2% and 300%, how does that sound?” Obviously everyone laughed, but that’s really the truth!

1. HOW MUCH ORGANIC GROWTH IS ENOUGH?
Written by Nick Stamoulis
When we started working with a new client a few months ago they asked us what
a “normal” organic growth looks like after a year of SEO. Could they expect to
see a 10% change? 20%? 30%? I explained to our contact there that our clients
have seen everything from as little as 2% change in organic to as much as 324%
change in just a year. It depends on how competitive your market is, how
established your website is, what kind of SEO work you’ve done in the past and a
myriad of other factors (some of which we can control and some of which we
can’t). I told our client, “I promise it’ll be somewhere between 2% and 300%, how
does that sound?” Obviously everyone laughed, but that’s really the truth!
To show you just how varied organic growth can be year over year, take a look at
some of these clients’ data (comparing July through December of 2013 to July
through December of 2014):
B2C e-commerce website: Organic traffic increased 63.39% (517,692 vs
316,85)
B2B software solutions provider: Organic traffic increased 102.80% (63,116
vs 31,123)

2. B2C/B2B printing services provider: Organic traffic increased 8.89% (17,971
vs 16,504)
B2B staffing agency: Organic traffic increased 50.68% (29,427 vs 19,529)
B2B software company: Organic software increased 38.69% (63,282 vs
45,628)
Of course most companies would love to see their organic traffic double in just a
year, but the client whose traffic increased a “mere” 8.89% isn’t upset either!
Especially since online leads were up year over year and they closed some new
(and rather large) accounts thanks to their amped up content marketing and
social media marketing programs. So how much organic growth is enough? It’s
however much you need to keep the wheels turning!
It’s important to measure your organic growth by your own standards. We had
one B2B client that always compared themselves to industry titans like IBM and
SAP. No matter how good their SEO program was doing, all they wanted to know
was why they weren’t getting as much organic traffic as IBM. The main reason?
They weren’t IBM! Some companies/websites are so big (millions of pages big)
and so well known that they can’t help but do well organically. I call this the “too
big to fail” approach to SEO. At the end of the day Google doesn’t care what
websites slip into the top 10 spots, as long as it keeps their users happy. If users
stop seeing the biggest names for searches they expect to see them for, how
long will they keep using Google for? Some websites get to thrive simply
because Google knows removing them would hurt their own bottom line.
That doesn’t mean, however, that your own website has no chance of taking on
the “big guys.” But it does mean you need to evaluate your own success by your
own past efforts. For instance, if you launched your website last year and went
from a 100-200 visitors a month in 2013 to 700-800 visitors a month in 2014
that’s a huge jump! Don’t worry so much on what the competition is doing and
just focus on your own organic growth.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/organic-growth