Businesses are often faced with the dilemma of whether to generate organic website traffic or paid website traffic. Each method has its benefits, but which one converts better? In this article, we’re going to contrast both strategies to give you a better idea of which one yields the best results for your business.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who visit your website through unpaid search engine results. It happens when your content ranks well on relevant keywords on search engines like Google, so users follow your pages without any direct costs on advertising. Organic traffic is commonly viewed as a more sustainable and economical solution over time, as it depends on quality content, search engine optimisation (SEO), and user experience instead of paid advertising.
User clicking organically tends to be trusted much more than paid traffic, so it can be assumed that this type of traffic is more valuable. Also, organic traffic captures people at different stages of the buying journey—from those who are simply browsing to others who are prepared to buy. It takes time and consistent effort to build, but organic traffic can ultimately result in higher conversion rates and long-term growth for your website.
How to generate organic traffic
Building organic traffic by improving visibility and user experience takes a multi-approach. This involves doing keyword research to understand the terms your target audience is searching for, and then optimising your content around those keywords. Your content must be high-quality and relevant—strive to produce informative, engaging, and useful resources that meet user intent.
On top of that, working on your SEO to optimise your website through on-page aspects like meta tags, headers, and internal links can ensure search engines grasp how to interpret, analyse, and rank your content.
Creating backlinks from reputable websites also increases your site’s authority that may improve its search ranking. Having a mobile-friendly site with high loading speed is not just good for user experience; it also helps top search engines like Google understand and rank your site. Finally, refreshing content regularly and leveraging social media for engagement may also help improve visibility and draw in more organic traffic.
What is paid traffic?
Paid traffic refers to the visitors who come to your site via paid promotion — pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display ads, or sponsored ads on social media. Paid traffic, unlike organic traffic, where people find your site when they are searching for specific key terms, is generated using dedicated ad campaigns based around these key terms, demographics or behaviours. This is because PPC — or pay-per-click — is a type of paid traffic when businesses pay to have their ads displayed in search engine results or on partner websites for specific keywords.
You can target ads on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn by interests, location, and other factors. Paid traffic is built for speedy action and producing more site visitors, sales, etc. Its exposure is immediate, and it can be very targeted, but the downside is that costs are ongoing and when the ad campaign ends, so do the benefits.
How to generate paid traffic
Paid traffic generation consists of advertising campaigns on different platforms. The first step is to choose the right advertising platform for your objectives (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc). Then, shadow your target audience based on demographics, interests and behaviours to ensure your ads are displayed to the right users. When dealing with PPC campaigns, ensure you conduct thorough keyword research to identify the terms that are converting, including them to create ads that reflect your users’ intentions.
Determine a budget and bidding strategy for your ads, which might be cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA). Craft attention-grabbing ad copy and creative to make your ad stand out and get clicked. Finally, retarget users who have visited your site. Regularly monitor the performance of your campaigns on CTR, conversions, etc., to optimise and refocus your campaigns for stronger results.
Organic traffic pros and cons
Pros:
Sustainable long-term growth
Organic traffic has sustainable gains in the long run. Once your content is ranked for relevant keywords, it will continue to generate visitors to your site over time without you having to reinvest in ads. This is how you get backlinks and build authority, which leads to better rankings and, ultimately, visitors. Paid traffic, for example, comes to an end as soon as you stop paying for ads, while organic traffic can be a more long-term, sustainable source of visitor growth. It is often considered a perfect approach for companies looking for long-term growth and regular online exposure.
Higher trust and credibility
Users trust organic search results more than paid advertisements because they are generally perceived to be more credible and less biased. Search engines ranking you high is an indication of your authority and relevance, which helps to build trust with potential customers. Search results are organic, meaning that how well your content is actual information and matches what users are looking for, along with your site’s overall reputation, will determine your ranking.
Achieving a conversion through organic traffic provides your brand with credibility among an audience that views content that is perceived to be more transparent and authentic than paid ads.
Cost-effective
Because organic traffic doesn’t have ongoing ad spend, it can be cost-effective in the long run. SEO, including articles, keyword research, and link-building, has a target market and at least costs compared to some pay-per-click ads, and advertisements (paid ads) don’t have a great deal of add to it.
As your website matures, your rankings improve, and your traffic grows, the return on investment (ROI) improves, allowing organic traffic to become a much more cost-effective marketing channel for businesses who want to get the most out of their online marketing budget. This is especially useful for small businesses trying to cut down on marketing expenses.
Cons:
Takes time to see results
One of the biggest disadvantages of organic traffic is that it can take a lot longer to start paying off. It’s not all that easy to get top positions in the search engines overnight. SEO techniques like content optimisation, backlinking and site speed improvements all take time — you need to keep working on them for weeks or months before significant improvements are felt. Organic growth isn’t the best way to generate traffic fast for businesses, as it can take time to develop.
Requires ongoing effort
Accumulating organic traffic is most certainly a gradual process that needs regular monitoring and patience. When you are at the top, your content needs to be updated with fresh, relatable content, and you need continual SEO optimisation. These strategies include generating new content, enhancing user experience, and obtaining backlinks. If you take your eye off the ball in terms of SEO, your rankings can take a dive, and organic traffic can dwindle. And with search algorithms changing over time, your previous content might need a bit of an update to keep up with it.
Highly competitive
High competition for the top positions in search engine results always makes it hard to get organic traffic. There are lots of fields where you might already have big players that have a lot of power and links. Many times, getting and staying at the top of search engines requires a round and advanced SEO technique, which are frequently prolonged and costly procedures.
Even worse, however, as more businesses realise the potential of SEO, the competition keeps growing which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve, let alone maintain, organic traffic without a well-planned and executed, ongoing optimisation strategy.
Paid traffic pros and cons
Pros:
Immediate results
Paid traffic allows you to be quickly discovered, and it can get traffic to your website right away. Your ad campaign starts producing clicks and conversions immediately when it goes live. This is especially useful for businesses that want to grab quick leads, sales, or traffic, such as during a promotion or product launch. Paid traffic offers the instant gratification that organic traffic can’t because organic traffic builds up over time, whereas paid traffic can generate results in as short as hours or days, so it’s perfect for short-term marketing goals.
Highly targeted
With paid traffic, you can target your audience as precisely as possible with demographic, psychographic, behavioural, and geo-targeting. Advertising platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads allow advertisers to set the criteria for their ideal audience in astonishing detail.
As such, you are able to display your ads to people more likely to convert to your product or service, thus ensuring high-quality traffic and high conversion rates for your business. It also enables you to customise your messaging for various segments to enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Scalability and control
Paid traffic campaigns are extremely scalable, meaning companies can ramp up or down spending as they see fit based on performance and objectives. It’s real-time — you can tweak budgets, bids and targeting strategies to optimise for the best results. Having this level of control allows businesses to respond quickly to market changes or changes in customer demand. Moreover, with paid traffic, you can experiment with different ad copies, landing pages, and call-to-action to see what works the best for you. Paid campaigns are versatile and can be tailored to your budding business’s changing demands.
Cons:
Ongoing costs
To get more eyeballs and traffic, businesses need to keep investing in paid traffic. If you’re paying per click (PPC), per impression, or per acquisition, expenses can stack up fast. In contrast to organic traffic, which you’re planting a long-term asset for, paid traffic requires you to spend every single day just to keep your campaigns alive.
The downside is that once the budget goes away, so does your traffic, making it an unsustainable option for businesses without a steady budget. Similarly, paid campaigns’ costs can change depending on competition for keywords or your target audience’s demand.
Ad fatigue
Over time, the audience can feel desensitised to your ads. This happens when users encounter the same advertisement repeatedly and become desensitised towards it. Ad fatigue can undermine the performance of your campaigns and cause lower click-through rates and fewer conversions. To counteract this, brands must continuously refresh their ad creatives, experiment with new messaging and optimise targeting strategies. That said, it takes time and investment to keep your paid campaigns running smoothly.
Limited long-term value
Return on investment from paid traffic is only viable for a long time to provide value to organic traffic. If you stop paying for advertising, the traffic stops. Paid traffic doesn’t do anything to establish authority, domain reputation, or long-term online visibility. In contrast to organic traffic, which continues bringing visitors as long as the content is up-to-date and well-ranked, paid traffic is a temporary solution. Over time, paying for ads alone can become expensive with inadequate results, forcing companies to either adjust their paid strategy or implement an organic plan.
Does organic traffic convert better than paid?
Organic traffic usually converts more than paid traffic in many cases because it is more trustworthy and relevant. Organic results are perceived as credible and unbiased, so users are more likely to convert for certain types of queries. Organic visitors tend to have stronger intent as the content they find is specifically relevant to their needs.
Paid traffic is beneficial for generating immediate exposure but tends to dilute engaging users because they may have clicked on an ad because they wanted to see the content associated with it, without the same commitment as organic visitors. Further, organic content can rank for a broader range of keywords—including long-tail terms you may not want to bid on with paid campaigns.
Summary
Overall, both organic and paid traffic have their own advantages and disadvantages. Organic traffic has cost-effective, long-term results, builds credibility, and is more likely to convert as it comes with built-in trust. It does, however, take time and constant work. Paid traffic, however, provides instant results, high targeted audience, scalable but high ongoing cost and ad fatigue.
In the end, which approach is best for you depends on your goals. A mix of organic and paid traffic will give your business immediate visibility while working towards sustainable growth. For expert guidance, contact ArkenEcom.
