Organic traffic is visits to your website from search engine result pages, excluding paid ads.
You may have wondered at some point why the organic type of traffic is important and why you should get organic traffic for your website. Many experts have said that organic website traffic is the result obtained for any successful SEO strategy.
If we look at it in another way, a high organic website traffic is the result of plenteous visits from organic sources – search engines. When your website ranks high on search engine result pages (SERPs), it is more visible for potential visitors to find you from there.
In this post, we’re going to answer the question “what is organic traffic?” and discuss how you can build it. Try to stay on the page till the end to see why this type of traffic is important for your website and how you can drive it to your website.
What is Organic Traffic?
This is a type of website traffic that comes from search engine results obtained by visitors using a search engine.
Web tracking tools such as Google Analytics identify visitors who visit your website from an organic source (search engines) using the term “organic search”.
Does Organic Traffic Differ from Paid Search Traffic?
Now, there are two ways you can increase your visibility on search engine result pages – SEO and SEM. The result of the former is organic traffic while the result of the latter is paid search traffic. Let’s see the difference between the two.
1. Organic Traffic
Traffic generated from an organic source as a result of search engine optimization is known as organic traffic.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a natural process of increasing a website’s organic traffic by making the website or its web page rank high on SERPs.
SEO can get you quality and quantity traffic for free. The downside is that it takes longer to work and produce results.
2. Paid Search Traffic
Traffic generated as a result of search engine marketing is known as paid search traffic.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a process to make your website appear on top of search engine result pages using paid ads. A good instance of SEM is when you use Google Ads to make your ads appear at the top of organic search results.
An advantage of SEM over SEO is that it produces faster results. However, you will have to pay per click (PPC) each time someone clicks on your ad to visit your website.
In summary, SEO generates organic traffic while SEM generates paid traffic. The former is free while the latter is paid for.
A typical search engine result page contains both paid ad and organic results. The ads are usually identifiable with a small “Ad” label on the top left corner.
Organic result differ from paid result in that traffic will drop as soon as you stop running your paid ads but you’ll always have high number of traffic as long as you keep ranking high on search engine result pages.
Why is Organic Traffic Important?
You have heard that this type of traffic is the best type of traffic for any website at all. It is even more preferred than paid search traffic and traffic coming from social media sources. This is because it shows you the outcome of your SEO strategy.
Meanwhile, when users type a query into a search engine, they have a very specific intent – either to find information or take an action. If you can satisfy whatever that intent is, you’re more likely to convert that user to a customer, subscriber or follower depending on what your website is about.
So, the singular reason organic traffic is important is that it is targeted at finding particular information. So, if you have that information on a page of your website, there’s a likelihood the user will click on your website to find it.
How Do I Drive Organic Traffic to My Website?
The science of buffing up organic type of traffic for a website is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is simply a process of making your website or web pages rank higher on search engines for targeted queries known as keywords. Knowing how to use Google keyword tools will come handy for this purpose.
If you’re still having a hard time figuring out how to get organic traffic for your website, despair not! We know how and we’ll tell you in just a bit.
Here are some actionable steps you can take today for improved organic traffic:
Keyword Research
Keyword research helps you identify what your audience is searching for. This will also help you identify the exact questions or phrases your target audience is searching for online.
Content
Becoming a power house for organic content is largely dependent on the content you put out! Your keyword research should inspire your content. However, your priority should be VALUE!
Keyword Usage
While you keyword research should inspire your content, it should also be a part of your content. Search engines like Google crawl your content to identify keywords prospective readers are searching for. Be careful not to overdo it.
SEO
There are a lot of SEO strategy claims on how to get organic traffic out there but do not feel overwhelmed by any of those. One of the primary thing you need to do if you want to increase your organic traffic is to improve on your SEO strategy. As simple as that sounds, it doesn’t come out that simple for a lot of people during its application.
However, we can tell you this, “SEO is more of smart work than hard work”. Lucky for you, we’ve put together these 5 Essential Elements to Improve Your SEO in 2020.
Consistency and Patience
Believe it or not, consistency and patience are two key ingredients in getting good organic traffic. Organic traffic takes time! It takes minimum of 6 months or longer to see the results of SEO or any other effort towards generating organic traffic. So be consistent, be patient and soon you’ll see results.
Organic Traffic Vs Other Types of Traffic
If you ever set out to track your website traffic, you’ll discover that there are different types of website traffic that come to your website on any given basis. Apart from organic traffic and paid search traffic which we have discussed earlier, there are other types of traffic like:
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic comes from visitors who type your website url directly into their browser. Google Analytics records this type of traffic as “Direct Traffic”. Direct traffic is common to websites of reputable organizations.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic comes to your website when a visitor to another website clicks an outbound link to your website.
Social
This type of traffic comes from social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and any other website where your URL is displayed.
Display
These are simply traffic that comes from your Google ads displayed on other websites. When a website visitor clicks on such ads, Google Analytics interprets it as “Display”.
This type of traffic is generated from your email subscribers. To be able to keep track of this type of traffic, you will need to connect your email marketing software (mailchimp, sendy etc) to your Google Analytics.
How to Track Organic Search Traffic
There are a lot of ways you can track website traffic, including website of a competitor. However, here are two simple but effective tools that can get you started.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one effective free tool to track website traffic. When you have installed this plugin or using its web version, simply navigate to ACQUISITION, ALL TRAFFIC and CHANNELS.
In CHANNELS, you can view your “ORGANIC SEARCH” result. You can also navigate ACQUISITION, ALL TRAFFIC, SOURCE / MEDIUM to see the exact organic source of the traffic you are getting. For example, “Google/organic” tells you that the traffic is from Google search engine. “Bing/ organic” tells you that the source is from Bing search engine. An organic source of traffic refers to traffic from a search engine.
2. Google Search Console
For a more in depth tracking of your organic traffic, you can also use a tool known as the Google Search Console. Google Search Console not only gives the number of traffic you have received from Google but also the keyword for which your website ranked.
After you have installed the Google Search Console, simply navigate to PERFORMANCE, SEARCH RESULTS.
The QUERIES tab tells you which keywords your website ranked for in Google search, known as “Impression” and how many clicks (visits) you received.
There’s also a PAGES tab which tells you what pages of your website appeared in Google search and the number of resultant clicks.
Conclusion
About a decade ago, internet marketing wasn’t what it is now. You could make a few tweaks here and there and boom, you’re ranking high on search engines. As at today, the times have changed. Both search engines and search engine users themselves have developed special preferences for great contents while filtering out the rest.
A great content is one that is characterized by expertise, freshness and accuracy. So, for you to be ahead of the competition, you will need to know how to spy on your competitors online strategy and also put in some amount of intelligent work.
We hope this article has helped you to see how important organic traffic is to your overall website growth and how you can equally drive a lot of traffic to your website.