Organic Vs. Paid Traffic – Which One Is Right For You

Website traffic is a determining factor for the success of a business. While one can attract free traffic with excellent SEO-optimized content, spending on ads can let one use the enormous user base of companies like Google and Facebook to increase the number of visitors on the site.

The traffic of a website indicates the effective online presence of a site, which in turn is responsible for the conversion rate. In this article, we shall discover two primary conventions of generating traffic on a website. We will also draw comparisons between organic and paid traffic so that you can distinguish the best approach for your marketing.

1.     Organic traffic

Organic traffic is when someone visits your website from the search engine results. The word “organic” suggests the naturally higher ranking of a website in search results.

How to get organic traffic

If you desire organic hits on your site, follow one or all of these strategies:

  • Optimize your website’s content using selected keywords.
  • Build backlinks from more prominent and recognized sites.
  • Provide meta descriptions for each webpage, making it easy for the search engine to crawl and index the page.
  • Finally, replenish your website with relevant and useful information to grab your audience’s attention.

Why consider organic traffic

Among other reasons, organic traffic can let you utilize the enormous customer base of Google. Even if your website provides general or specific information, users can easily be influenced by this information and modify their queries to commercial searches and search a product online. Thus, converting a significant portion of the traffic into leads and customers will be easy for you.

Merits and demerits of organic traffic

Advantages

  • You get traffic on your website for free of monetary cost.
  • Top-notch SEO optimization ensures great long-term ROI.
  • Your content can reach an audience in any domain.
  • With minimal maintenance, you can generate convertible leads.

Disadvantages

  • Only the first 3 to 5 search results in Google gets 67% of the traffic
  • The competition is high, so it is challenging to make it to the top 5.
  • This approach is not scalable.

2.     Paid traffic

Paid traffic is something that your site gets when you put an advertisement on popular platforms like Google Ads, Facebook, or Twitter. This approach is basically a paid promotion for your products and services onto other websites.

How to get paid traffic

With a highly user-friendly Ad system by Google and Facebook, you can put an ad for your services easily. These platforms intelligently put their ads in a way that doesn’t hamper the user experience.

Why paid traffic?

Unlike organic traffic, paid traffic can get you fast and reliable outcomes by causing an inpouring of visitors from major websites. This method allows you to grow your business while keeping your profit unharmed.

Advantages and limitations of paid traffic

Advantages

  • You can get instant results with paid traffic.
  • Easily scalable and provides both short and long-term ROI.
  • You can target a specific audience.

Demerits

  • This method can be costly in competitive niches.
  • Leads stop appearing when you turn the ads off.
  • This method is prone to wasting money very quickly.
  • Creation and testing of ads add to considerable upfront costs.

Organic vs. paid traffic: Finding the right choice

Complementary strategies

Organic and paid traffic can basically work as a complement to each other. According to data, 86% of marketers as well as 45% of small businesses run Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to back their SEO strategy. This means you can use retargeting campaigns to retain your organic visitors.

Better Conversion

As long as a long-term conversion is concerned, 70% of marketers agree that SEO is a better approach than PPC. For short-term ROI, there paid traffic works like magic to drive sales.

Final Thoughts

Focus on organic traffic if you don’t have a significant budget for marketing. Conversely, if you have less time, and enough money, consider focusing on paid traffic.

Working to gain organic traffic requires you to grasp the concepts of SEO and content marketing effectively. If you are open to learning, organic traffic is a much better option for you. On the other hand, paid traffic can be an incredible channel for retargeting visitors and scaling the marketing process. Eventually, you can blend these two strategies together to optimize your marketing campaign that can satisfy the unique need of your business.