Organic traffic

Spend less money on Google Ads? One way to reduce advertising costs is to improve the quality and quantity of organic traffic . What is organic traffic and how important is it to your website’s SEO? I explain it to you on this page.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is website traffic that comes to your website through a search engine’s organic search results. Through tools such as Google Analytics or the Google Search Console, it is possible to see where users of your website come from: organic traffic is thus easily measurable.

Organic and paid traffic: the differences

By organic traffic, I mean the visitors to your website who come here from the organic results of a search engine. There is also paid traffic: these are visitors who come to your website through an SEA campaign. Direct website traffic are those visitors who enter your website’s URL directly into the search bar.

The more organic traffic, the better (in theory). This means that you need to invest less in advertising in order to attract visitors to your website.

Organic traffic in a nutshell

No time for a long article? No problem. Watch the video below for a summary of this article.

The benefits of organic traffic

In the digital marketing landscape, both organic and paid traffic are vital. However, organic traffic has some unique advantages over paid traffic that are worth considering for larger organizations.(1)

1. Sustainability: one of the biggest advantages of organic traffic is sustainability. Unlike paid campaigns, which stop generating traffic once funding runs out, SEO efforts continue to consistently draw traffic to the site long after the initial work is complete. This makes organic traffic a sustainable and cost-effective long-term strategy.
2. Credibility and trust: research shows that users tend to trust organic search results more than paid ads. This trust can contribute to higher click rate (CTR) and relatively high conversion rates.
3. Better ROI: Although SEO requires time and effort, studies show that organic traffic often offers a better return on investment (ROI) than paid traffic. Generating traffic through SEO is often significantly cheaper in the long run than paying for ads.
4. Competitive advantage: high organic ranking can give a company a competitive advantage. Although competitors can bid for the same paid keywords, they cannot so easily mimic the organic ranking built by SEO.
5. High-quality traffic: organic traffic can often be higher quality than paid traffic. Users who find what they are looking for through organic search results are often further along in the customer journey, which can lead to higher conversion rates.

Organic traffic and paid traffic should not be seen as conflicting strategies. Instead, it is important to see them as complementary.

When do you deploy paid traffic and when organic traffic?

The trade-off between getting paid or organic traffic can be tricky. In brief, my consideration of this.(2)

1. Paid traffic is used to test certain search terms in the short term (what converts well and what does not precisely not).
2. You use organic traffic to “lock in” the search terms that have been identified as positive and actually optimize for them.

After all, SEO takes a little longer than SEA, but offers the discussed benefits (for once you really rank higher in Google).

My advice

I recommend that you get busy improving content on the website and in the ads. Perform keyword analysis, make sure your website is good and create interesting content for visitors. These are all SEO tools that ensure you optimize your website, which will only increase organic traffic and actually decrease your advertising costs.