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How To Balance Organic And Paid Traffic

Getting traffic to your site is getting tougher by the day as the web becomes increasingly crowded. But traffic means potential customers for your business, and in this post, we look at how organic and paid traffic drive people to your site and how to find the right balance between them.

Pay Per Click Advertising for Paid website traffic in Lakeland FLWhat is the Difference Between Organic & Paid Traffic?

Before getting into how to balance organic and paid traffic, let’s define our terms.

What is Organic Web Traffic?

Organic web traffic comes from search engines. When someone goes to Google, Bing, or another search engine and types in a question, they’re fed pages of results. The higher the result appears on the page, the more likely the person will click on it. SEO tactics like keywords, targeted backlinks, and trustworthy content help organic traffic.

What is Paid Web Traffic

Paid traffic comes from paid channels, like Facebook and Google ads. Paid search ads can provide more immediate results because organic traffic takes time and work to show up in the rankings, while paid traffic gets you where you want to be almost instantly. Think of paid traffic as pay-per-click marketing, in which you pay for your ad to appear at the top of search engines and social media pages.

However, people are becoming savvy to search results that are obviously ads and may skip over them to get to the organic results, which they see as more trustworthy. Paid and organic traffic play significant roles in your marketing efforts; one isn’t necessarily superior to the other. But you must strike the right balance to get the best results, and here’s how to do it.

Optimize Your Content & Website

Before going the paid traffic route, you must optimize your website’s content for organic traffic. This means putting out valuable content for the reader that’s SEO optimized. Gone are the days when you could stuff your content with keywords and call it a day; people want information they can trust and see through content that’s clearly written with the algorithm in mind instead of the end user.

The benefit of optimizing your content for organic results is that it’s cheaper than paid traffic, and it won’t lose effectiveness once the advertising budget runs out, like what can happen with paid ads.

Another tactic to get better organic results is to optimize your website. This means lowering the load time and fixing broken links. Research shows that 38% of your customers will click away and go somewhere else if your website takes longer than four seconds to load. The same is true for broken links, which suggest to the user that you’re not maintaining your site and may lose trust.

Don’t Overuse Paid Traffic

As mentioned, paid traffic is a valuable tool that can get you immediate results; however, it’s not something you should rely on. Here’s how to employ paid traffic responsibly.

Set a Clear Goal

Before investing in ads to drive traffic to your site, define exactly what you want to achieve. For example, do you want to boost overall traffic to your site? Generate leads? Boost sales? Knowing your goal helps you put your money in the right places.

Identify Your Target Audience

It’s also crucial that you know who you’re marketing to by defining your users’ demographics and online behavior. The beauty of paid ads is that you can direct them to the people who most likely want your product or service.

Monitor Results

Finally, if you invest in paid traffic, you must monitor the results to know what works and what doesn’t and ensure you get the best bang for your buck. All that said, overusing paid traffic can be detrimental to your website and waste money. As we said earlier, users see organic traffic as more trustworthy, so if you over-invest in paid ads, people may see your company as spammy.

Another thing to watch for is over-targeting or being too broad in your targeting. Paid traffic works best when directed to the people most likely to become a customer. Over-targeting wastes your money and won’t drive traffic to your site. Or, if it does, it won’t be the traffic you want.

Is There An Ideal Ratio?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how much organic versus paid traffic you should invest in to get the best results. The ratio depends on many factors, including your budget, goals, target audience, and industry. For example, if you’re a company that’s just launched your website, it’s beneficial to lean more towards paid traffic to drive people to your site while you build up your content.

Google Ads Paid Click Traffic Marketing in Auburndale FL

However, an established business should rely more on organic traffic to maintain a steady flow of visitors who are more likely to convert into paying customers.

The bottom line is that paid and organic traffic are essential marketing tools that you should employ to drive customers to your website. The key is to continuously monitor what works and make tweaks along the way to continue growing.

Let Us Work For You

Brandtastic is a full-service marketing agency that gets measurable results for our customers. Whether it’s SEO, custom website design, paid and social media advertising, or branding, our team of professionals will work with you to provide just what you need and nothing you don’t.

If you’re ready to get to the top, call us at 813-441-0275 and give us to an opportunity to show you what we can do for you.

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