Organic traffic generally refers to non-paid traffic, so includes traffic from:
- Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
- Referral traffic from other sites – visitors arriving at your site after clicking on a link on another website.
- Direct traffic – someone typing in your URL into a browser.
Such traffic is all achieved organically, rather than through a source of advertising or paid promotion of some kind.
On the other hand…
Paid traffic is where you are spending money to attract those visitors to your website. This might include:
- Using paid listings on search engines.
- Paying to promote your content/link on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and give it a much wider audience.
- Showing ads on other sites around the net, usually using an ad network like Google’s Display Ads within Adwords.
- Visitors arriving at your site because of an affiliate program you run, i.e. incentivizing others to link through to your site in return for monetary compensation of some kind, usually either on a sale or some other user action after they arrive.
In order to generate organic traffic, it is paramount to rank high in search engines; not only for the home page of your website, but most if not all the inner pages as well. For example, if you own an online women’s clothing boutique, keywords that would be focused on to push organic traffic to your home page may consist of: chic women’s clothing, boho women’s clothing, women’s clothing Los Angeles. However, on your website, most likely you would have numerous categories for specific types of apparel–ranging from black maxi dresses, romper, tanks, pants, shorts etc…
For every category and sub-category, it is imperative to not only make the pages look visually appealing, but designed, written and coded in a manner that will help improve search engine ranking. Furthermore, the pages have to appeal in a manner other website owners will want to share on their website; which in return generates one of the most important aspects of search engine ranking–backlinks.
To learn more and to see how we can be of help, please contact us.
