The goal is the same for both cases, whether it is organic traffic or paid traffic. You need visitors to your website to monetize it.
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What is the difference between organic traffic and paid traffic?
In short, the traffic driven by search engine optimization (SEO) is called organic traffic, and the traffic coming through search engine marketing (SEM) is called paid traffic.
For example, come to google search engines and type “web hosting”. Several results come that are shown below. Few results are written “Ad” in front are paid results, rest are organic search.
Organic traffic:
In the initial days of your blog, this is really hard to come front in the search results, this is the only con of organic traffic. The best thing is you don’t need to spend any money. If you follow some simple steps, gaining traffic is easy. Search engine optimization helps people to find content that meets their needs online.
SEO doesn’t really serve as a constantly defined tactic that assures certain numbers of visitors at today’s site would grow tomorrow or the day after. But with proper keyword research and valuable content can grow your organic traffic very fast.
Is organic traffic really free?
The straight answer is NO. For proper SEO of your website, you need some tools that are not free. For example, you definitely need a keyword research tool like SEMrush, Mangools, Long Tail Pro, etc. These tools are costly. That means you need some investments to grow your website organically.
If you are a newbie and don’t want to spend too much money, you can use google keyword planner which is free. Mangools and Long Tail Pro are also very cheap compared to other keyword research tools.
Start SEMrush free trial,
Start Mangools free trial,
Start Long Tail Pro free trial.
Paid Traffic:
Do you want an instant upward graph for your business? Paid traffic is the only way to do so. Fix your budget and start advertising for your post. There are several platforms that exist for paid advertisements. The most common advertisement platforms are Google, Youtube, Facebook, Quora, etc.
The advantages of organic traffic:
1. No direct expense required for organic search:
If you just start your business or if you are a new blogger, start concentrating on organic traffic. Even if you are investing in some SEO tools you have an option to choose a cheap tool or an expensive one.
2. Great return on investment:
Whether you are investing your efforts or money you want the return on investment. When you are putting effort into your organic traffic, you will get great ROI. It sometimes takes time to come in front of search results, but if you do proper keyword research, you can grow your organic traffic very fast. The best thing is you will put the effort in once and will get results year after year.
3. Organic traffic increase with time:
You will get repeated new traffic all time without paying anything, and this traffic will increase with time. So, you will get traffic, lead, revenue, and more.
4. Organic search builds reputation:
If you want to build your reputation and credibility, organic search is the best procedure to grow. People always provide more credibility to those that are coming in search results front page organically. Visitors give less credibility to paid advertisements. Whenever your website comes to the front page for different keyword search results, it builds a reputation.
5. Organic search always engages related users:
You will get relevant users for your business in organic search. Google algorithm always shows your content to the relevant people for different keyword searches. Even for a spelling mistake for a certain keyword, your website will come in the organic search results.
6. Actionable data can be collected through organic search:
A real-time data is very important to fix your total marketing strategy. For example, if you know that a blog post gets 100 visitors in a day and 5 people provide their email addresses, this kind of data can help you to fix your SEO strategy for your upcoming articles.
The advantages of paid traffic:
1. Paid search results immediately:
You don’t need to wait a long time to get traffic. Instantly after the creation of your new post, you can start getting traffic through paid advertisements. Whenever you are in a hurry to get immediate results to get traffic for your new product or services, paid advertisements are an obvious and excellent way to get traffic to your blog post.
There are various platforms for advertisement. Google ads and Facebook ads are the most popular. Proper optimization of Google ads with a higher quality score can bring your Ad to the top of the first page. Any ad at the top of the first page provides a huge impact on the visitors.
2. Paid search gives the winning data:
You can collect proper data from your campaign, like age, location, interest, etc. By using those data, you can create a more effective campaign.
3. Paid traffic delivers an outstanding ROI:
A proper campaign always provides an excellent return on investment. For a successful campaign, proper research on keywords related to your targeted audience is mandatory. But ROI always varies depending on the quality of traffic you are targeting.
4. Paid search engages users who are ready to purchase:
You can achieve instant results and revenues by targeting through advertising for ready-to-buy clients and transaction queries for your business.
5. Budget controlling is possible:
You can control your budget at any point in time while running an ad campaign. This is possible to fix the daily budget or total budget. In the Google PPC campaign, you can also fix the cost per click depending on the demographic and keyword.
The drawback of organic searches:
1. Need to keep on improvements:
If your article is ranking on Google search results, that doesn’t mean that it will always stay in the same ranking position on a particular keyword. For some other content google algorithm found more valuable, your content will slip its position. To improve your position, you need to update your content with new information from time to time.
2. The organic search takes time to get result:
After doing proper keyword research and writing valuable content, this is not guaranteed that your article will rank in search results. It may take few months to come in front for a low competition keyword. For a high competition keyword, it can take much more time.
3. Proper SEO kill is required:
Only investment in SEO tools is not enough, you need the best SEO skill to make your content on the first page in Google search results.
The drawback of paid searches:
1. The paid search required money instantly:
Always a budget required to start an ad campaign on any platform. For a beginner, it is a little difficult to invest money at the beginning. You need proper planning to start an ad campaign as a newbie.
2. The campaign needs improvements and maintenance:
By using the initial data of an ad campaign, you need to improve the campaign. Even A/B testing is required to find out a winning campaign. So, continuous maintenance and research are very much involved here.
3. Paid search returns in the short term only:
You will stop getting traffic when you stop your campaign. If you are not able to find out your winning campaign, this is not possible to run an ad continuously.
4. Need proper skill on pay per click advertisements:
To run a successful PPC ad campaign, proper skill is required. If you run an ad without any knowledge, there is a chance of losing money. Correct targeting, relevant keyword, and a high converting landing page is the key to the success of your ad campaign.
Which one to choose, organic search or paid search?
Both searches have their exclusive benefits. If you are new in the market and if you do not have any brand, you must start with paid advertisements for traffic. But start doing SEO for your website from day one. Within few days you will start appearing in search results. If you want proper growth for the business within a short span, then you need both paid and organic searches.