What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic (sometimes called SEO traffic) is the part of a website’s traffic that comes from search engines (e.g. Google, Bing and Yahoo!), without the need for sponsored ads. Unlike paid traffic, we do not have to invest in AdWords or other online advertising tools. To achieve this, numerous organic SEO techniques are used, as we will see below.

why is organic SEO important?

What is organic traffic, what is it for and how to increase it are undoubtedly part of the first lesson in any SEO course. Why? Because if we do not manage to position ourselves naturally in the search engines, we will have to invest absurd amounts of money in paid advertising.

In addition, paid advertising does not guarantee that we will appear in the first pages of search results. Google, Bing and Yahoo!, as well as other search engines, value quality sites with relevant content more than those that only use sponsored ads. In other words, they favor sites capable of generating good SEO traffic.

And there is no point in promoting our website on social media or even on radio or television, if we are not “important” to search engines.

how to get organic SEO traffic?

Among the main organic SEO techniques that we can use to generate natural traffic are the following:

Submitting our site to web directories
Exchanging links with other pages (linkbuikding) or getting better positioned pages to link to our site (link juice)
Publish links to our site in blogs, discussion forums, social networks, etc.
Create search engine optimized content (off-page SEO)
Improve the quality and performance of the website (on-page SEO)

But before deploying an SEO strategy to get organic traffic, we have to determine the latter with a web analytics tool. Only then can we measure the results and adjust the organic SEO strategy in the right direction. For this, the best tool at our disposal is Google Analytics.

how to measure organic traffic in Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows us to know different aspects of the traffic that reaches our site over a period of time: number and duration of sessions, audience characteristics, pages or sections visited, bounce rates, acquisitions and conversions, among others.

To measure our organic traffic in Google Analytics, we just need to click on the “Acquisition” tab. This view shows us the web traffic broken down into different categories: direct traffic, referral traffic, search traffic and campaign traffic. In the Search traffic part it shows us, in turn, two types of traffic: organic and paid.

What interests us most about the organic traffic report in Google Analytics is the list of keywords. Along with the keywords, we will see the number of visits and pages per visit, the duration of the sessions, the percentage of new visits and the bounce rate. With that information, we can begin to rethink changing those keywords that produce few visits or a high bounce rate.

Every time we add new content to our site, we will have to monitor in Google Analytics if the keywords of that content are working. That way, we will be gaining extra SEO traffic points, which will eventually translate into more visits and conversions