Organic vs Paid Traffic, Which Will You Use?
Organic vs paid traffic is a debate that has gone on for years, the truth is the work, but which one is best for your business? Here we look at them both side by side.
Hi Trish Davies, here and the focus today is on the comparison of organic vs paid traffic. Traffic is the lifeblood of your online business; it is the fuel that keeps the fire going and brings visitors to your webpages.
Without traffic your online business will struggle to the point of dying, that is the stark reality. Therefore, you must have a definitive traffic generation strategy in place. Traffic can come from various sources but there are two clearly defined types of traffic.
That is organic traffic and traffic that you pay for. Organic traffic can be described as free in relation to monetary value, but it still has a price on its head which I will cover shortly.
Paid traffic is quite simple as you open your wallet and get your credit card out to send visitors to your offers. The facts are that both traffic generation strategies work, but I wanted to help you understand the mechanics behind them.
So, let’s look at a head to head comparison of organic vs paid traffic so you can decide which is best for you. Then you can prioritise on the channel you decide to move forward on.
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic comes to your business naturally from the search engines for which you don’t have to pay for. When you look at search engines there are really two main ones users can choose from which are Google & Bing. Google has bay far the lion share of users which can be perfectly illustrated in the phrase “Google it”.
The following image courtesy of Statcounter shows exactly the breakdown of all organic traffic and the sources.
As you can see Google is the main player when it comes to sending you organic traffic. So, what can you do to encourage them to send you website visitors? The answer is through Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.
SEO is a process that you implement through the content that you publish on your website. Google along with the other search engines have complex algorithms that crawl your website and it’s content.
To make your website more SEO friendly you must do a number of things. Your website must be easy to crawl and index. You must optimize all your pages and post for keywords. The content you publish on those pages and within your posts must be high quality and unique. Finally, you must build backlinks from high quality authority websites.
By implementing these factors into your website will force the search engines to look on your website more favourably. I don’t profess to know how their algorithms work but these elements are wildly renown to be the criteria. Then Google and their competitors do their magic!
How To Leverage The Search Engines
Search engines have an infinite number of users. Each of those users log onto the search engines for a specific reason which is they are looking for information. They enter keywords into the search box and that keyword represents what information they are looking for.
So, the user has an objective that they want to fulfil. It could be a general search, a more specific search or a search that has some kind of commercial intent. Let’s look at a topic such as caring for your lawn.
- A general information search would be – “lawn care”
- For more specific information the search could be “best lawn feed”
- A search with commercial intent could “buy lawn feed”
Therefore, if you had a business and website that focused on this niche you would write relevant content. A post on how to look after your lawn, another post on a lawn feed review and another on the best place to buy lawn feed.
Now these keywords are just for example purposes, you would have to do more keyword research on each objective. Then you would incorporate those keywords in your posts and videos.
When you optimize your content correctly you then stand a very good chance of appearing in the search results. People click on your link; they are directed to your content and take the action they need.
You Must Put In Some Personal Investment
This is organic traffic in a nutshell. It doesn’t cost you any money when people click on your link but there is investment needed on your part. Although you don’t physically pay for the traffic you are investing your time to do the keyword research and create the content.
You time does have a value so really nothing in life is free. The profit potential is potentially huge though as if your content is great it will sit in the search results for a long period of time. Think of every piece of content you create as a piece of virtual real estate. The more real estate you create your website becomes a much more valuable asset that is constantly working for you.
One thing I must mention is that this investment does take some time to come to fruition. You won’t suddenly see hundreds and thousands of visitors overnight; it could take months so you must be patient.
What Is Paid Traffic?
Paid traffic is something that you trade money for with the search engines. It is the fastest way to get traffic to any webpage or product offer you have. The process is the same as regard to people entering keywords into the search engine. The difference is the way you links are displayed.
I will carry on the thread of law care but in the following image you will see the objective is different. I have used a keyword with commercial intent, in other words a buyer keyword.
Now there are more results on this page, but I have focused on the top 3 results. You will notice that alongside the link for each result is the word “Ad”. This means the owners of these websites have created paid advertisements within Googles Adwords platform. Each time an individual clicks on these links the website owner will get charged a fee.
Paid traffic requires less investment of your time. You haven’t got to spend a couple of hours or so creating content and the research that is involved. Creating paid ads can take a matter of minutes when you have gained the experience.
If you are going own the route of paid traffic, then I recommend you learn everything about the platform. How it operates, the best practices, learning the strategies, otherwise it can be a very expensive learning curve. Money will run through you fingers and your ads will not have the desired effect if you don’t master the skills required.
Paid traffic really is a numbers game. You must know what you are spending and what your return on investment is.
Organic vs Paid Traffic, What’s Best For You?
For the sake of this post I have just covered Google as there simply isn’t enough time to cover the other platforms. What you must understand though is that there are plenty of other platforms that offer organic and paid marketing solutions.
Facebook – You can organically attract website visitors from you busines pages and the content you publish in your timelines and feeds. If you build up a following on Facebook, then each time you publish new content your followers will be notified.
There is a paid traffic platform you can leverage on Facebook. The principle is the same as the search engines. You create ads for your offers, you target your audience and you ad shows up in their newsfeeds.
Look at your own Facebook profile and you will see ads appear. The way to know if it is a paid advertisement is that it will state that it is “Sponsored”.
YouTube – YouTube is owned by Google and is a search engine in it’s own right. It has a search box that works just like the Google search box. When people enter a keyword, relevant videos appear in the search results.
Create your videos around what people are searching for which does require keyword research and optimizing your videos.
YouTube also has a paid marketing platform where you can create ads that will appear when people enter that keyword.
I must emphasise the point I made earlier. You must learn everything about your chosen platform whether it is organic or paid traffic you are looking for.
Organic vs paid traffic is something I cover with my Build Your AU programs. To learn more about building your audience check out this free videos series from previous Build Your AU masterminds.
Helping you build your authenticity, authority and audience.
Trish Davies
Build Your AU
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