What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to visits that come to your site via unpaid (i.e., “organic”) search results. Meaning it’s search engine traffic you get for free—aside from what it costs to create and maintain the content.
Increasing organic traffic is one of the main search engine optimization (SEO) goals businesses have. Because it can result in more leads and sales.
Benefits of Organic Website Traffic
Some advantages of organic traffic include:
- Affordability: Organic traffic is free
- Targeted traffic: Organic traffic often attracts visitors who are specifically looking for the types of products/services and content you provide
- Relationship building: Organic traffic drives people to your content, and they may continue to engage with your brand if they like what they see
- Long-term sustainability: Organic traffic can provide a steady stream of visitors over time as long as your content remains relevant and optimized
- Scalability: You can increase organic traffic with an SEO and content marketing strategy
But organic traffic also has potential downsides:
- Ongoing investments: Although organic traffic is free, you still need to invest in SEO and content marketing to improve your search engine visibility
- Slow growth: Organic traffic growth takes time, requiring consistent effort before you’ll reliably see results
- Algorithm dependency: Organic traffic is dependent on search engine algorithms, which can change frequently
Organic vs. Paid Traffic
While organic traffic visits come from appearing in standard search results, paid traffic visits come from pay-per-click (PPC) ads on results pages.
Paid search campaigns can deliver almost immediate results and allow you to target users based on specific criteria. Such as demographics, location, and search behavior.
But these campaigns can be costly—especially in competitive markets. And the traffic stops as soon as you stop paying for ads.
In contrast, organic traffic has the potential to generate a large volume of clicks to your site without incurring any costs beyond your initial investments.
You can estimate the total value of any website’s organic traffic in Semrush’s Organic Research tool.
Just enter a domain and look for “Traffic Cost”:
Here, we see that it would cost roughly $23.2 million in running paid search ads to replicate eBay’s August 2024 organic traffic for the same keywords
How to Increase Organic Traffic
Now, let’s look at how to drive organic traffic to a website. Which requires a coherent SEO strategy, using SEO best practices, and following these five steps:
Step 1: Fix Any Technical Issues Your Site Has
Google needs to be able to discover, crawl, and index (store in a database) your website’s content for you to rank for relevant queries and attract traffic. So, you’ll want to ensure there are no technical issues getting in the way.
Semrush’s Site Audit tool makes it easy to check your site for technical issues that could affect its crawlability and indexability.
First, enter your domain into the text box and click “Start Audit.”
Follow the prompts to configure your audit.
Once you’ve done that, click the “Start Site Audit” button.
When the audit is complete, you can see your site’s overall health with the “Site Health” score. The higher the score, the fewer technical issues your site has.
Head to the “Issues” tab to see a complete list of all the problems the tool detected.
These are categorized into “Errors,” “Warnings,” and “Notices.”
You should address errors first—they’re the most severe issues affecting your site.
In this example, the tool found broken images, redirect chains and loops, a broken internal link, and a duplicate meta description.
Click “Why and how to fix it” next to any issue to learn more about it and how to address it.
Take whatever steps you need to resolve the first error. Then, work through the rest of the errors, warnings, and notices.
Further reading: How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit in 10 Steps
Step 2: Find Keywords to Drive Your SEO Strategy
Keyword research helps you identify valuable queries people use when searching for information related to your niche. Which you can use to create targeted content that attracts more organic traffic to your site.
Start finding relevant search terms with Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.
Enter a seed keyword (a broad term related to your niche) into the text box and your domain in the “AI-powered feature” box. Then click “Search.”
The tool will then produce a list of relevant keyword suggestions.
It also provides important metrics for each keyword, including:
- Search intent (Intent): What users are hoping to achieve when they perform a search for that term
- Search volume (Volume): The average number of monthly searches for the keyword
- Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD %): The estimated ranking difficulty for that keyword on a scale of 0 to 100 for your specific domain. The lower the score, the more likely you are to rank well.
- Potential traffic: An AI-driven forecast that analyzes your domain and estimates your potential traffic from a given keyword, based on your domain's relevancy and Topical Authority.
Your goal is to find terms with the right combination of high search volume and low Personal Keyword Difficulty. And then target those terms with the right type of content to satisfy the searcher’s intent. (More on that in the next step.)
You’ll find keyword groups (topically related terms) in the left-hand menu. Which can be useful for exploring more specific keyword topics within your niche.
Once you find relevant terms you want to target, select the box to the right of those keywords and click “+ Add to keyword list.”
Then, give your list a name and click the green check.
Repeat this process with other keyword groups to find even more terms
Then, see which terms your competitors target. To find even more relevant keywords.
Use Semrush’s Keyword Gap tool for this.
Enter your domain and at least one competitor’s domain. Then click “Compare.”
The tool will then compare the keyword profiles of each domain.
The two keyword categories you should focus on first are:
- Missing: These are keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t
- Weak: These are keywords your competitors rank for higher than you
There’s a good chance you’ll find some great keyword opportunities here. After all, if your closest competitors are ranking for certain keywords, they’re probably relevant to your website as well.
Further reading: Keyword Research for SEO: What It Is & How to Do It
Step 3: Create Search Intent-Focused Content
High-quality SEO content that satisfies users’ needs is more likely to rank highly in search results. And drive organic traffic to your site.
It also helps you establish authority in your niche and build trust with your audience.
First, look at your keyword list and determine which terms you already have content focused on. So you can optimize those pieces to attract more traffic.
You can easily find optimization opportunities for your site’s content using Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker.
Enter your domain into the text box and click “Get ideas.”
When you get to the “Add pages to optimize” screen during setup, choose the “Manually” tab. So you can specify the pages you want to optimize based on your keyword research.
The tool will then give an overview of potential improvement areas and list the specific pages you should prioritize.
Click “# ideas” next to any of the listed pages to view suggestions for that page.
For example, here we see that the selected page is difficult to read and doesn’t have a relevant meta description.
Fixing these issues could improve the page’s relevance for the target keyword in Google’s eyes.
For keywords you need to create new content around, use Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant. Which checks the piece for SEO, tone of voice, readability, and originality in real time.
Step 4: Acquire Quality Backlinks
Earning backlinks (links from other domains that point to yours) from other reputable websites increases your site’s authority and credibility. Which can lead to better rankings and more organic traffic.
The key to building quality backlinks is to consistently publish high-value content that other sites naturally want to link to.
But you can speed up the process with dedicated link building tactics.
Some examples include:
- Broken link building: When you find a site with a broken external link and suggest replacing it with a link to a relevant resource on your own site
- The skyscraper technique: When you take a popular piece of content and create your own version of it that’s better than what the competition has
- Checking competitor backlinks: When you check which sites link to your competitors and ask if they can also link to your site
Speed things up by finding new link building opportunities for your site with Semrush’s Link Building Tool.
Enter your domain and click “Start Link Building.”
The tool will then generate a list of prospects (sites that might link to you) based on your domain’s keywords and competitors.
You can find these in the “Prospects” tab.
Then, choose which prospects to contact. (This is easiest when you have a relevant piece of content to share.)
And manage the entire outreach process within the Link Building Tool.
Further reading: Link Building for SEO: A Guide to the Basics
Step 5: Set Up Your Google Business Profile (If Applicable)
If you run a brick-and-mortar business or a local service business, focusing on local SEO can significantly boost your organic traffic.
In the U.S., 32% of people search online for local businesses several times a week. And 21% of consumers do so each day.
One of the most effective ways to increase your visibility for location-based searches is to set up and optimize your Google Business Profile.
This is a free business listing that shows important information about your business directly in the search results.
Like this:
You should populate your Google Business Profile with as much relevant information as you can to maximize its visibility. And persuade people to visit your site.
You can learn more about how to optimize your profile in our in-depth guide to Google Business Profile.
How to Check Your Site’s Organic Traffic
Now, let’s look at some ways to monitor your organic traffic.
Organic Research
Follow these steps to use Semrush’s Organic Research tool to see any website’s organic organic traffic estimates:
1. Enter a domain into the text box and hit “Search”
2. View the “Traffic” number at the top of this report, which estimates how many monthly visits organic rankings drive to the site
3. Click the “Traffic” section to see an estimate of the domain’s organic traffic over time
4. Click on the “Position changes” report to see how ranking changes affect traffic
Google Analytics
Follow these steps to check organic traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4):
1. Go to your GA4 account
2. Click on “Reports”
3. Under the “Life cycle” section, click “Acquisition”>“Traffic acquisition”
4. Here, you can see all your traffic sources, including “Organic Search”
5. To see the specific search engine driving your organic traffic, scroll down the “Traffic acquisition” report. Then add “Session source” as a secondary dimension.
Further reading: What Is Organic Traffic in Google Analytics 4? (+ Analysis Tips)
Google Search Console
Follow these steps to check organic traffic with Google Search Console (GSC):
2. Open the “Search results” report under “Performance.” Here, you’ll see the total number of organic clicks driving traffic to your site from Google’s search results.
3. Scroll down to see which queries, pages, and countries bring the most organic traffic to your site
Keep Track of Your Organic Traffic Performance
Focusing on organic traffic can support your business’s long-term growth.
And making technical improvements, doing keyword research, creating content, and building links are all vital ingredients for improving your organic visibility and traffic.
As you work to improve your SEO efforts, it’s a good idea to use a tool like Position Tracking to monitor your keyword rankings. Because higher rankings are often an indicator that more organic traffic is soon to come.
Try it today.