Guide to the meaning of organic search and organic traffic for sites

Let’s get back to basics! Often – even in our insights – we use common formulas but very sectoral, which may be difficult to understand to those who are not familiar with the profession or approaches for the first time SEO issues: this is the case of organic search, an expression that is perhaps less obvious than it may seem. Everything revolves around the adjective “organic,” in short, and so today we will try to explain what the meaning of organic search is, what organic results are on Google and why it is important to increase organic traffic.

Organic search: definition and explanation

Organic search is a formula that refers to search results that are generated by search engines such as Google in response to a specific user query and that are not influenced by advertising or sponsorship.

Organic search includes all results that appear on Google’s SERPs that are not paid: thus, they are pages that algorithms show only because they are relevant to a user’s search terms, considering a number of factors, including the relevance of the content to the search query, the quality of the content, and the reputation of the website.

In practice, therefore, organic research is the area of work of digital marketing towards which the SEO focuses by definition, which studies the tactics and improvements necessary to increase the organic visibility of the pages of a site.

What is organic traffic: meaning, characteristics and usefulness

It is necessary at this point to open a parenthesis on “traffic,” which we could define as the unit of measurement of a website: indeed, any website of any kind has the goal of attracting traffic-and, possibly, quality traffic-because more visitors means increased chances of earning money through sales, clicks or other forms of monetization.

In light of what has been written, it is easy to understand the definition of organic traffic: all visits that arrive on pages of the website, blog or e-commerce by users who have launched queries on Google or other search engines and click precisely on one of the organic results proposed in the SERP. Organic visitors are consequently the people who land on a site immediately after using a search engine, without referral from any other web page.

Organic traffic is therefore free and potentially available to all sites, but its actual value depends on so many variables, including actual position in SERP, structural features of the SERP itself, level of optimization and attractiveness of preview snippets, and so on.

In any case, free and potential huge visibility are some of the reasons why organic traffic is important and organic search a key channel for those who want to launch or relaunch an online business, and SEO is obviously the big player in this process.

Organic traffic also differs from direct traffic, that is, the visits a site gets without intermediation, from users who know the address and enter it directly into the browser bar or select it from favorites, and most importantly it is the opposite of paid traffic-the visits generated by paid ads through Google Ads campaigns and any other kind of external paid signals with which to funnel traffic to the site, which fall in digital marketing to the broader branch of SEM.

Compared to paid traffic, organic traffic does not require an extra budget investment other than that related to SEO (if we use outside agencies or professionals, or even the costs for analytics tools), which remains the preferred way to try to improve the site’s visibility on search engines and, thus, increase organic traffic. In addition, serious SEO focuses holistically on optimizing the site in all its parts, from technical to content, and