Every company’s website needs traffic if it is to produce more sales and revenue. Perhaps the most obvious way to ensure a website receives visitors is to pay for traffic by placing ads online. However, focusing on generating organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO) can also significantly boost a website’s visibility and long-term success.
Traffic that arrives in more natural fashion from search engines and other sources, though, is generally even more desirable. There are three simple reasons why organic traffic beats the paid kind.
1. There is No Marginal Cost for Organic Traffic
Take out some pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google or Facebook, and traffic levels will surely rise. Every click that converts into a visit, though, will drain the budget of the associated campaign.
It is entirely possible to make such investments pay off, as the many billions earned by internet advertising programs each year show. On the other hand, being forced to pay a set price for each and every visitor means never being able to reduce costs below that level.
Whether it gets paid for or carried out in-house, search engine optimization (SEO) work can free a company from this trap. Effective SEO Services can be quite affordable while also increasing traffic levels greatly.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about SEO is that there is no incremental cost required to bring in each visitor. Whether an SEO campaign produces a few thousand additional visitors or millions, the marginal cost stays at zero.
That opens up possibilities that simply do not exist when paid traffic is the focus. Given that other types of organic traffic feature the same basic cost structure as SEO, it should be easy to understand the appeal.
2. Organic Traffic Keeps Coming
Even for businesses where PPC costs are particularly low, the inherently transient nature of the generated traffic can be a problem. While it is sometimes nice to be able to produce traffic on demand, needing to keep an ad campaign going is rarely very desirable.
Organic traffic produced via SEO and other means tends to endure long after the activity responsible for it ends. No PPC campaign can be considered a long-term investment since its effects will end as soon as the spending does.
As such, companies can think of organic traffic as more of an enduring asset than the paid-for kind. That frequently makes it possible to plan and strategize in ways that could not be justified by paid traffic.
3. Organic Traffic is Easier to Convert Into Sales
One of the benefits of carefully targeted PPC is supposed to be that people who choose to click on ads are predisposed to buy. There is probably a bit of truth to that belief, but likely not as much as paid-traffic proponents typically claim.
In fact, deciding to click on an advertisement can position a visitor to be more guarded against subsequent sales efforts. When a visitor arrives after clicking on an interesting-looking search result, on the other hand, that tends to be much less of an issue.
It will always be best to use situationally appropriate tactics when trying to convert paid traffic or organic visitors. Many businesses end up having an easier time turning the latter into customers.
Organic Traffic Can Become the Foundation of a Business’s Success
None of this should be taken to say that there is no place for PPC ads or other means of producing paid traffic. In practice, organic traffic almost always ends up being a better resource to build on than the paid-for kind. Companies generally find that it makes the most sense to focus on generating organic traffic first.
