Organic Traffic Definition: What It Is and How to Measure

A website's organic traffic refers to the amount of traffic it receives from search engines as opposed to traffic generated from sources such as social media, paid advertisements, email marketing, and direct referrals from other websites. However, there's organic and paid traffic too. So, let's get to the organic traffic definition…

Organic traffic is those visitors that visit your website through free and unpaid sources – so no ads.

For example, if you pay a fee to purchase an ad from Google, that would be referred to as paid traffic, whereas visitors that arrive at your site via Google's free search listings would be referred to as organic visitors.

And it's important to measure your organic traffic for several reasons.

Understanding the available opportunity within a specific niche allows you to build a great SEO strategy.

After all, it helps you take action based on data rather than hunches and gut feelings.

So what metrics and data should you collect to measure your organic traffic volume?

Read on to learn more.

But first…

Is the Measurement 100% Accurate?

Measuring the effectiveness of organic traffic is not 100% accurate.

When it comes to determining what is driving your search engine rank, there are many factors that are taken into account.

That being said, search volume can still give you a pretty good estimate of what is working for your SEO.

The keywords you use will depend on the type of product or service you have and which words would be most attractive for someone in the buying stage.

So understanding which keywords work for your company can be done through careful research and by choosing the right keywords that drive traffic and those that are relevant.

But What Metrics Should You Pay Attention to?

First, you have to make a list of keywords which should be:

Keywords your website already ranks and doesn't rank for.

For each of these keywords, you will need their:

1. Search Volume

It's important that you choose the right keyphrases when setting up your SEO campaign.

If you want to track how organic traffic is performing in regard to the competition, you need to know the search volume of a keyword.

The search volume shows the number of search queries for a specific search term in a search engine within a given timeframe.

Keep in mind that the number of search queries is estimated and can be subject to different seasonal fluctuations.

Google's Keyword Planner will show you how many searches there are for each keyword, so it's just a matter of using that number as a measurement.

This is a key metric for estimating organic traffic as it is fundamental for creating an estimate.

2. Keyword Difficulty

There are a number of factors that can affect the difficulty level of a keyword.

Keyword difficulty is a metric used to determine how difficult it is to rank for a keyword.

Assessing keyword difficulty can help you determine whether it's worth your time and efforts to :

1. Optimize a webpage for that keyword

2. Or bid on that keyword in a Google Ads campaign (part of the paid traffic, obviously.)

You can tell how difficult it will be to rank for a keyword based on how many advertisers are bidding on it, as well as your perceived authority in comparison.

As you get more comfortable with ranking higher in search engines, your rankings should improve across all keywords.

3. Current Ranking Position

Simply put, the ranking position is a website's organic search position.

So, if your website is well-optimized, it will normally hold the number one position when searching for your company's name.

The number one spot starts and counts from the top result under paid adverts.

Including this metric in your measurement will allow you to further prioritize based on where you're currently ranking for a specific topic.

For example, it's probably easier to get your site on page 1 if you're on page 2 than on page 30.

As per the organic traffic definition, you want people to find you easily, which means that you must improve your ranking.

4. Click-Through Rates (CTR)

CTR is the number of clicks that your site receives divided by the number of times it is shown in search results:

So, CTR= clicks/impressions

This is an important metric that helps you estimate and improve your organic traffic.

Obviously, a high CTR is a good sign that users find your site and content helpful and relevant.

Thus, the more your keywords relate to each other and your business, the more likely a user is to click on your website after searching for your keyword phrase.

Conclusion

The best way to measure the potential for organic traffic is to make a list of keywords that might be relevant.

The most important step in the process is choosing the right keyphrases, so you should use tools like Google's Keyword Planner.

Once you've chosen them, go back and analyze your site content against each keyword; it could be a sign that your current content isn't as relevant as it could be.

You can also use Google Analytics or Audiit – which will help you improve your website compared to your competition so that your SEO efforts don't go in vain.