Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a set of techniques designed to improve organic website traffic. But what the heck does that mean exactly? What is organic traffic, anyway? In this blog post we will define all the major sources of traffic to a website, and the benefits and challenges of tracking each metric. We focus on organic traffic for one specific reason: it’s the category of traffic over which we have a degree of control.

Organic traffic refers to all the visitors to your website that arrived there organically, or naturally, via search engine results. These visitors landed at your site by clicking a link provided by a search engine (usually Google) in response to a query they performed. Organic traffic is free traffic — there’s no cost to having one’s website appear in Google’s search results.

SEO is a set of techniques that can make it more likely that your webpage appears along others in search results for a particular keyword, and that it appear higher in that list. Obviously, the higher up your web page appears in the search results for a query, the better, because this affects how likely a link to your web page will be clicked. When done properly, SEO is very good at improving your site’s placement in search results.

Direct traffic means visitors to your website that came there directly, by typing your site’s URL into their web browser, clicking a bookmark for your website or web page, etc. Direct traffic comes from people who know your company or website and are actively seeking them out. It is an indicator of the demand that exists for your company, its products, or services, so it’s an important category of website traffic.

Direct traffic is difficult metric to measure, however, since it is used as a catch-all category for any traffic that cannot be differentiated by Google Analytics. Thus, traffic originating from a browser in incognito mode, a link in a PDF, a link in a text, or from one of many messaging apps, will all be categorized “direct traffic”by Google Analytics.

Email traffic includes all of your website’s visitors that arrived there by clicking a link in an email. These emails include those sent in a marketing campaign, or transactional emails that arise from servicing your customers.

Email traffic is an important segment, especially for small businesses. In order for marketing emails to successfully funnel traffic to your website, they will need to be consistently excellent. Junk mail and spam have become an epidemic that make it very difficult to persuade anyone to even open an email today.

Social media traffic comes from the various social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok. The number of social media users is constantly increasing, and their engagement level is high, making this a very attractive category of traffic. 

Attracting social media users to your website, however, requires a well-crafted content strategy and a consistent output of content. It requires you to establish yourself as a subject matter expert, which is a time-intensive process requiring participation in social media even when it doesn’t directly further your interests.

Social media is an area of tech that’s in constant flux. There are multiple social media networks, and each has its own ranking algorithm. This complicates the task of getting discovered by your audience. It is often a good idea to make social media marketing a version 2.0 goal for your company: something to take on when the rest of your marketing works like clockwork. 

Referral traffic is another free but valuable traffic source. It results from backlinks to your site created by third-parties. (An external link is a link from your website to a third-party site or resource, and a backlink  is a link from a third party website to yours.) Backlinks help increase your site’s authority and page ranking, so they are important links in SEO, but acquiring them is not in our control.

How does one acquire backlinks? Focus on the basics: use keyword research to identify topics where there’s decent demand but not a big supply of people creating content, then focus on the quality of your content. If your blog is about a niche topic, its uniqueness will help. If your perspective is different, or you have a new take on a topic that not many other people have considered yet, this will also help you get backlinks.

Until you have a large audience, though, getting your writing seen by the right people will require you to promote and market every new story you publish. It’s a not a case of “If you build it, they will come” (to paraphrase Field of Dreams). You must build it and market it, then maybe they will come. 

There are some practical ways to increase referral traffic that are in your control, however. Commenting in forums or on social media with a link of yours that is relevant to a story or conversation creates a backlink. Just because you created it, it’s not cheating. If you had placed your links haphazardly or randomly where they weren’t relevant, that would be cheating (in fact, it’s spam).

Authoring your own backlinks is not terribly effective, however. Not all backlinks are created equal, and Google can tell the difference. Which do you think will have more impact on your authority and page rank: a link you posted on a forum or a link appearing in a New York Times story? The latter, obviously.

One aspect of referral traffic that’s important to keep in mind is that each backlink to your website will need to be actively vetted for relevancy, authority, and quality, since they affect SEO. To perform such an analysis, it is a good idea to use an SEO site auditing tool such as Ahrefs.

Paid traffic is made up of visitors that you have acquired. Paid traffic comes from pay-per-click ads, shopping ads, display ads, and ads placed on social media platforms that are focused on conversions. Converting a visitor to your website means inducing them to take an action: sign up for your newsletter or buy a product, for instance. Paid traffic, whether your ad was placed on Google, Bing, YouTube, FaceBook, or somewhere else, will have an instantaneous effect on your website traffic.

These quick results come with a fairly hefty price tag, however. Ad cost is usually measured in cost-per-click (CPC), which, as its name implies, is the cost charged for each individual who clicks your ad. These people will be directed to your website, and it is then your job to convert them into a customer.

CPCs vary according to the industry of the website’s corresponding business, and the chosen ad platform. Below are average CPCs for some of the most common platforms, but note that websites representing companies in some industries (such as the legal profession) can pay CPCs orders of magnitude higher than those shown.

As a practical matter, the conversion rate for paid traffic is from 2-5%. That means for every 100 people who click your ad, on average only between 2 and 5 of them will take an action on your site that converts them into a customer, such as signing up for your newsletter or buying a product from you. Your CPC applies to the entire 100 people, however.

Note that paid traffic is only a temporary improvement in site traffic. As soon as your campaign ends, or your balance at the platform in question runs out of money, the traffic boost to your site will disappear and your numbers will return to normal.

The most successful website marketing campaigns are precisely targeted to a specific prospect and have been designed based on ample market research that has revealed this specific customer’s needs, challenges, and preferences. Top websites boast a conversion rate on paid traffic of 10% or more.

Your desire to find out what is meant by the term organic traffic has snowballed into a short course on marketing, and could serve as a foundation for SEO, if this topic interests you. A good story to read next in this subject area is about the single best way to improve your website’s SEO, and it will likely come as a surprise.