What Is Organic Traffic?

Date First Published: 4th August 2022

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what organic traffic is in this article.

Organic traffic describes traffic that comes through search engines, such as Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and Yandex. The traffic is unpaid as visitors do not land on the website through paid ads, which appear at the top of search engines before the rest of the search results and are labelled with the word 'ad' before the hyperlink. These results are from companies that have paid to place their links at the top, where potential site visitors can easily find them.

Organic Search Results Vs Paid Search Results

Organic traffic is basically free website traffic, which is what SEO focuses on. For example, if a user searched on Google for instructions on how to attach a file to an email and they clicked on the first search result below the paid ads, the website that the searcher clicked on would be generating organic traffic as it came from Google, which is a search engine. There are hundreds of factors that determine organic search rankings. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine the position of indexed pages. Publishing high-quality content, getting backlinks, and using the meta tags appropriately can help increase the organic traffic of a website. For more information, see this article.

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Applications, such as Google Analytics can give a measure of organic traffic as a percentage. Google Analytics separates traffic that comes through search engines from paid ads, referral sites, and direct traffic. Organic traffic can be found under the acquisition section by clicking all traffic and then channels.

The higher the ranking on the search engine results page, the better the chances are of getting more organic traffic. A benefit of organic traffic is that it can be ensured that organic traffic is coming from actual people and not automated bots as organic traffic cannot be generated from automated bot software. Because people find a website using a search engine, they are not referred by any other website. In addition, companies do not have to pay for organic traffic as unlike pay-per-click advertising, where companies get charged a small amount of money each time someone clicks on one of their paid ads at the top of the search engine results page, organic website traffic will always remain free of charge.

A disadvantage of organic traffic is a lack of control as this type of website traffic can only be generated through search engine results and there is no method of knowing when a webpage will rank for a certain keyword, its position, and whether it will stay in the same position or constantly vary in ranking.