What Is Organic Traffic? (And Tips To Increase It)

Everything you need to know about organic traffic, including the best methods to get more search engine traffic to your website.

Table of Contents

•   What Is Organic Traffic?
•   Why Is Organic Traffic Important?
•   Organic Traffic Vs. Paid Search Traffic
•   Best Ways to Increase Organic Traffic
•   How To Check Organic Traffic?
•   Learn More About Organic Traffic

For beginners to SEO, the terms organic traffic, paid traffic, and direct traffic can be confusing, but they don’t have to be.

In this post, you’ll learn what organic traffic is, why it is the most important form of traffic you can get to your website, and the best ways to increase your organic traffic levels. 

What Is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the number of visits to a website coming from a search engine’s organic results and not paid ads.

When users type a query in a search engine (such as Google or Bing), they are presented with a set of results that includes both the pages ranking in the top positions organically and a set of ads (usually denoted with the word Sponsored or Ad) to differentiate them from the organic results.

When a user clicks on any of the organic results and visits a website, this is recorded in analytics tools as organic search traffic

Why Is Organic Traffic Important?

The reason is simple: Organic traffic is free and targeted.

Users typing a query in a search engine have a very specific intent, and if you can provide them with a solution or answer to their question, you will more likely gain a new customer, email subscriber, or follower.

In addition to the above, organic traffic is important because it increases website trust, which has several additional benefits.

Users trust Google, and websites that rank organically in the top positions of Google are trusted by users. This means it is more likely to convert an organic visitor than a visitor from Facebook or another medium.

Other benefits of organic SEO traffic include:

•     Organic traffic can be scaled by publishing more content.
•     It provides more visibility for local businesses.
•     It’s measurable and quantifiable.
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• However, organic traffic also has some disadvantages.

Generating organic traffic from search engines takes more time than PPC paid traffic.
Ranking organically for popular terms is very difficult, if not impossible.
Creating high-quality and authoritative content that can get you high rankings is expensive and time-consuming.

Organic Traffic Vs. Paid Search Traffic

The main difference between organic and paid search traffic is that organic traffic is free, while paid traffic is paid for.

There are two ways to get traffic from search engines. The first way is to rank your website high in the search results using SEO, and the second way is to use Google Ads to place your ads on top of the organic results with advertising.

With SEO, you can get traffic for free 24/7, but it’s not instant. It takes time for SEO to work and generate results.

On the other hand, with PPC advertising, you can get faster results, but you will have to pay each time someone clicks on your ads and visits your website.

• Paid Search: As explained above, this is traffic coming to your website from paid search ads. 

• Direct Traffic: When someone visits your website directly by typing the URL in a browser, this is recorded in Google Analytics as direct traffic.

• Referral Traffic: When someone clicks a link on another website and visits your website, this is recorded as referral traffic.

•  Social: This is traffic from social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.).

•  Display: Refers to traffic coming from paid ads on other websites.

Best Ways to Increase Organic Traffic

The best way to increase organic traffic and get more visits from search engines is to follow proven white-hat SEO practices. The most effective tips are:

1. Publish Content That Matches The Search Intent

One of the characteristics of users using a search engine to look for information is that they have a specific intent. Your job is to satisfy their intent by providing them with the right kind of information.

Put yourself in the user’s shoes and consider what content they want to consume. Search Google for your topic and analyze the top organic results. 

Put yourself in the user’s shoes and consider what content they want to consume. Search Google for your topic and analyze the top organic results. 

• Look at the type of content that is ranking: Is it long-form articles, product reviews, short posts, or detailed guides?
• Notice the tone and style – is it formal, conversational, or technical?
• Pay attention to the format and structure. For instance, if the top results are listicles, your content might benefit from a similar format.

2. Find Keywords To Use In Your SEO Strategy

You need to do your keyword research and find out which keywords to target with your content. For a page to rank organically in search engines, it has to target a specific keyword.

​ Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ahrefs to find keywords related to a specific topic.

    Look for terms with a decent search volume but low keyword difficulty (these are your head keywords).

    Look for more specific and less common than highly competitive keywords (these are your long-tail keywords).

    Use a keyword research tool to find the keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ websites.

Once you have a list of potential keywords, focus on creating high-quality, informative content that naturally integrates your target keywords. 

3. Include Relevant Keywords In Your Page Titles

 The page title is one of the most critical SEO factors. Search engines use the title to get an idea of what a page is about, which is also shown in the search results.

A good page title includes search terms that users can recognize and is interesting to encourage them to click on it and visit your website.

Keep your titles below 60 characters and use your target keyword or close variations at the beginning of the title.

4. Perform Regular Content Audits

 One of the best practices to follow to increase your organic traffic is to perform regular content audits. Over time, content can become outdated or less relevant, negatively impacting your site’s performance.

Follow these tips: 

•  Delete, merge, or redirect pages that are not considered helpful content.

•  Update your top-performing pages by adding/changing text and making the content more relevant to the user’s intent.

•  Find pages ranking in positions 5-10 on Google and optimize them by finding gaps between your content and what is ranking in the top 5 positions.

•  Optimize your top-ranking pages for featured snippets.

5. Get Links From Other Websites

Backlinks

from other relevant websites (that don’t carry the nofollow attribute) act as ‘votes of trust,’ improving a website’s organic rankings.

In the SEO world, this is known as link building and is part of off-page SEO.