Organic search is the unpaid search results of a search engine. Advertisers cannot buy or influence these results; they are what the search engine considers most relevant to the user's search query. Organic search results are ranked according to their relevance to the search term. Therefore, organic search results don't include ads, but may include snippets such as maps, images, articles, or the knowledge graph. For a long time, digital marketers have simply summarized the properties of direct and organic traffic.
Generally speaking, organic traffic consists of visits from search engines, while direct traffic is made up of visits from people who enter your company's URL into their browser. However, this explanation is too simple and leaves many digital marketers without the resources to fully understand web traffic and obtain information on web traffic from organic and direct sources. If you look at your total website traffic, a healthy amount of direct traffic is around 20 percent, according to web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik. However, due to major changes on the web that prevent marketers from tracking the true source of traffic, this percentage is likely to increase. As for organic traffic, it is the primary channel that inbound marketing strives to increase.
This traffic is defined as visitors that come from a search engine, such as Google or Bing. This doesn't include paid search ads, but that doesn't mean that organic traffic isn't affected by paid search or display advertising in either a positive or negative way. In general, people trust search engines and phrases like “only Google” reinforce this trust. Therefore, paid search, display, or even offline campaigns can generate searches which can increase organic traffic while those campaigns are running. To sum up all of this information, even organic traffic such as direct traffic has some gray areas. However, for the most part, organic traffic is driven by SEO.
The better you rank for competitive keywords, the more organic traffic you'll generate. Websites that consistently create search-optimized content will see a steady increase in organic search traffic and better ranking in search results. As a marketer, it's important to analyze your keywords and high-ranking pages each month to identify new SEO opportunities. Efforts to follow best SEO practices - sometimes referred to as white hat SEO or organic SEO - are designed to boost a website's position in the SERPs without paying or resorting to tricks.
