Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to any visit to a web page by a human user who does not arrive at that page through an advertisement.

Definition

In general, traffic means the flow of data on the Internet. Specifically, this refers to the access of visitors to websites. Organic traffic refers to the access of human users via search engines. It is important that you distinguish organic from paid traffic.

Paid traffic is access via advertisements or advertorials. Closely related to the concept of organic traffic are the key performance indicators (KPI) page impressions and page visits.

Organic traffic

Just as there is a distinction between organic search results and ads, you can distinguish between organic and paid traffic. On the Search Engine Result Page (SERP), the difference quickly becomes apparent. At the top you will find advertisements, below them the organic search hits. The concept is the same as for traffic differentiation.

Every view of your site by a human user represents organic traffic, regardless of whether the user finds your site via the SERP or a backlink. If you place ads on your site, the views that come to your site through those ads represent paid traffic.

You can further differentiate your organic traffic:

• Users who reach your site through a search engine
• Your social traffic via social networks
• Your direct traffic is the traffic from users who enter your URL directly.
• Referral traffic is generated by people visiting your site via backlinks.

You can track how successful your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is by comparing the amount of your organic traffic to your paid traffic. There are various tools for this, for example Google Analytics. The tool provides you as a webmaster with a variety of KPIs with which you can analyze your traffic. The program can also distinguish between traffic from your organic hits and traffic from your ads. The well-known search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing are automatically recognized by Google Analytics and you can expand the list according to your needs. For organic traffic, only hits by human users count. Therefore, good analytics programs subtract the calls by crawlers and bots from the total.

Importance of organic traffic for SEO

The amount of your organic traffic shows you how well your site is optimized for search engines when you use your tools to determine how your users are finding your site. If your analysis shows that most of your visitors find your site through backlinks, you should investigate your site. Why doesn’t the search algorithm give your site high authority? What steps can you take to help crawlers rank your site better? Before your page appears on the SERP, it is scanned by a search engine crawler, which evaluates your page based on technical data such as loading speed or page architecture. Here you can work on your Technical SEO. In addition, the search engine examines your content based on keywords or text structure.

Once the page has been indexed by Google, for example, it will be listed in the SERP and your users will be able to find the page. User behaviour is now more strongly evaluated by the algorithm than in the past. The less visitors leave your site after a short landing page visit, the lower your bounce rate or the longer users stay on your site, the better. Also the presence of your site in the rest of the net via backlinks plays an important role.if you distinguish between the different types of organic traffic, you get a good idea where you should start to gain more reach.

How do you get more organic traffic?

Your goal of your SEO work is to generate more organic traffic – unlike paid traffic, this doesn’t cost extra!

• Focus on your target audience when optimizing the content of your website. If you write your texts by keyword stuffing or other techniques for search engines, Google evaluates this negatively or at worst as spam.
• Write unique lyrics. You are competing with your competitors for the top spots on the SERP. With the WDF*IDF formula you can determine how much your text stands out from the crowd and a semantic analysis gives you clues on how to improve the word content of your page.
• Work on your backlinks. If your site is present on the Internet via links, it achieves a higher authority with the algorithms of the search engines and thus a better position on the SERP.
• If you create a clear sitemap, you not only increase the user-friendliness of your site. You can also put them in the Google Search Console to make sure that the search engine can index all your pages.
• SEO Yoast – the small plugin helps you optimize your site’s content for a keyword and write user-friendly texts.
• Monitor your KPI regularly so that you can react quickly as soon as your traffic gets worse again.

Conclusion

Organic traffic is a fundamental key performance indicator. With this metric you can quickly measure the success and reach of your site and distinguish how your users find your site. The work to achieve more traffic is extensive – you need to constantly work on optimizing your site, generate interesting and exciting content, be present in social networks or maintain your backlinks. Through SEO you can attract visitors to your site, but only through good content they will stay on your site – which is also rewarded by Google’s algorithm.