What’s the difference between paid and organic traffic?

When trying to make the most out of search engine traffic in order to generate traffic to and business from your website, there are two aspects to take into consideration: paid traffic and organic traffic. Essentially, the differences are quite obvious: one is free and one requires payment, but the differences go a lot further than that.

Paid traffic, often generated through Google’s Adwords platform consists of paying for each click that a user makes on one of your adverts, thereby generating traffic to your website and, hopefully, enquiries and sales for your business. Paid search allows you to set your own budget and stick to that, but it does tend to be quite expensive when compared to organic search engine optimisation.

Organic traffic accounts for more than 85% of all search engine traffic, so you can see where the big money lies. To have real search engine success, you need to be on the first page of Google for your chosen keywords. Of course, some financial input is likely to be necessary, especially if you decide to hire a search engine optimisation company to optimise your website for you. Organic search engine optimisation gives long-term, long-lasting benefits which target the bulk of the traffic, but the results do take time to build up and bear fruit, meaning that you need to be committed in the long term.

Generally, the best practice (if your budget allows it) is to start off using paid search and organic search engine optimisation in tandem, allowing paid search to bring in the traffic and sales whilst the organic search engine optimisation takes time to come into full effect. As your business from organic search engine optimisation begins to build, you can level off your paid search spend and concentrate on the bulk of the traffic from organic search. Although paid traffic is still successful, it is declining in terms of the likely return on investment that advertisers are seeing, as well as becoming more expensive as a form of advertising and marketing. Through embracing organic search engine optimisation in the long term, your results will be positive and long-lasting.