Internet Marketing Glossary

Definition: Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to traffic that comes to a website via unpaid links from other sites such as search engines, directories, and third party websites. Organic traffic tends to build over time in direct correlation to the amount of topical content on the website and its number of backlinks from authoritative sites.

The term "organic traffic" is often used to refer to all traffic that is not directly paid for (as opposed to PPC, CPM, CPA, or other pay schemes). A website will tend to receive organic traffic as a natural result of its quality as viewed by search engines and regular Internet users. It is considered the most valuable form of traffic not only because it is free, but because visitors who arrive naturally are a self-selecting group, more likely to have a real interest in the website's subject.

Because organic traffic is supposed to be natural, it generally cannot be built extremely quickly. While it it certainly possible to obtain a large number of backlinks for a website in a short amount of time, this is not necessarily advisible, as it may appear to the search engines that the website is attempting to artificially inflate its rankings. This perception on the part of the search engines, even if inaccurate, will often trigger rankings penalties that can be severe and long-lasting. 

Organic traffic is:

• free
• high-quality
• slow to build
• natural
• reliable
• sustainable 
• and best of all, increasable

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