What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is important for businesses. The term “organic traffic” is used for referring to the visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid (“organic”) search results. Organic traffic is the opposite of paid traffic, which defines the visits generated by paid ads. Visitors who are considered organic find your website after using a search engine like Google or Bing, so they are not “referred” by any other website.
The easiest way to increase the organic traffic of your website is to publish quality and relevant content to you website – a blog is usually the best way to do this. See more about blog posts for business here. Having an active blog on your website, however, is only one of the strategies used for acquiring new visitors. The branch of online marketing that focuses directly on improving organic traffic is called SEO – search engine optimisation.
Organic traffic is obtained from the appearance of the site in the results of a search that users perform in search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Organic traffic is free traffic, this aspect being what makes it the type of traffic that website owners want the most.
Where do you see organic traffic in Google Analytics?
If you don’t have Google Analytics for your business, you absolutely should. It’s a free tool to track your website statistics and without these statistics you can’t see how well your website and content is performing and what you need to improve.
The first step you need to take to analyse organic traffic, SEO traffic, in Google Analytics is to access the Channel Grouping report, which you find by clicking on Acquisition / All Traffic / Channels. Thus, you can view the different website traffic by sources. Accessing Organic Search, you will be able to analyse in detail the indicators corresponding to the organic traffic.
This report is one of the most important in evaluating the results of the SEO optimisation strategy. You can analyse more sophisticated metrics, such as landing pages and keywords that have attracted the most organic traffic and many other relevant indicators.
For those who analyse in detail the traffic sources of a site, the appearance of “not provided” in Google Analytics has begun to shake with the percentage increase of this traffic. Basically, “not provided” traffic is organic traffic coming from the search engine, after accessing the displayed results for different keywords. If you connect the Search Console with the Analytics account, you can see all the information from Search Console in Analytics integrated with conversions. Now you will know which keywords convert better and focus on them to increase organic traffic brought by them and have more sales.
Improving the time spent on the site, after a user has reached a page on your website or online store, increasing the number of pages viewed in a session and lowering the bounce rate, can be a clear sign that it provides a pleasant experience for those who visit your site. After this you need to improve conversion, what the users do on your site after they get there, basically from here, the entire ordering process begins.
Search Engine Optimisation is continuously changing and it’s important for all businesses to make sure they keep on top of it.
What is direct traffic?
Direct traffic means all users who have entered the URL of a website directly into their browser’s search bar. Direct traffic also includes users who have clicked on a site’s link through the “Favourites” categories of a browser. Also, when we talk about direct traffic, we count users clicking on links from non-indexed documents.
The data of this traffic, in many cases, comes from the internal employees, the partners, or the current customers who pass by your site to connect to their account. But this is also indicative of great notoriety if users spontaneously come to your site.
Acquiring new visitors is essential, but retaining them is even more important. Because it is made by relevant visitors, direct traffic is an essential sign of the health of the site. The number of direct visits, their proportion in total visits, as well as the behavior of those who went directly to the site (in Google Analytics is between predefined segments, so a few clicks away) are important indicators in analyzing a website traffic quality. Web analytics tools themselves segment traffic by source and distinctly mark direct traffic.
Difference between organic and direct traffic sources
On the one hand, we have search traffic, on the other, direct traffic. There are two completely different sources. But when does someone search for the exact site address in the search engine, it is called branded search traffic.
Traffic is the unit of measurement of a website. The goal of any site is to attract traffic because a large number of visitors represents a large number of customers for the company, and customers generate revenue. At the same time, it is important to know what types of traffic are, how and when we can attract visitors.
The direct traffic is represented by the direct accesses of the site. This type of traffic includes users who access the same website directly and regularly without using search engines. As I mentioned earlier, time spent on the site is a significant indicator that suggests to Google that your site offers quality content and thus gives you more authority (domain authority).
How to increase organic traffic?
We all want more organic traffic on our websites. Whether it’s for a business site, service provider, or online stores, in each of these cases, a higher volume of relevant traffic is reflected in the increase in the number of orders, turnover, or revenue from advertising.
Always be mindful of SEO
The main advantage of SEO is that it offers permanent results. Instead of channeling your efforts on adverts spread all over the internet, you better set up your site for search engine robots that roam your web pages. An essential thing to look for is the choice of keywords, selecting them by the keyword search volume. They help you grow organically in search engines, as long as you maintain a balance between high-search words and low-competition words.
Create a blog for your site
If your website does not have an active blog, you must create a blog for your site. Blogging is a very effective way to attract the audience and generate more traffic and, therefore, more sales for your business. Why? Because it helps SEO.
Google and other search engines like new content, often. A blog is the perfect way to keep adding new content to your website without affecting you main cornerstone content. There are many ways to create a blog for your site. Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress come with a blog built-in.
Page Load Speed
Your page loading time is important for a few reasons.
First of all, if your load speed is too slow, Google will recognize this, and it will harm your ranking. A slow website will also impact the way your website visitors engage with your pages, as a result, those negative interactions will hurt your ranking too.
Research shows 40% of visitors will abandon websites if the page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. What’s even more shocking is that 80% of those visitors won’t return to that website. This is terrible for your SEO ranking because it ultimately kills traffic to your site. But on the flip side, if your page loads fast, people will keep coming back.
Be active on Social Media
It is said that if you are not present on social media, you do not exist. For your business, quality content on the site, and the blog is important, but you will also need mentions on other websites (backlinks) and on social media. Publishing your blog post on social media will send Google social signals that can help in getting better rankings.
User-experience Design
The first impact and all the experience that the user has on the site matters on how your website converts. Often, the high bounce rate is due to a slow loading web page or hard to navigate content. In other words, if we get to a site and can’t find the navigation menu, and are attacked by an avalanche of pop-ups, we will most likely not have the patience to look for what we need. See more about User Experience Design here.
First paragraph and Headlines
As a ranking factor on-page, the first paragraph and headlines are important. All the elements on the page are optimised according to the keywords. The first paragraph should contain the main important keywords and explain what will the user find in the article. The subtitles that appear on the page are equally important because they will help the reader to understand very quickly what they will find on that page. If a user scans the page and in 10-15 seconds does not fin what he needs, it is very likely to lose it. The subtitles also help in structuring the content.
SEO Optimized Images & videos
Images are very important for any website, especially for eCommerce stores – we all want to see what we’re buying right? But, all images must be of a high quality and optimised for the web. That means not to high in file size (KB) and correctly sized in dimensions. Large images will slow down the page load speed and that’s very bad for SEO.
All images need an Alt (alternative) tag, this should be a brief keyword description of the image content.
Title and Meta Descriptions
The title and meta description are very important. It is how your link will look in search engine results pages, which describes what the page the user will reach after clicking.
You need to introduce the keywords for which you want the page to rank in title and meta description and maintain a clear and converting message. It improves the CTR, and you will get more visitors on your website.
Publish quality content for your target audience
You need to know your target market well and understand how to first, attract their attention and secondly, to turn them into customers. Providing detailed information about your products and services and showing that you are an authority in that market place is vitally important. Creating content optimised for organic traffic and on the right topic will bring quality visitors that will convert in leads and bring more sales.
If you need any help or advice with increasing your organic traffic, get in touch for a free, no-obligation consultation.
Coast Creative provides marketing, website development, branding & creative design, SEO and social media services.
