What is Traffic

In this article, you would learn ABC of organic traffic, paid traffic, SEO, and methods of generating traffic to blogs, and websites, especially if you are new to blogging, digital marketing, affiliate marketing.

For beginners, traffic means people. People or prospects visiting your website, or blog to subscribe to your services, or  buy products, or get information or make inquiry. In a simple term, visitors to your website/blog is called TRAFFIC.

Unarguably, many digital marketers, affiliate marketers, bloggers, online businesses usually get frustrated due to inability to generate traffic to their product or other peoples products and services page. Whereby, number 1 success determinant factor for any online business is traffic generation.

In the coming section, I would be sharing with you what organic, direct, and  paid  traffic are all about, including SEO and factors to consider when making your choice. And how to get this traffic to your website/blog.

What is Organic Traffic and SEO

This is traffic gained from search engine results. Search engine is an internet tool used for scanning internet for content. Examples of a search engine are Google, yahoo, Bing, etc. You do not pay any money to get traffic from these sources. People only get to know about your content and website when they Google (search) related keyword about the content on your site or blog and they are presented with links to your site in the search result, hence they land on your site page. The only way to achieve organic traffic is by publishing quality and original content and via SEO.

SEO stand for Search Engine Optimization. This is a practice or discipline  in digital marketing that deal with improving relevance of web content so that they can feature (rank) on the top of search engine result. It is a very broad and important aspect of  internet marketing as everyone dream appearing topmost of Google search result. There are steps and tools when performing SEO. You may want to check this 25-in-1 tools of SEO for every internet marketer.

Google Analytics

Google offer a free tool called Google Analytic. GA records and track every visit to a website. For instance, when someone click on a search result to visit your website, it would be recorded in the analytic as organic search. You can generate report from this tool to monitor  traffic volume to your site. In order to check the source of the organic traffic, you login to the Google analytics console and navigate across “Acquisition > All Traffic  > channel”

The organic group in the result; Direct, Organic Search, Referral, show how much traffic gotten from each source.

You can navigate through “Acquisition > All Traffic  > Sources/Medium” to see how many visitors searched for your site from other search engines like Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Other traffic sources reported on Google analytics

Direct Traffic: This is a form of organic traffic. These are people visiting your website by directly typing your domain address directly into the browser URL bar. Google analytic record them as “Direct Traffic”.

Paid Search: Traffic from online paid advert. We would discuss paid traffic in the next section.

Referral: This is when your website link is clicked form another website; a link from another website to your website. It is recorded on Google Analytics as referral traffic.

Email: Traffic generated via email marketing. When link to your site is click via email sent to your subscriber if you are doing email marketing.

Social Traffic: These are traffic coming form the social medial network like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. When people land on your website from this social platforms, their traffic is recorded as social.

Display: Traffic from Google adsense. Google used to place banner on third party popular site, when people click on these banners, it is recorded as “Display” traffic. Google Adsense is fully explained in the preceding section on Google Ads network.

Google search console

Google search console is another method of getting report of who searched for your site on the web. This where to see the record of how many time a site appear in Google search. when login to google search console, click on performance and scroll through to see queries and replied pages, including devices, countries they are searching from and more.

What is paid Traffic

Simply put, paid traffic is the traffic you acquire by paying money. YES! You buy visitors to your site. This is a form of online advertisement you make to get people visit your website. This is usually achieved via Social media networks, SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Google ads network.

Social media networks

This is when you leverage social media (Facebook, Instagram Linkedin, etc) by paying them to redirect visitors to your website. Did you notice banners, short videos showing up while you are scrolling through the social media. Those banners and short videos are online adverts to pique your attention and click. Clicking on the banner or video would take you to the advertiser’s website. And the advertiser would be charge based on the click. It is called PPC (Pay Per Click). We also have PPM (Pay Per 1000 Impression). In PPM, you are charged based on the number of people that sees your banner, whether they click or not. Think of it as a billboard or signboard

Search Engine Marketing

This is the paid version of Google search. You pay Google so that your site appear at the top of Google search whenever related keyword to your content is searched on Google. It is called Google Ads. Google paid search result usually have “Ad” tag to signify that the result is an advert. This is also applicable to Youtube. When you pay Google to have your Youtube video appear first in video search on YouTube.

Google ads network

This is the placement of Google banners (banners or short videos) on blogs, popular sites. You must have seen this before, but not take note. This is a method of monetizing a blog when you have daily volume of visitors. Google and the blogger share the amount paid by the advertiser. It is also PPC or PPM based. The banner placed by the blogger or site owner is called Google Adsense.

Organic Vs. paid traffic

With organic traffic, the traffic is free, continuous, and permanent once it start coming. As far as you have the content available on your site. But organic result is not instant. It can take months (in fact 6 months sometimes) before having results, but once result start coming in, it remains. Unlike paid traffic that  is short-term, the result is quick but temporary. You get result only when you pay money.

How to get organic traffic to your site

The No.1 proven way of generating organic traffic to your website/blog is via SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you can vividly understand SEO and follow SEO white hat (legitimate) practice, then the odd of gaining organic traffic is in your favor.

SEO is the process or practice of improving the relevance of your site, content, post, so that search engine like Google can rank (feature) site, content or post in their top search results as discussed in the previous section.

There are hundreds of site ranking factors Google deploy in determining top search results, but some of the key factors are:

Back links: Backlink is having a site clicked from another site. Lets say abc.com appear in an article on quora.com, when people click on abc.com on qoura, it improve the SEO score of abc.com. Some people go to the extent of sharing their site with influencers, so their followers can click on their site from the page of the influencer in order to gain SEO score.

Quality and original content: Write what people would love to read and share with there family and friend. because the more they share or search for it online, the more the SEO score. If the content is not original (plagiarized), Google would detect and such content suffers ranking. Write about what people are searching for.

You may want to read how to discover what people are searching for.

Keyword Focus: Do proper keyword planning and write on the keyword with low competition. Keywords are the phrases we normally search for on Google, e.g., “how to start blogging”, “how to learn English”, “who is the president of America”,etc. these are all examples of a keyword.

Heading and subheading: Do proper arrangement of your site content. Use Headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3, etc) where necessary so as to make your content properly organised and easier to read.

Outbound and inbound links: Include link to other websites in your article, at least 2-3 outbound link. Also, add links leading to other pages of your site, i.e., previous related content your share.

As stated early, there are more than 200 factors for SEO. It is a complex and vital part of organic traffic as there is no other reliable, long-term-result-oriented, and less expensive method of getting everlasting traffic to your site. You can consider this online SEO training to know more.