10,000 visits a month… but no SEO at all?

01.The problem

Working out your real organic visibility is fairly complex to implement. Most of the analyses we are shown are wrong. That is the problem we run into with some of our prospects, and with large accounts in particular.

The number of visitors reported by analytics tools does not match the traffic actually brought in by the site's organic search. It is pure arithmetic, and it is massively under-estimated by marketing teams.

02.The 4 traffic sources of a website

To clarify what is being measured, you have to separate:

1. Direct traffic

   Arriving straight through the browser address bar or a bookmark. Not acquisition in any real sense.

2. External link traffic

   When someone mentions you on another site or app — classic referral traffic.

3. “Brand” search-engine traffic

   Searches on your company name and its variants. Important, but not acquisition: these are prospects who already know you. All tools wrongly classify this traffic as SEO.

4. Acquisition SEO traffic

   This is THE traffic every company is after: prospects who did not know you and reached your site through a business keyword.

03.The “not provided” effect

For about four years (note: this was 2016, it is even more pronounced today), Google has hidden the keywords used in searches behind the famous “not provided”. Google accounts for more than 90% of the French market. As a result, analytics tools can no longer distinguish brand traffic from acquisition traffic.

04.The only reliable method

From there, the ONLY way to genuinely estimate organic acquisition traffic is to audit the ranking of every business keyword, cross-referencing three pieces of information:

1. Monthly search volume

   For each keyword, the number of searches performed per month, obtained through the Google Ads keyword planner (vrd.ci/gmc).

2. Actual ranking

   For each keyword, your site's real position in Google.

3. CTR by position

   A declining click-through rate applied to the position — the missing piece of the calculation, detailed just below.

05.Declining CTR by position

Google positions are far from equal. The figures we apply:

Multiplying volume × CTR for each keyword yields a realistic estimate of acquisition SEO traffic. Summed across the whole business scope, it gives the true picture of a site's SEO.

06.Our PDF audit

This is exactly what we compile in our SEO audits, delivered as a complete PDF — the same methodology powers our public sector studies (see the insurance study).

In many cases these audits reveal surprising situations that do not match how companies see their own organic search. The “10,000 visits but no SEO” case this article is named after is a great classic.