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If you’ve dipped a toe at all into the world of SEO, you’ve probably heard the term organic traffic. What is it exactly? Why is it so valuable to your business, and how can you increase it? This article covers the basics on organic traffic and how to boost it to help your business grow.
Put simply, there are two ways to generate traffic from search engines: ensure your website ranks highly in search results or set up paid ads that get your site to the top of the paid results. Let’s distinguish between these types of traffic. Organic traffic represents visits to your website that come from a search engine and not paid advertising. (Paid advertising generates paid traffic, which also plays a part in your overall SEO strategy.)
Here’s how organic traffic works. Let’s say you’re a homeowner and you realize it’s time to purchase a new furnace. It’s January in northern Illinois, and it’s cold. You know you need to do some research, so you navigate to your preferred search engine and type in a search term like furnace installation. Your search engine generates a set of results with paid ads (noted by a small symbol that says “ad”) and organically ranked search results. You then click on the top three or four websites as you’re exploring your potential furnace purchase—these are for local HVAC companies. Your site visits are recorded by these businesses’ search analytics as organic traffic.
Organic traffic is the most valuable kind of traffic you can generate. Why? It’s free, it’s targeted, and it reaches your potential customers when they are most engaged.
Think of the furnace example. You certainly don’t want to be left out in the cold, so you’re a motivated buyer. The same is true for the searchers looking for your business. They’re highly engaged and it’s likely that if they find your business via a search engine, and you rank high in the results, you stand to gain a new customer.
The key is to rank in the top positions organically—because this increases website trust. Organic traffic is more likely to convert than traffic from paid search, direct traffic, referral traffic, social media, or other channels. What do these terms mean?
Now that you know what organic traffic is and why it’s so valuable, it’s important to focus on how to boost it. When you do, you’ll get more visits from search engine results.
First, it’s important to start somewhere productive. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process. In addition, changes to SEO strategy and search engine results are constantly evolving, even in early 2021. With this in mind, here are top tips proven to help boost your organic traffic:
SEO can be a complicated topic, but it’s critically important to your business and its future—on the web or off. Interested in learning more about boosting your organic traffic and optimizing your SEO strategy? We can help. Reach out to us to discuss.