Organic traffic

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Definition

Organic traffic, essential in any digital marketing strategy, refers to the set of visitors that come from organic results from Google and other search engines, such as Yahoo. These results, as distinct from paid advertisements, are displayed in response to a specific user query entered in the browser’s search bar.

In SEO, organic traffic is a key indicator, not only to measure the volume of visitors, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of your local and global SEO strategy. High organic traffic is often synonymous with high quality content and good visibility in the results pages. It is also a crucial factor in improving the ranking of your website.

SUMMARY

The different sources of traffic

In digital marketing, there are different types of traffic sources, and it is crucial to know what they are and how to differentiate between them. Most web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, classify traffic sources into several types, which we list below.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic refers to all users who come to your site via a link on a site external to yours.

Paid traffic (Paid Search)

Paid traffic, or “Paid Search”, represents all users who come to your site through online search engine advertising campaigns such as Google Ads, or through online social media advertising, such as Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. Paid search is also known as SEA (Search Engine Advertising).

E-mail traffic

Email traffic refers to visitors who come to your site via email. This can be through emailing campaigns or an email newsletter.

Direct traffic

Direct traffic refers to all users who visit your website by typing your site’s URL directly into the browser’s search bar.

Social traffic

Social traffic refers to all Internet users who visit your site via social networks.

	Source	Cost	User intent	Examples
Organic traffic	Organic search results	Free	Information, Navigation, Commercial, Transactional	Pages ranked by keyword
Reference traffic	External links	Free (except for collaborations)	Information, Navigation, Commercial	Links to your site from external blogs
Direct traffic	Direct URL entry	Free	Navigation, Transactions	Enter a site’s URL directly into the search bar
Paid traffic	Advertising campaigns (online)	Paying	Informative, Transactional, Commercial	Google Ads and Facebook Ads
E-mail traffic	Emailling campaigns	Variable	Informative, Transactional, Commercial	Newsletter
Social traffic	Social media	Free (except paid advertising)	Information, Navigation, Commercial, Transactional	Social media posts

Benefits of organic traffic

Organic traffic is surely the most profitable and most important type of traffic your website can have. However, it is important to note that other traffic sources are also very important. The main benefits of organic traffic include :

Free: Organic traffic is generated naturally and does not involve any cost.
Qualified leads: Internet users who click on natural results tend to be more interested and are more likely to become customers.
Sustainability: If your SEO strategy is successful, the results will last for the long and very long term.
Cost-effectiveness: Organic traffic is extremely cost-effective. It represents no direct cost, lasts over the long term and attracts qualified leads that are more likely to convert (time/cost/benefit).
Increased credibility and trust: A high position in search results will reinforce the credibility and authority of your brand and website.

How can you find out your organic traffic?

There are several options for tracking your organic traffic. If you are the manager or owner of a website, you can access your statistics for free at :

These are the two free tools that Google makes available to webmasters to know and track the statistics of their websites. If you are interested in Google Search Console and want to know more, we recommend that you take a look at our Google Search Console Guide.

It is important to note that Google Search Console data is not always accurate, even if it is extremely reliable.

If you want to know the organic traffic of your competitors or any other site, you will have to use paid tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestics, etc.

How can I increase my organic traffic?

If you want to increase your organic traffic, you will obviously have to work on the natural referencing of your site. To do this, you will need to implement an SEO strategy for your website.

It is important to remember that developing and implementing an effective SEO strategy is a time-consuming task and requires some experience in the field. This is why using an SEO agency may be the right decision.

If you decide to handle your SEO strategy yourself, here are some tips and areas of work that will help you generate organic traffic.

Create quality content: Develop quality, unique and original content that responds to the needs and questions of internet users. Google’s main goal is to provide the best possible response to visitors’ queries. If your content meets this condition, you will have a good chance of being favoured by Google’s algorithm.
Optimise your content: even if your content is of quality, there are some rules and best practices to apply to optimise your content for search engines. These rules are simple: follow a logical Hn structure (H1, H2, H3, etc.), optimise your meta-title and meta-description tags, optimise your page’s internal links, create backlinks to your content and target relevant keywords.
Technical optimisation: if you want to appear at the top of search engine results, technical optimisation of your site is essential.
User experience (UX) optimisation: optimise the design of your site so that it is intuitive, pleasant, with fast loading times and an optimal mobile experience (responsive).
Backlinks: Developing a smart backlinks strategy to increase the relevance of your content to Google and drive traffic (referrals) to your website.

Bonus: List of tools to improve your organic traffic

To help you increase your organic traffic, we list below the best SEO tools.

Description	Main use	Price
A web analytics service that provides detailed statistics on your site’s traffic.	Traffic tracking, visitor analysis	Free
Google tool that helps monitor, maintain and optimise a site’s presence in search results.	Ranking monitoring, SEO diagnostics	Free
A suite of marketing tools for research, keyword tracking, SEO auditing and competitor analysis.	Keyword research, competitor analysis	Paying
A set of SEO tools for backlink analysis, keyword research and site analysis.	Ranking tracking and backlink analysis	Paying
An SEO audit tool that crawls websites to collect essential technical data.	SEO audit, technical analysis of the site	Free/Paid
A popular WordPress plugin that helps optimise editorial content on a page.	Content optimisation	Free/Paid
A set of tools to improve SEO, track rankings, research keywords and analyse backlinks.	All-in-one SEO tools	Paying
An SEO tool dedicated to competitor analysis and content optimisation	Content optimisation	Paying
A SERP analyser that allows you to understand how pages are structured and ranked, to help you optimise your content.	Content optimisation	Free/Paid