Organic And Paid Traffic. For a website, visitors are the most important thing. A website without visitors is like a shop without visitors and buyers. So how do you bring traffic to your website? There are two ways to bring traffic to a website, namely organically and paid.
Organic traffic is obtained from natural (unpaid) searches from search engines such as Google, Bing, Firefox and others. You can get organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO).
Meanwhile, paid traffic comes from paid advertising such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and others. You have to pay for every visitor who sees and clicks on your ad.
The question is, which is more profitable for your business, organic or paid traffic for your digital marketing strategy?
Before answering the questions above, you should know more about what organic and paid traffic are and their advantages and disadvantages.
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is traffic that comes from website visitors through organic searches, namely when internet users type in certain keywords or queries when searching on Google Search Engine.
As an illustration of organic traffic, when internet users search for information with a keyword, your website appears on the first page of the search among other websites that display information relevant to the keyword. Then after reading the title and meta description the user is interested in clicking on your website.
The higher your website’s ranking in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), the greater the chances of getting clicks or organic traffic.
To get organic traffic, you don’t spend as much money as paid traffic. It’s just that you have to make SEO efforts on your website, both onpage SEO, offpage SEO and local SEO.
What Is Paid Traffic?
As the name suggests, paid traffic is traffic that is obtained by paying. You pay for an ad that will direct visitors to your website.
Advertising here includes PPC ads on Google or social media, banner ads and sponsored content. You will incur costs for each impression or click with different cost variations depending on the platform you use and also the level of competition for the keywords you are targeting.
A commonly used strategy to get lots of visitors from paid traffic is by implementing Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
In some cases, there are businesses that can get high profits from paid traffic, especially if they have high-converting ads. But there are also businesses that produce nothing after spending a lot on paid traffic.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Organic Traffic
A strategy or method certainly has advantages and disadvantages. Likewise with organic traffic for your business. The following are the advantages and disadvantages:
The Advantages of Organic Traffic
- Organic traffic can help increase the popularity and credibility of your website. The more people who search for and visit your website organically, the more your credibility will increase. And later, search engines will automatically display your website on the top page.
- The higher the credibility of a website and the higher its ranking in search engines, the higher customer trust in the website. Because a high website ranking is a form of recommendation from search engines for their users.
- Organic traffic can direct visitors to your website for a long time, months or even years. Especially if you diligently update your content to keep it relevant.
- Costs are much cheaper, because you don’t pay other parties to serve paid ads. You only need a little effort and tools to make your content search engine friendly.
- Research shows that organic traffic can generate more clicks, especially for search queries with high search volume.
- Reach a wider range of potential customers. Moreover, if your content is able to provide solutions for visitors, of course your website will get lots of visits from visitors who get information and solutions from your website content.
- Makes you more creative. Organic traffic is closely related to SEO. Meanwhile, SEO is something that continues to change and develop according to search engine algorithms. So you will be more creative in continuing to optimize SEO on your website pages.
Lack of Organic Traffic
- It takes a long time to get the target traffic you want. Because to get a high ranking in search engines that can bring in traffic takes months or even years of effort and time, especially for keywords that have high competitiveness.
- Sometimes traffic is disrupted or decreased by algorithm updates from search engines. It takes more effort to conform to search engine policies.
Advantages And Disadvantages Of Paid Traffic
Here are some advantages and disadvantages of bringing in visitors through paid traffic:
Paid Traffic Benefits
- Can bring visitors directly to your website quickly. This will really help achieve your marketing goals and business profits in a relatively short time.
- Can provide conversions or sales that are much higher than what you targeted. However, this can be realized with the right strategy and careful budget planning.
- Can target visitors precisely according to demographics, interests and behavior, so that you can get ideal and effective potential customers.
Paid Traffic Disadvantages
- It requires large costs, especially to target keywords with high competition. Especially if you use other parties to create advertising content and SEM optimization.
- There is a chance of loss/boncos. It could be that your website traffic and click ratio increase, but this is not necessarily in accordance with your marketing goals, such as increasing sales and so on.
- Paid traffic is not sustainable over a long period of time, unless you provide funds to maintain the flow of traffic. If you stop funding it, then the traffic will stop.
- Less effective when compared to organic traffic. User trust and engagement are low, perhaps because visitors are aware that they are being targeted by ads.
Organic And Paid Traffic, Which One Do You Choose?
After knowing the advantages and disadvantages of organic traffic and paid traffic, at least you have something to consider which one you will choose.
But basically both have the potential to bring traffic to your website.
Organic traffic is a long-term strategy for gaining sustainable, high-quality customers and leads over time, but it requires a long time and significant effort.
On the other hand, paid traffic can bring traffic quickly and fits your marketing goals but is expensive and visitors don’t stick around for long.
To make a choice, you should first consider several factors, such as your budget, business goals and overall marketing strategy.
This way, you can determine when it’s time to use paid traffic to improve your business and what efforts to keep organic traffic flowing to your business website.
Conclusion
It is important for you to remember that organic and paid traffic are not something that should be in conflict. Because many facts show that digital marketing can achieve success by combining these two strategies.
With organic and paid traffic, your business can maximize ROI and other marketing goals and grow sustainably.
Always stay up to date with the latest SEO, social media advertising, PPC and other information. Continuing to adapt to best practices and the latest trends is the key to the success of your digital marketing.
This way, your business can achieve its marketing goals effectively and efficiently and always stay ahead of the competition.