What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to visits that come to your site via unpaid (i.e., “organic”) search results. Meaning it’s search engine traffic you get for free—aside from what it costs to create and maintain the content.
Increasing organic traffic is one of the main search engine optimization (SEO) goals businesses have. Because it can result in more leads and sales.
Benefits of Organic Website Traffic
Some advantages of organic traffic include:
- Affordability: Organic traffic is free
- Targeted traffic: Traffic often attracts visitors who are specifically looking for the types of products/services and content you provide
- Relationship building: Organic traffic drives people to your content, and they may continue to engage with your brand if they like what they see
- Long-term sustainability: Organic traffic can provide a steady stream of visitors over time as long as your content remains relevant and optimized
- Scalability: You can increase organic traffic with an SEO and content marketing strategy
But organic traffic also has potential downsides:
- Ongoing investments: Although organic traffic is free, you still need to invest in SEO and content marketing to improve your search engine visibility
- Slow growth: Traffic growth takes time, requiring consistent effort before you’ll reliably see results
- Algorithm dependency: Organic traffic is dependent on search engine algorithms, which can change frequently
Organic Search Traffic Challenges
The greatest challenge with organic search traffic is that Google and other search engines are constantly changing and adapting algorithms that can impact your SEO efforts without you even knowing.
Before, after, or during page optimization and keyword analysis, make sure your pages are indexed. Conduct a quick Google search using “site:yourwebsite.com” to make sure your pages are indexed. If you are performing site updates, even basic page changes, Google must re-crawl and then re-index these pages. It’s not uncommon to experience unstable rankings for up to a few weeks afterward, but don’t be discouraged! It will improve.
Organic Search Traffic Best Practices
Some examples of techniques used for organic SEO include using keyword opportunity and keyword ranking, backlinking, link building to improve link popularity, and writing content relevant to human readers. Sometimes users switch up the keyword phrases that they use to make a purchase decision. Here is where you need to make sure you do better keyword research so that you can understand what they are searching for. There are many ways in which you can do this.
First, look at AdWords data. Here you can use the keyword planning tool and get ideas from Google based on your existing keywords. You can also work with your AdWords team to identify patterns or trends the SEO team may not have known, as AdWords generally is constantly trying and testing out new keyword phrases. Learn more: Adwords Dashboard.
Second, using a tool like SEMRush or Moz, you can identify what your competitors are ranking for and what is working for them. If one of your competitors seems to be gaining traction with organic search, they are perfect examples to reverse engineer. You can do this in SEMRush by going to your “competitors” tab and then looking at your competitors and what they rank for. This would be a good example of a competitor you want to reverse engineer. Once you reverse engineer them, you want to change your keyword strategy on your physical website.
How to Increase Organic Traffic?
The volume of traffic you can get depends on your rankings in search engine results. As you move down the search results page, there will be a substantial drop in click-through rates. For instance, the first result on Google gets around 40% click-through rate, but it drops to 20% for the second position and 10% for the third.
This underscores the importance of implementing techniques to improve your website’s ranking and ultimately drive more organic traffic.
Therefore, to rank higher and get organic traffic, you need to optimize your website for search engines by implementing best SEO practices. This combines SEO strategies like content optimization, technical health maintenance, and authority building.
Types of Traffic Sources
To get a handle on the direct traffic vs organic traffic difference, it’s worth it to understand how all of your websites’ traffic sources are classified by analytics tools like HubSpot or Google Analytics.
Most website analytic tools will organize your traffic sources into the following categories:
Direct Traffic
As we mentioned, direct traffic is categorized as traffic that does not come from a referring website. If traffic is coming from an unknown source, it will likely be categorized as direct traffic as well.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is any traffic that comes to your site from a search engine, but that isn’t paid for. Any organic search traffic is going to be a result of your inbound marketing and SEO efforts.
Paid Search Traffic
Paid search traffic is any traffic that comes from a paid search campaign you’ve launched on a search engine like Google or Bing.
Social Traffic
Any traffic that comes from a social media website, like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Email Traffic
If you are properly tagging your email campaigns with email parameters, any traffic that arrives on your site from an email will show up as email traffic.
Referral Traffic
Traffic that comes to your website from any other website that is not a social media platform or a search engine. Someone clicking over to your website from a hyperlink on another blog would be considered referral traffic.
Conclusion
Traffic is an important metric for any website. It demonstrates a site’s authority, relevance, and quality. This traffic is challenging to earn, but the benefits, including credibility, cost-effectiveness, and sustainability, are undeniable.
If you are serious about your online presence, optimizing your website and content is a must. And remember, while organic visits suggest initial interest, true engagement is ultimately determined by the relevance, quality, and value of your content.
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