Can you buy organic search traffic?

What you need to know about buying website traffic from organic search results.

If you have a website you may have heard the term organic traffic or seen it in Google Analytics. You may be wondering what it is and how it differs from direct, cpc, social media, or referral traffic sources. Here’s what you need to know about organic traffic and how to increase it.

What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is site sessions (or visits) from organic search results. Search engines use hundreds of signals to decide where to rank sites in search results for different keywords. The traffic sites receive from people searching and clicking through to their site is known as organic traffic.

Why is organic traffic important?

Millions of people each day rely on search engines to find websites. They search brands, products, information, and more. Search engines have become extremely good at delivering highly relevant results that closely match their search. This is why organic search is the #1 way people find websites on the internet. (source) For most websites, it is their largest source of web traffic.

Organic traffic vs. paid search traffic

Paid search (or “CPC”) is a traffic medium that also comes from search engines, however, is different from organic traffic. CPC stands for “cost per click”, meaning advertisers pay a certain amount every time a searcher clicks on their result in paid search ads.

Organic results appear entirely based on the relevancy of a page to a keyword and there is no payment involved in their rankings or traffic. Paid search positioning, on the other hand, is bought by advertisers through Google Ads. CPC is the bought version of search traffic whereas organic traffic is completely free.

How to increase organic traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website’s rankings to increase or improve organic traffic. It involves researching how people are searching for a site and understanding how to rank for the keywords they are searching.

There are many factors that go into getting a website to rank and drive traffic including (but not limited to):

• On-page signals (headers, on-page text, images, metadata)
• Technical signals (robots.txt, page speed, mobile-friendliness)
• Off-page signals (backlinks, social media presence)

If you are looking to grow your organic traffic, there is an abundance of agencies and specialists that provide SEO services. Otherwise, with some time on your hands, you can also try to run your own SEO program. Here are some helpful tips to get started.

Tracking organic traffic with Google Analytics

There are a variety of ways you can check your site’s organic traffic data. One of the most common ways is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to see where your traffic comes from and how it engages with your site.

Once you have Google Analytics set up, you can access your organic traffic by navigating to Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. This will show the different way users access your site.

From there, select Medium as your primary dimension. This will allow you to see the different mediums driving traffic to your site, including organic traffic.

One thing to note is organic includes traffic from all search engines. If you are interested in finding organic traffic from a specific search engine, you can set your primary dimension to medium: organic and your secondary dimension to source.

Tracking organic traffic with Google Search Console

Google also provides a free tool called Google Search Console, which offers additional data about your organic traffic. This includes data about:

• Keywords driving traffic to your site
• Search results driving traffic to your site (web, image, video)
• Impressions and click-through-rate for your keywords
• Average rankings for your keywords

One thing to note is Google Search Console only includes organic traffic from Google and if you want to see traffic from all search engines, you will need to refer to Google Analytics. That said, about 90% of all searches happen on Google (source), so this data should be reliable.

Closing thoughts

Organic traffic can be key for your website to gain visibility on the web. By improving rankings, you can grow your traffic and be discovered by your audience as they search the web.

SEO is a worthwhile investment and can have lasting impacts for your business. Since this traffic is free (unlike cpc traffic), the return on investment can be significant.

That said, ranking for keywords is no easy task and requires constant upkeep. Websites are constantly competing to rank for search terms and drive traffic. This is why it can be best to hire experts to help you create and manage an effective SEO program.