Organic Traffic vs Paid Traffic

In the digital world, traffic is the synonym of visitors that come to a website. For example, right now when you’re reading this, you are our website’s traffic. You might often heard of “Organic Traffic” and “Paid Traffic” as the common terms. But what are the difference? The cost and the source. Organic traffic is FREE while paid traffic is not. While organic traffic is coming from the search engine optimization, paid traffic is coming from pay per click advertisement. First, let’s take a look on how paid traffic works:

Paid Traffic

Paid traffic means the visitors who are coming from paid promotions or advertisements. It can be from Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Instagram Ads, influencer marketing, sponsored contents, and paid discovery. Let’s take a look on the below illustration: Depending on what kind of platform you’re paying, you can pay per click or just pay a flat rate.

Organic Traffic

Organic is everything that are naturally made. The term organic traffic is used for referring to the natural visitors that are coming to your website as the result of ranking higher in the search engine. Let’s put it in the illustration below: For the above illustration, let’s say your page ranks number 1 in Google for the keyword “Clogged Drain”. Now, anyone that are searching about “Clogged Drain” will see your site on the first result. Hence you will get free traffic anytime without spending a single cent! The only way to get it is through search engine optimization.

Organic Traffic vs Paid Traffic

Both organic and paid traffic have their own pros and cons. So, here are some of the things that you should consider when comparing organic traffic vs paid traffic:

1. Result Timing Goals

If you’re looking for quick results, paid traffic is more suitable for you. You will get instant visitors right after you run the ads campaign. Meanwhile, to get organic traffic, you need patience to build your site SEO and get a good rank in Google. Based on our research, in average we took around 4 to 6 months in order to rank #1 on certain keywords in Google.

2. Budget

If you have limited budget, getting organic traffic could be a good idea. Let’s compare what benefit you can get by using organic search from the illustration below: Let’s say you run a company of personalized gift, and according to Google Keyword Planner, there are at least 100k traffic a month. Considering that the first result on Google will get 45% of the traffic, that is 45,000 visitors to your site monthly. Average advertiser pay around 1 dollar per click, which means the traffic of 45,000 is equal to $45,000 per month. So if you can rank 1 organically using SEO in keywords “personalized gift” and considering there are no other advertiser, you’ll save around $45,000 per month! Isn’t that amazing?

3. Control

In terms of control, paid traffic could be a good option. Some of the platforms such as Facebook ad, enables you to control your target audience and target “Look a like audience” for the next campaign. Then, if you are targeting a very specific group of audience, for example: age 55 to 70 years old who has income in the range of >$200K a year, Facebook ad enables you to do that. As for organic traffic, you can not really control which age or income group that you want your visitors to be.

4. Risk

Sometimes, advertisers could face a risk that the ads do not convert well and get a bad Return on Advertising spend. There is a chance that you will spend higher on the ads as compared to the actual revenue you earn by placing those ads. Let’s put it in the easier way with the illustration below: For example, John is selling his personalized tumbler online with the net profit of $9 per product. John then runs a Facebook ad campaign with $1 cost per click. This means that John needs to make sure that there is 1 from the 9 clicks that convert into a buyer, in order to breakeven. If John could not even get a single buyer from the 100 clicks, it is a waste of $100!

Are You Team “Organic Traffic”?

Getting an organic traffic seems to be the goal for every web owner since it is far more beneficial in terms of cost-saving. However, the road of getting an organic traffic might be more difficult and it requires more learning about search engine optimization.