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What’s So Important About Organic Website Traffic?

7 min readOct 19, 2024

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Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a set of techniques designed to improve organic website traffic. But what the heck does that mean exactly? What is organic traffic, anyway? In this blog post we will define all the major sources of traffic to a website, and the benefits and challenges of tracking each metric. We focus on organic traffic for one specific reason: it’s the category of traffic over which we have a degree of control.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to all the visitors to your website that arrived there organically, or naturally, via search engine results. These visitors landed at your site by clicking a link provided by a search engine (usually Google) in response to a query they performed. Organic traffic is free traffic — there’s no cost to having one’s website appear in Google’s search results.

SEO is a set of techniques that can make it more likely that your webpage appears along others in search results for a particular keyword, and that it appear higher in that list. Obviously, the higher up your web page appears in the search results for a query, the better, because this affects how likely a link to your web page will be clicked. When done properly, SEO is very good…

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Paul Goddin
Paul Goddin

Written by Paul Goddin

Paul is a Washington D.C.-based freelance writer who enjoys making complicated concepts accessible to a wider audience. You can find him on the web at godd.in.