What is the difference between paid and organic traffic?
Traffic that comes to your website is typically from a combination of sources. The most common traffic is from search engine optimization techniques that increase positioning in search engines. No website would be able to achieve or sustain any level of success without a consistent source of traffic. Learning the different ways that traffic is sent to your site can help you classify what marketing methods are working and which ones are not. The most common forms of traffic building are comprised of two different types. These are organic traffic and paid traffic.
What is Paid Traffic?
Think of paid traffic like other forms of advertising for a business. Companies buy television, print and radio advertising spots to deliver sales messages and notifications to current and potential customers. Part of search engine optimization can be accomplished by acquiring traffic by paying for strategically placed ads or banners that are displayed in search engine results pages or SERPs. These sponsored links or banners are displayed when an Internet user uses specific keywords to search for products or services. Paid traffic can be used with a combination of SEO tools to get results.
What is Organic Traffic?
Internet users that find your website by searching in search engines is usually a direct result of organic traffic. This method is the unpaid form of advertising. Many SEO campaigns are built on organic traffic since it offers the most variety in driving traffic to websites. Keywords typed into search engines take users to different areas online that contain content using these keywords. The quality of the content is only one factor in determining the positioning in SERPs. Internet marketers use multiple types of organic traffic building tools to achieve success with lead capturing websites, landing pages and niche websites.
Ways to Purchase Paid Traffic for Your Website
There is no incorrect or correct way to purchase traffic. Every Internet marketer has his or her own options to select and the results that are received can be evaluated to gauge the cost per click ratio. The budget that you have created to test your advertising campaign may limit you to the following choices:
Newsletter Advertising
PPC and Google Adwords
Buying Bulk Traffic
Banner Exchanges
Placing ads in newsletters has been done for decades online. This is perhaps the easiest way to target traffic that is related to your niche. Rates vary depending on circulation size and the frequency of the newsletter distribution. Google programs like PPC and Adwords are used by both small and large companies and this increases the competition and cost for keyword marketing. Bulk traffic can be purchased in lots of 1000 visitors from any country in the world. Websites like Fiverr.com are excellent sources for buying bulk traffic. Banner exchanges are still in use as an alternative to Google Adwords. The size of your banner and number of ad impressions will dictate the price you pay.
Ways to Get Organic Traffic to Your Website
It is likely that you have performed many organic traffic generation techniques without even knowing it. If you have placed keywords on your website for optimization, you have performed one area of organic search engine optimization. There are many other ways to produce organic traffic to your website. These include the following:
- Article Directories
- Press Releases
- Backlinks
- Link Wheeling
- Competition Analysis
- On Page Optimization
- RSS Directories
- High and Low Competition Keywords
Submitting articles to directories and using press releases to announce all news are the most common ways of generating organic traffic to your website. Backlinks generation and link wheeling take a little extra time to master, but these techniques will help increase your page rank naturally. Knowing what your competitors are doing will go a long way in helping you understand your customer base.
Organizing your website links, text, images, header, title and footer will ensure your website is optimized to capacity. Targeting RSS directories lets the world know what is new in your blog posts and these directories should be submitted to regularly. Using both high and low volume keywords and phrases can help you increase page rank faster.
By combining paid and organic traffic, your niche website will generate more traffic and should help turn visits into completed sales of your products and services.
