As you’re well aware, your website can get traffic from countless channels. Social media, paid advertising, and e-mail campaigns all contribute to your site traffic. But did you know that organic results (mainly from Google) remain the most significant source of traffic? This is according to a recent Search Engine Land article by Kristine Schachinger. Titled, “4 Reasons Organic Search Is Better,” the article explains why there’s no match for the long-term effectiveness of organic, SEO-based advertising.
Schachinger supports all of the article’s claims with data from a 2014 report by BrightEdge, which declares organic search “the clear champion” of website traffic. Accounting for 51% of total site traffic, “organic is simply better for delivering relevant traffic.” However, in addition to being the highest-performing traffic generator in terms of raw numbers, there are a few other reasons organic search is still the most viable resource for site visits:
- You have more control over your organic presence. When you rely on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to drive your traffic, your success is based on the whims of their platforms—which are completely unpredictable. For instance, Facebook is notorious for limiting the organic reach of business pages, thus forcing businesses to pay for their posts to be seen by their followers.
- With organic traffic, you have more long-term security. With sources like social media, e-mail referrals, and paid ads, your traffic will go away as soon as you stop investing in them. (This is especially true for paid ads.) But once you’ve created a secure, organic presence, it takes a significant period of negligence to create a major deficit in traffic.
- Visitors who arrive to your site via organic search are more likely to become long-term customers because they sought you out. As Schachinger explains,
“Matching keywords to user intent means you may be present in many searches. The user may find you consistently, and once they get to your site, they are more likely to stay. Organic users are still your best long-term customers. In my experience, they have lower bounce rates and more pages visited, and they are more likely to return.”
This isn’t to say that the other traffic sources aren’t valuable. While organic search results will drive the majority of your traffic, the best way to approach advertising is to capitalize on all possible sources. The synergistic effect of multiple traffic generators is the key to long-lasting performance. Be sure to read Kristine Schachinger’s full article over on Search Engine Land.