What Is Organic Traffic? How to Get More to Your Website Now
The Glorious Company Team
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is website traffic that comes to your site from a search engine like Google or Bing. It’s when people are searching for a specific keyword, phrase, or question and then visit your site because they see, on the unpaid search results, that your content has the answer they’re looking for. The more organic traffic you can drive to your site, the more your site will grow.
Your website needs traffic to sustain your business. Whether you’re selling products, as in ecommerce, running an agency for a service-based business, or running an affiliate marketing operation, you need site visitors to discover your content, interact with it, and complete the action you want them to take. Even if all you have is a signup form for your email newsletter, you still need traffic.
Other Forms of Traffic
It’s vital to understand the other forms of traffic besides organic traffic. Here’s what these look like.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is when site visitors land on your site by clicking a Google Ad that you’re running. These search results appear above organic search results in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and have a big, black, bold “Sponsored” label next to them.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is generally visits that come to your site when people directly enter the URL of your site into their browser’s address bar or directly click to your site from a link from a bookmark.
Social Traffic
Social traffic is traffic that comes from social websites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. It occurs when people are sharing your website content on social media or linking to your site from social (organic).
It can also happen when you’re running ads for your site on social media (paid).
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic comes from links to your website. These links are said to “refer” traffic to you. These can be in the form of backlinks on other sites, blogs, social links, or links people share among themselves.
Email Traffic
These visits come from traffic generated by your email campaigns, as people on your list click on links in your newsletters or promotional materials.
Benefits of Organic Traffic
The benefits of getting more organic traffic to your site are manifold. Here’s a quick list of all the advantages of driving more organic traffic to your site:
More site visitors who are relevant to your product or services
Higher rankings of your site in the SERPs
Greater brand awareness
More conversions
More sales
More revenue
Cheaper investment than paid traffic
At the same time, it’s not all positive. The biggest disadvantage is that it takes longer than paid traffic to see the effects of organic traffic. In other words, it takes longer to generate organic traffic to your site than it does to get paid traffic to your site. This is because organic traffic is based on people clicking through to your site from search, and the only way they’ll do this is if they see content that’s relevant to them. Creating this content in the form of blog posts, infographics, videos, landing pages, etc. takes time.
Comparing Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic
One of the most important distinctions is the one between organic and paid traffic. While both will bring more visitors to your site, the technique behind each is different and will also affect your budget dissimilarly.
So what is organic traffic in marketing?
Organic traffic only refers to people clicking through to a webpage of your site that they discover in organic search results. This is after they’ve entered a specific keyword or keyword phrase and decided that your content answered their question the best.
For example, they could be looking for actionable advice on how to start a blog. They see your blog post in the search results, decide that your meta description will give them the answers they need, and so click on your result.
Organic traffic is traffic that you don’t pay a search engine for. It’s traffic that flows to your site as long as you maintain Google’s SERP ranking for your keywords against all the other competitors on the search results. You only pay the cost of ideating and writing the blog post (which could just be sweat equity).
Paid traffic, on the other hand, is traffic that you pay for through ads like Google Ads when you successfully bid on relevant keywords to your site. Running Google Ads is essentially “renting” space on the SERPs for however long you choose. As soon as you stop running these ads, you won’t have placement on the SERPs for your keywords anymore (and so lose the paid traffic).
These ads appear above organic results in the SERPs. So, while you do enjoy higher placement for your search results with ads, they don’t ensure consistent traffic over the long term (unless you spend money over the long term). Organic traffic can be consistent traffic if you optimize your content in such a way—keeping it fresh and relevant over time—that search engines continually show it to people for various keywords.
Comparing Organic Traffic vs. Direct Traffic
As mentioned above, organic traffic is traffic that arrives on your site from people performing searches for keywords or topics on search engines like Google. This traffic lands on your site because these people believe that your webpage’s content will answer their questions and be consistent with the relevance of their search queries.
Direct traffic is when people either type your URL directly into their browsers’ address bars or click to your site from a bookmarked link. For instance, if someone types “https://www.thegloriouscompanyltd.com/contentmarketing” into their address bar and lands on our agency’s content marketing service page, that’s an example of direct traffic to our site.
The interesting thing about direct traffic, though, is that sometimes it’s not 100% clear where it actually comes from. That’s because analytics tools don’t always succeed in determining where your traffic really comes from; in these mysterious cases, it’s just counted as direct traffic.
Here’s where your direct traffic can actually come from:
HTTPS to HTTP — Secure sites are HTTPS (you can see this in your browser’s address bar with the lock next to the URL) while sites that aren’t secure are still HTTP. If you still haven’t updated to an HTTPS site, then you won’t see traffic coming from other HTTPS sites as direct traffic, but, rather, as referral traffic. You can easily upgrade your site, though, with a third-party SSL certificate to make it secure.
Real direct traffic — The most legitimate source of direct traffic is when people type your URL into their browsers’ address bars.
Internal employees — When your employees land on your site, they usually don’t have their IP filtered from web analytics.
Improper redirects and missing tracking codes — If you fail to use legitimate SEO redirects for pages you’ve taken down, redirect chains may not be properly logged. As a result, Google Analytics will count a redirect as direct traffic when it’s really not. The same can be said about missing tracking codes on pages like landing pages. If your tracking codes aren’t working the way they should, Google Analytics will count that as direct traffic instead of organic traffic.
Your customers — Let’s say you have a portal on your site onto which customers log on. This can be counted as direct traffic when it’s not.
Certain email clients — Believe it or not, clicks from emails sent through Outlook or Thunderbird may not pass on referring information. Instead, you guessed it, it’s again counted as direct when it’s not.
Mobile traffic — A few years ago, Groupon ran an experiment, in which it de-indexed its site for 6 hours, that revealed that as much as 60% of direct traffic is actually organic traffic. Mobile users saw a 50% decline in direct traffic when the site was de-indexed; traditional desktop users only saw a decline of between 10% and 20%. That’s because mobile apps don’t really pass on referral information.
Here's How You Can Increase Your Organic Traffic
You can increase organic traffic to your site. It revolves around these factors:
Credit: Google
Keyword research — Use a tool like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, or Mangools to determine what keywords or keyword phrases you want your site and its pages (like blog posts and landing pages) to organically rank for. Then target the people using these search terms with your content.
Topic research — Closely related to keyword research, topic research expands on your keyword research by ideating what actual topics you want to write about, building on the keywords you identified.
Content creation — Once you’ve mapped out your keywords and the topic you believe will have good resonance for your intended audience (the content strategy), you’re ready to start writing your content. After that, content marketing strategies like video, social, and SEO-optimized blogging can spread the reach of your content far and wide.
Refresh existing content — Increasing your organic traffic isn’t just dependent on creating brand-new content. You can also update your old content with newer, more relevant information and statistics to bring it back on Google’s algorithmic radar.
Optimize new and old content — Ensure that your on-page SEO is sound. This includes your page’s and blog post’s SEO titles or title tags, your meta descriptions, and ALT text and descriptions for your images.
Technical SEO — This behind-the-scenes SEO is just as vital. This includes Core Web Vitals and Schema.org. Core Web Vitals are crucial to measuring your site’s loading performance, which is critical to the user experience you present your site visitors. This is one of the most important aspects of getting your site to rank highly in the SERPs. Measure your Core Web Vitals by visiting Pagespeed Insights. Schema.org is markup language that essentially translates the normal way humans speak into structured data that’s easier understood by Google’s crawlers and robots. Implementing structured data also helps your site to rank higher in the SERPs.
Link building — Building a strong backlink profile for your site is key, too. The more links you have pointing back to your domain, the higher your site’s Authority Score and the higher you’ll climb in the SERPs.
Outreach — Get backlinks and more exposure for your site by reaching out to other site owners. This is especially effective if you’ve just created a new blog post that’s more informative and authoritative than what’s currently in the Top 10 results of the 1st SERP for the keyword you’re targeting. You can then reach out to all other websites that are linking to the top results, tell them you’ve created a better piece of content, and ask them to link to yours instead.
Using Semrush (and Other Tools) to Get More Organic Traffic to Your Website
Using a web-analytics tool like Semrush empowers you to bring more organic traffic to your site. Here’s how.
Step 1: Perform a Technical Site Audit
First of all, run a site audit in Semrush to check for any existing performance issues on your site. In your SEO Dashboard, head to the Site Audit tool and click on “Create Project.” Enter your domain name and create your project. Configure your various site audit settings, such as the domain and limit of pages and crawler settings.
Credit: Semrush
Once the site audit has run its course, you’ll receive a Site Health score when you click on your project name again. Head over to the Issues tab to see Errors, Warnings, and Notices and how you can fix these.
Credit: Semrush
With this out of the way, you’re ready to do some keyword research!
Step 2: Determine Your Keywords and Research Your Topic
There are two ways to go about keyword research.
First, you can simply research the keywords that you know your customers will be searching for on Google. For instance, let’s suppose you run a pet shop specializing in dog food. Your customers will likely be searching for terms like “nutritious dog food” or “best dog food for puppies”—phrases like that.
Credit: Semrush
Within Semrush, head to the Keyword Overview tool and enter your keyword or keyword phrases. You’ll instantly get deep insight into the viability of trying to target this keyword in your content, whether that’s a blog post, landing page, or article. You’ll see the keyword’s:
Volume
Keyword difficulty
CPC
Keyword variations
Intent
Related keywords
Knowing this information empowers you to know whether it’ll be worth it to optimize your content for the keyword.
The second way of performing keyword research is with a keyword-gap analysis. This is where you’ll research your competitors’ sites to see what organic keywords are driving in organic traffic to them. Your goal is to see which keywords you either don’t yet rank for or which keywords your competitors are ranking higher for than you.
Credit: Semrush
Head on over to the Keyword Gap tool within the Competitive Research section of your SEO Dashboard. Here’s where you’ll enter your domain and up to four of your competitors at a time. Pay extra special attention to the Missing and Weak result tabs in the keyword-gap analysis. Missing stands for all the keywords for which your competitors rank, but for which you don’t yet rank. Weak stands for the keywords for which you rank lower than your competitors. Make a play for select keywords in these two categories by featuring them in the new content you’ll create on your site, taking care to address the pain points and questions people have when searching for these search queries on search engines.
Set Up Your Google My Business Profile
This only applies if you run a business, regardless of whether your customers are all online or you see them in person. Setting up a Google My Business profile won’t take long, and it’ll help you show up in Google’s local search results like Google Map Pack.
Step 3: Monitor Your Organic Traffic Results
The last step in your journey of bringing more organic traffic to your site is regularly checking to see if you are successful. Remember that the process of bringing organic traffic to your site is a constant one and so demands consistent monitoring of your site’s traffic.
As a website owner, you can check your traffic three ways:
Semrush (or other SEO tools)
What is organic traffic in Google Analytics, and where can you find it?
Credit: Google Analytics
In Google Analytics 4, which is the latest version of Google Analytics, simply head to Reports. Then, go to Acquisition and then Traffic Acquisition. Once there, you’ll see the organic search number of visits to your site for the date range you select, in a chart and grid.
In Google Search Console, head to Performance, the second from the top in the left-hand menu. Once you click on it, you’ll view the number of clicks, impressions, the average CTR (clickthrough rate), and average position for various search queries for your site.
Credit: Google Search Console
Finally, you can also get a sense of your organic traffic with Semrush’s Organic Research tool. This handy tool empowers you to understand any website’s organic keyword rankings plus its estimated organic search traffic.
Credit: Semrush
The Keywords number reveals how many keywords rank in the top 100 of the SERPs for the country selected. The Traffic number indicates how much monthly organic traffic the site receives from all these keywords in the top 100 of the SERPs.
Make Organic Traffic a Priority
Now, you have a crystal-clear idea of what organic traffic is, how it benefits your site, and what you can do to increase it. You also have a clear understanding of how this type of traffic differs from the others. Organic traffic is some of the most valuable kind of traffic that you can bring to your site. It has numerous benefits and relatively few drawbacks.
Start increasing your site’s organic traffic right now by creating high-quality content that surpasses that of your competitors. And be sure to research your keywords and topics well, while optimizing your content for SEO. You’ll eventually build a consistent and strong stream of traffic this way, which can increase your conversions and revenue!
Have any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below!
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