In plain English
It's customers who walk in because they heard you're good, rather than because they saw a billboard you paid for. The billboard stops when the payments stop; the reputation keeps working.
Used in a sentence
“Organic traffic to the service pages has grown every month since the new site launched.”
“When we paused our ads, most of our leads disappeared, because we had almost no organic traffic.”
In detail
Analytics tools separate visits by where they came from: organic search, paid ads, social media, other websites and people typing your address directly. Organic search visits come from rankings you've earned through useful pages, a strong Business Profile, links and a well-built site.
Organic traffic takes longer to build than paid traffic, but it doesn't stop when the budget does. Each click costs nothing, and people often trust unpaid results more. Most businesses do best with both: ads for immediate leads, SEO for growth that compounds. See how long SEO takes.
Why it matters for your business
Organic traffic is the visitors you don't pay for each time, and it builds on itself.
- No cost per click
- Keeps coming when ads pause
- Trusted by searchers
Easy to mix up
Organic traffic isn't all free traffic. Visitors from social media or other websites are tracked separately; organic usually means unpaid search results specifically.
Related terms
Keyword, PPC and SERP. Or browse the whole glossary.
