What Is Organic Traffic And Organic Search In Google Analytics

With more than 1.94 billion websites online, business owners are competing aggressively against one another to attract targeted web traffic and achieve the top search engine rankings. The term ‘web traffic’ refers to web users here. Measured in terms of user visits and sometimes sessions, web traffic is what every business owner needs to generate sales and earn profits. Web traffic can be further divided into two types:

• Organic
• Inorganic

The primary purpose of this post is to help you develop a thorough understanding of organic traffic. However, later in the post, we’ll also shed light on the main differences between organic and inorganic so you can understand how each strategy works and choose the right one for your business. You can use the table of content given below to view different sections.

Table of Content & Quick Links

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is used to describe the number of visitors that are generated directly from a search engine’s search results. Let’s say someone unfamiliar with your business is looking for products and services you’re selling or providing. In such instances, they are likely to search for your products and services using appropriate industry keywords or phrases. From these searches, your business is most likely to be listed in the top results of search engines if optimized for those keywords.

For example, someone searching for an auto shop in Victoria British Columbia for windshield repair services types a search query (phrase or term) into Google. Since your business is optimized for that phrase or a similar term, your website pops in the top searches or organic results of the search engines. This increases the likelihood that the person searching for your products or services will click your site.

This is called an organic search listing. Websites listed in these results are not paid, they are ranked by search engines, such as Google, based on their SEO efforts. The search engine deems these websites the most authoritative and relevant, listing them for the given search query. Anyone who then clicks on any of these websites in the non-paid listing present in search engine results is equal to organic traffic.

In other words, organic search traffic is the traffic that comes to sites that are ranked naturally or organically—ones that are not promoted or paid for. These sites are ranked based on their relevance and popularity.

Organic Traffic—Crucial Statistics Worth Knowing

Organic results are present right below the advertisements and map results in search engines. Search results that are found organically contain a mix of backlinks, on-page optimization and social signals. Although the SEO world is constantly changing and marketers/strategists have trouble keeping up with all the updates, the only consistent thing is the value of your buyer persona you find through organic searches.

Here are some crucial statistics that business owners should know to strategize their online marketing strategies better:

• About 61 percent of marketers say that growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.
• You can increase your organic search traffic by nearly 111 percent by updating and republishing your old blog posts with fresh content and images.
• The first five organic results in the SERPs account for nearly 67.6 percent of all clicks, while the results from six to ten organic result pages account for just 3.73 percent of the traffic.
• Organic rankings equate to high quality web traffic that is also easier to convert into sales.
• Sites listed in the top industry searches lead to a sense of trust among users.
• 94 percent of clicks in search engine result pages go to sites featured in organic results.
• Approximately 40 percent of the revenues across industries, such as retail, business services, hospitality, technology, media and entertainment, come from organic traffic.
• Organic results drive nearly 300 percent more web traffic in comparison to social media.
• Major search engines, such as Google, Bing, YouTube and Yahoo, account for approximately 70.6 percent of all web traffic.
• Organic results that rank on the first page of Google contain an average of 1,890 words.
• On average, the close rate for organic search has a 14.6 percent close rate as compared to outbound leads that have only 1.7 percent close rate.
• The highest spenders mostly turn to organic search for acquiring information.

From these statistics, you can determine the importance of optimizing your site for organic results and the traffic and business it brings. So, if you are looking to grow your sales and business profits, you should invest in strategies that get you in the top 5 organic search results for your industry.

How to Find Organic Traffic in Google Analytics

Before we share details on finding organic web traffic in Google Analytics, let us first learn about Google Analytics. To begin with, Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google to help users analyze their web traffic closely.

Although web analytics may seem like a small area of your digital presence, its implications are huge. Here’s how:

For any business, its website acts as a hub for all its digital traffic. If you’re running marketing activities, such as social media or search ads, your customers are likely to visit your site somewhere along their user journey.

Knowing that your website is the central hub of your online presence, it presents the best way to give you a holistic view of the success and effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. This is where Google Analytics comes into the picture.

Google Analytics helps track the outcome of your digital marketing efforts, allowing you to gauge and measure the success of your campaign. On the other hand, if the campaign is not delivering the desired outcome, you can tweak it.

Simply put, Google Analytics enables you to carefully analyse details about your website visitors. These valuable insights can be used to shape your business’ marketing strategy and deliver better experiences to your target audience. No wonder more than 50 million sites across the world use Google Analytics for developing or improvising their online marketing campaigns.

Now let’s focus on ‘how to find organic traffic in Google Analytics?’ Here is a step-by-step guide that will help you get started:

Step #1— The first step to finding organic traffic in Google Analytics is to open the dashboard for your website and choose the ‘Acquisition’ option. You will find this option on the main menu to the left side.

Step #2— Then, click the dropdown menu of the ‘Campaigns’ to choose ‘Organic Keywords’. Now click on one of the organic search engine listings in Google or any other search engine to view the traffic that has visited your site. This will allow you to see the percentage of your organic web traffic.

Step #3— You can change the date range to see how your organic traffic has changed. This will allow you to check if your organic traffic has become worse, improved or remained the same over the selected period.

Step #4— If you’re in the ‘Organic Keywords’ report section, then the primary dimension will be set on keywords. However, what’s important to note here is that most organic keywords will not show up in this section so it may not be helpful. Therefore, it is recommended to change the primary dimension from ‘Organic Keywords’ to ‘Source’. This change will allow you to view complete data regarding organic traffic from different search engines.

Step #5— The next step is to change the settings from ‘Source’ to ‘Landing Page’. By clicking on ‘Landing Page’, you will be able to see a list of all the pages that brought most organic traffic to your website.

Step #6— If you move to the ‘Other’ option, it will allow you to slice and dice your website’s organic traffic data from any dimension. This information can be extremely useful, especially if you’re looking to strategize better and capture a bigger market share. By using the ‘Other’ option, you can select your country and city to get geographic data from all over the world. This is the easiest way to see what part of the world your organic traffic is coming from.

Step #7— Google Analytics also allows you to add a secondary dimension to the results, thereby getting more specific results. For example, let’s say you want to know if people in your target cities are using mobile devices vs. Desktop computers to search for your products and services.

Did you know that mobile device share of organic search visits is growing rapidly? Put simply, you can use Google Analytics to generate a lot of useful reports related to your organic search traffic. You can gather and analyze this data by source, country, landing page and more.

Organic Traffic vs. Inorganic Traffic—What’s the Difference?

Besides organic search, you can also generate traffic inorganically. If you’re wondering what the difference between the two is, read on to find out all the details.

Considered to be the most valuable traffic source, organic traffic is generated through organic search results. These results appear in the list of links below ads in search results after a user types a query into the search engine. Organic results are purely based on the content of the page and its quality. In other words, your organic traffic will comprise people that have found your business links in organic searches.

Inorganic search is also known as paid search. It focuses on optimizing business through paid strategies, such as PPC (pay-per-click advertising) and paid social media advertising. This is the key difference between organic and inorganic search traffic. Businesses that focus on organic traffic generation don’t have to pay for clicks, unlike those that invest in paid search for lead generation.

So, when you buy website traffic via pay per click advertising, you pay the search engine each time someone clicks on your website ad. One of the most common types of PPC advertising is through Google Display Network.

Now that you know the basic differences between organic and inorganic searches, here’s a quick overview of the plethora of benefits of investing in organic search:

Cost

One of the top benefits of organic search over paid search is the cost. Although PPC ads guarantee placing the links and ads of your company in front of potential site visitors, they come with a high cost as the amount of cash that you spend on click-throughs eventually adds up.

However, the cost per click for organic searches is zero. All you must do is continue to implement sound SEO strategies to cost-efficiently generate quality traffic and grow your returns on your investment smartly. The more effort you put into improving your organic search traffic, the higher your website will appear in search rankings, thereby pushing competition further down the list.

Credibility

Among the top reasons why SEO Resellers Canada advocates organic search is that search engine users view these results as trustworthy. This is because organic results last long on search engine result pages as compared to paid search results.

Studies show that 1/3 of web users skip paid results in favour of the first organic result that is displayed for their search query. So, by targeting organic traffic, you can solidify your company’s web presence while building a solid reputation for your business.

Increased Conversion Ratio

By capitalizing on your organic search results, you can easily grow your business and increase the sales conversion ratio. When a consumer searches for information regarding a product or service that you sell, it shows that they are already in the research phase of the consumer engagement cycle. This is the optimal time to convert your prospects into customers.

So, if your business optimizes on search engines for organic results, you are likely to get found by your target audience. As a result, your target leads may click on your site, thereby leading to the conversion of leads into sales.

Likewise, paid search also offers tons of benefits to online business owners. Some of the key benefits of paid search are that the results are delivered in a short period. Other benefits are:

• Your website gains more visibility.
• You can get more effective results in a very short period.
• The placement of your paid ad can help increase your brand awareness.
• You can create and execute a paid search campaign in a matter of days.

If you have the budget, then we’d recommend you focus on both inorganic and organic searches to get the best results. Consider crafting a strategy that combines both organic and inorganic SEO. By doing so, you can take advantage of both strategies.

For example, when prospective customers will see your site in the top organic searches, it will give credibility to your inorganic SEO efforts. Using both organic and inorganic SEO is the best way to show Google that your site deserves a higher rank on the search engine result pages.

Top Ways to Increase Your Organic Search Traffic

As our main area of focus is organic traffic for this post, let us share with you some of the best ways to attract more traffic. The practice of increasing organic traffic is called search engine optimization. As mentioned above, using search engine optimization can help you to improve your website’s ranking in the organic searches for your industry and most searched keywords.

To attract organic search traffic through SEO, you should take the following steps

Invest in Keyword Research

Before the optimization process begins, do some legwork. Analyze what keywords and phrases your target audience uses when searching for the products and services that you are selling. A great tip that the experts at SEO Resellers Canada would suggest is to optimize keywords with low competition. This will also help your website rank higher in organic results.

Keyword phrases with high search volumes are highly competitive. They are so competitive that you may have to devote months to show up in the top searches. Therefore, instead of spending your time going after something that is highly competitive, opt for the low hanging fruit of long-tail keyword phrases. That means using low competition keywords so that you can optimize better and get faster results.

For example, let’s say you have an auto shop in Victoria British Columbia. If you try to rank for the term ‘auto shop’, it’s going to get difficult because it may be highly competitive for your industry. Instead of that, you can narrow down and optimize for long-tail key phrases, like auto shop in Victoria British Columbia.

Also, long-tail phrases are likely to resemble what an actual user would type into a search engine when looking for information or products or services. And you know what that means? It means that you’ll be able to drive better results. Studies show that using long-tail key phrases help business owners get better results due to less competition and greater relevancy.

Make Your Site is Search Engine-Friendly

Make sure that your business website is search engine friendly. You can do this by inserting meta details. This includes title tags to your website pages with descriptions. In other words, the meta title, description and URL are the three vital ingredients for an optimized web page or a blog post. These details are used to tell Google exactly what you are talking about.

Develop Quality Content

Content is crucial to website success. You need to focus on generating content that is high quality, keyword-rich and more importantly, answers the search queries of your prospects. However, it is important to understand that you shouldn’t just post content because you know publishing articles and blogs regularly can improve your organic search results. Remember that mediocre content that is full of fluff will not get you far, and it will damage your business reputation in the long run.

Your business website is a representation of your company. In most cases, it is the first impression of your business on your potential customers. Therefore, just like you won’t offer a substandard service or a product to your customer, you shouldn’t publish low quality blogs as they can negatively impact your brand image. So, quality content not just ranks better, but it also makes a good impression on prospects, converting them from potential customers into actual buyers.

Create Backlinks

To rank better in organic searches, make sure to create backlinks. A backlink is a link that points from one domain to the other. A website that provides the link is called an outbound link, while the website that receives the link is known as an inbound link.

One of the oldest SEO strategies, backlinks are still one of the best and most result-driven strategies to rank a website in the top organic searches. And this is clear from the fact that websites with the strongest links to authentic websites continue to appear in the top searches.

The key reason behind the success and relevancy of backlinks is that they act as votes of trust, thus improving organic rankings of a website. Therefore, you should encourage your clients, suppliers, industry mavens, partners and bloggers to link to your website.

Remember that the more incoming links that you have on your website, the higher your website will rank. Such websites are viewed as trustworthy and authoritative.

Don’t Violate the Rules

When trying to increase organic search traffic for your business, make sure to do it ethically and in conformance to the rules laid down by Google. If you violate the rules and use Blackhat SEO techniques to gain a higher rank in the organic searches, then sooner or later, you will be hit with a Google penalty.

Here are some of the many tips to avoid Google penalties:

• Avoid building cheap links
• Never use anchor text that is an exact match
• Never publish low quality or plagiarised content

Tap into the Power of Social Media

Create a strong presence on social media to improve your organic traffic. Build your presence on networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Also, make sure to add share buttons to your site so that your audience can share your content and help you rank better for your industry.

Use Data and Metrics for Result Optimization

As mentioned earlier, under the section “How to Find Organic Traffic in Google Analytics?”, we will emphasize again that business owners should use this tool to collect data and metrics and optimize it for success. Google Analytics provides you with quality data to help you to see where your organic traffic comes from and what keywords they use to search for your products and services.

This data and metric can be used to drive more business and rank better in organic searches if used carefully. By using this information, you can fine tune your content, use the right keywords and tweak your SEO strategies to optimize results.

In short, to increase organic website traffic, business owners must give their target audience what they want to convert them into actual buyers. This includes more than just offering quality products or services. To convert prospects into buyers, you need to offer quality information, advice and customer experience to them. All these factors can help you to gain their trust and enable them to move forward in their purchase journey from your website.

In Conclusion

The digital landscape is highly competitive and to compete successfully, you must focus on building a trust-based and long-term relationship with your audience. This is only possible if your business continues to rank in the top industry searches organically.

Ranking in the top organic searches entails a lot of hard work, patience and time. But if you embrace the daily grind of creating high quality content in combination with other SEO tactics, you will be able to spear through competition and rank high in your industry organic search results.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jamie Barton

CEO of NASN Licensing Inc. & Shopincities.com

Jamie has more than two decades of experience in accelerating brand visibility for online businesses. His company operates SEOResellersCanada.ca, a white label SEO and digital marketing agency. With his unique and actionable business processes, agencies and small businesses can successfully expand online operations without the traditional associated cost overhead.