Organic Traffic

What is Organic Traffic?

The term organic traffic refers to all visits to your website that are triggered by unpaid search results. In other words, a web user gets to your site by entering a query in a search engine like Google or Bing and clicking on your page link when it shows up in the search results.

Organic traffic is different than direct traffic (visitors who get to your site by typing in the URL or clicking a bookmark) and referral traffic (visitors who come to your site by clicking a link on another website). It also differs from paid traffic (visitors who come to your site through a pay-per-click ad or by other paid means).

One of the primary goals of search engine optimization (SEO) is to drive organic traffic to a website.

Why Does Organic Traffic Matter?

When your site gets organic traffic, it means that real internet users are clicking your site links in their search engine results because they believe that your content will answer their question or solve a problem. The more organic traffic, the more eyes you have on your web pages, giving you more opportunities to convert prospects to leads.

By increasing organic traffic to your site, you can also increase your search engine rankings (so that your listing shows up ahead of your competitors). This is because lots of traffic to your site signals to Google (and other search engines) that your content is high-quality and relevant to web searchers and should therefore be prioritized in the results for certain queries.

Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic

There are many different SEO strategies that can help increase your organic rankings. To get started, you can:

  • Write website content that answers questions and/or solves problems for your target audience.
  • Produce high-quality, original content on a regular basis.
  • Perform keyword research to optimize your content for relevant search terms.
  • Use keywords to optimize your meta titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags (on images) on all website pages.
  • Use an analytics tool to get insights into the pages that are driving the most organic traffic to your site.
  • Use responsive web design to make sure your website looks good on all screen sizes, from desktops to smartphones.
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