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Organic Web Traffic Versus Paid Traffic

December 14, 2009

If you own a website, you have a shared need with every other website owner. Your website needs traffic. Driving visitors to your site is considered the holy grail by many internet experts. Without people visiting your site (that’s what internet traffic is) your website is just a vacant piece of property on the internet landscape.

Okay, so everyone knows they need traffic. The real question is how to get it. Everyone seems to have different ways to attract traffic to your website. Some people feel that search engine traffic is best. They use special programs like SEO elite to optimize their site (look here for a full SEO Elite Review). Others feel that paid traffic is the best, like pay-per-click traffic from Adwords. (If you go that route, be sure to read the Adwords Help page).

Many of the ideas are fads. Some are suspicious. Others only produce traffic within a particular demographic. But the majority of traffic eventually comes down to two types: free (organic) traffic, or paid traffic.

There are internet experts who maintain that all traffic costs something. They explain that all web traffic costs you something – either money, time or work. While that is true, we will still use the term “free traffic” to describe the term natural or organic traffic. Organic traffic is any traffic you receive that you did not buy outright. Organic traffic can have many different sources. It can come from people finding you in the search engine results and clicking on the link to your site. Free traffic can come from incoming links. Free visitors can come when someone puts your website address directly into their browser. They may do this if they hear about your website from a friend, in a magazine article or on a radio computer talk show. All of these forms of traffic are organic traffic. Such traffic is free in the sense that you don’t pay someone to get that traffic. Here is a page that offers more SEO help.

Paid traffic is exactly the opposite. It is any traffic you receive because you paid for it. This can be on a per-click basis from pay-per-click programs like Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing. It can be from an ad displayed on a different website. It can be from when someone types in your website url from a paid print ad in a newsletter. There are several other ways you can pay for traffic.

You may be wondering which way is better? Common sense would indicate that the “free traffic” was better. There is no doubt that free is usually good. But free(organic) traffic can take a long time to get. You see, after you first create a website, no one knows about it, so no one will put links on their site to yours. The search engines don’t know your website exists either, so they don’t show your site in any of the search results. Even word of mouth sdvertsing takes time to gain momentum. With paid advertising, you can usually start getting website traffic instantly. Yes, you have to pay for it, but if done correctly, you can usually make a lot more money than you pay for ads. In that case, paying for your traffic is a lot better than waiting for your site to become profitable.

The best strategy, however, is to use (both|both free and paid traffic techniques|paid and free traffic techniques|both natural and purchased traffic methods} in combination with each other. If you have a non-optimized site, the first step is to craft a pay-per-click campaign to acquire immediate traffic. Gauge your paid traffic closely at first. You may also want to test many different ad variations. Especially test which keywords and keyphrases are getting results. Refine your ad campaign to include more profitable words and trim unprofitable keywords. Then, start optimizing your site internally for the high value keywords and start a linking campaign using those profitable keywords and phrases as the link text to internal pages on your site. Within 3 months to a year, you will be dominating both the paid and natural traffic sources.

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