What Is Organic Traffic And Why It Matters

From MarketFlow's library

In every industry I have ever worked in, there are websites that have high authority, have been around for a long time, and rank for all the keywords you want to rank. I'll use MarketFlow as an example. We are a marketing software platform. It would be great to rank for the word Marketing Software. When I do a search of that keyword, the top 2 results are Salesforce and HubSpot. These are 2 giant companies that we can't even begin to compete with right now. Does that mean we don't even try to get organic traffic? No We go for long tail keywords.

What is a long tail keyword? A long tail keyword is characterized as a lengthy and specific search term having many words in it. If we take our example keyword of Marketing Software a long tail variant could be "Best Marketing Software For a Small Business" Or "Best Marketing Software to Increase Organic Traffic"

The upside of Long Tail keywords is they are almost always much higher conversion intent. If you look at a typical buyers journey, the first step is identifying what their problem is. As a business owner, I might think "I need to get more traffic to my website" They've identified they have a problem, now they are going research solutions. At this point they may search for marketing software. as they understand their problem more and start seeing possible solutions, they may start looking for specific solutions for their problem such as "best marketing software for a small business" They are ready to buy, they just need to figure out what the best solution is best for them - they use a long tail keyword.

The downside of the longtail is the amount of search queries for long tails are much lower. However, looking at the bright side of this problem that also means that competition to rank for the longtail is much less. You are much more likely to rank high for a long tail than a short tail keyword.

That's all well and good, but driving ranking for a keyword that only gets a couple hundred searches a month doesn't seem like it would bring enough traffic to make a difference. No problem - simply rank for multiple long tail keywords around the same subject. Earlier I used the example of 2 long tail keywords for 1 short tail. If I thought about it, I could come up with 10 or 20 variants. Now I am starting to drive a significant amount of traffic to my site.

This concept gets even better. Google tracks every query search your website showed up for rather is was ranked on page 50 or page 1. It will show you impressions and clicks. Often time if you are not trying to rank for the long tail, the impressions will be maybe 50 or so, and your clicks will be 0. However, you have identified queries where you already are at least on the Googles radar. It's much easier to rank for a keyword that is at least identified by the SERPs than it is starting from scratch.

— Source: Organic Search: The Longtail Keyword

Concept · Search Intent Every query carries one of three intents, and the intent predicts the behavior Origin. The three-way taxonomy of search intent — navigational, informational, transactional — was formalized by Andrei Broder, then a researcher at AltaVista, in his 2002 paper A Taxonomy of Web Search (SIGIR Forum). Broder's insight was that classic information-retrieval research had assumed all searches were informational — the user wants documents about a topic — when in fact a large share of real web searches were navigational (take me to a specific site) or transactional (I want to do something, usually buy). The taxonomy reshaped how search engines themselves were built, and twenty years later it remains the standard frame. The names have drifted slightly in the marketing world — "transactional" is sometimes split into "commercial investigation" and "transactional" — but the core three-way structure is unchanged and unchallenged.

Mechanics. The intent behind a query is set before the searcher ever sees a result. By the time they click your link, they are operating inside a frame — "I'm finding a place," "I'm learning a thing," "I'm buying a thing" — and that frame governs how they evaluate your page. The navigational searcher evaluates "is this the place I was looking for." The informational searcher evaluates "does this answer my question." The transactional searcher evaluates "can I do the thing here, and should I." A page can satisfy one frame and violate another with the identical content. The intent is the lens; your page is what's seen through it.

Why we adapt it for digital marketers: the practical consequence is that "organic search traffic" is not one audience — it's three, blended, and the blend is invisible until you read the behavior. A landing page that bounces organic traffic at 55% might be failing, or it might be receiving a heavy share of informational searchers who were never going to convert on a sales page and shouldn't be counted against it. The Tracker's Source Diagnostics card buckets organic search as one source; this chapter teaches you to read that bucket's behavior — bounce, scroll, dwell, conversion — as a fingerprint of the intent mix underneath it, so you know whether your search presence is attracting buyers or browsers.

— Source: the Anatomy of a Search: Search Intent Concept

A visitor who arrives, reads the explanatory section, and leaves satisfied was almost certainly informational. A visitor who arrives and bounces in three seconds was either badly mismatched or navigational-to-the-wrong-place. The behavior is a noisier intent signal than the query would be — but it is a real signal, it is yours, and it is permanent.

Example. When Google completed the move to "(not provided)" around 2013, a wave of analyses predicted that organic-search marketing would become un-measurable. It didn't. What changed was the unit of measurement: from query to landing-page behavior. Marketers stopped asking "what did they search" and started asking "what did the searchers do" — bounce, scroll, convert, by landing page. The shift was, in hindsight, an improvement. The query was always a proxy for what the marketer actually cared about, which was whether the visitor converted. Behavior is not a proxy. Behavior is the thing itself.

— Source: The Anatomy Of A Search: Why Intent Survives The Journey

Strip a search down. A visitor has a need, converts it into a string of words, submits it to a search engine, receives a ranked list of results, and clicks one. Four parts: the need, the query, the results page, the click. Each part shapes the visitor who eventually lands on your page.

The most important of the four — and the one that survives all the way to your Tracker — is the need, more precisely the intent behind it. Search intent is not infinitely varied. It clusters into a small number of recognizable types, and the type determines everything about how the searcher behaves after they click:

Navigational intent. The searcher already knows where they want to go and is using search as a faster address bar. They searched your brand name, or "[your company] login," or "[your company] pricing." They arrive knowing exactly who you are. Navigational searchers bounce very little and convert at high rates, because they self-selected — they came looking for you specifically.

Informational intent. The searcher wants to learn something. They searched "how does X work," "what is Y," "best way to Z." They are not yet looking to buy; they're building understanding. Informational searchers who land on a sales page bounce heavily — not because the page is bad, but because the page is answering a question they haven't asked yet. They wanted an explanation; they got a pitch.

Transactional (or commercial) intent. The searcher is ready, or nearly ready, to act. They searched "buy X," "X pricing," "X vs Y," "X near me." They have moved past learning and into deciding. Transactional searchers are the highest-value search traffic a landing page can receive — they arrive pre-qualified, with the buying frame already in place.

Your Tracker cannot label the intent directly — it can't read the query. But it can show you the behavior, and the behavior of each intent type is distinct enough that the organic-search bucket's pattern in Source Diagnostics is a reliable proxy for the intent mix your search presence is attracting.

— Source: The anatomy of a search: what a search actually is

Why intent survives the journey Information Retrieval and the Hidden Query The science underneath the metric The reason the searcher's intent is readable from arrival behavior — even though the query itself is hidden — comes from the information-retrieval literature and from the specific history of how search engines stopped sharing query data.

The query is a lossy compression of the need Information-retrieval research has long recognized that a search query is a compressed, lossy expression of an underlying information need. The searcher has a rich, specific need; they compress it into two to five words; the search engine decompresses those words into a results page. Compression loses detail — but it does not lose intent. The intent type (navigational, informational, transactional) is the most robust feature of the need; it survives the compression into the query and it survives the decompression into behavior. This is why you can read intent from arrival behavior without ever seeing the query: the intent was the load-bearing part of the need, and load-bearing parts survive.

Why you can't see the query: the "not provided" era For the first fifteen years of the commercial web, search engines passed the query to the destination site in the referrer URL. Marketers could see exactly what was searched. That ended deliberately. Google began encrypting search in 2011 and, over the following two years, moved essentially all organic search behind HTTPS — which strips the query from the referrer. Analytics tools started showing organic keywords as "(not provided)." The other major engines followed. By the mid-2010s, the actual search query was, for practical purposes, invisible to the destination site. This was a privacy decision, and it is not coming back. Any analytics approach that depends on reading the organic query is built on sand. The durable approach — the one this chapter teaches — reads the searcher's behavior, which no privacy change can take away from you because it happens on your own page.

Intent classification from behavior is well-established Search engines themselves classify query intent from behavioral signals — click patterns, dwell time, reformulation rates — because they, too, often can't fully parse intent from the query string alone. The same principle works for a landing page. A visitor who arrives, reads deeply, and converts was almost certainly transactional. A visitor who arrives, reads the explanatory section, and leaves satisfied was almost certainly informational. A visitor who arrives and bounces in three seconds was either badly mismatched or navigational-to-the-wrong-place. The behavior is a noisier intent signal than the query would be — but it is a real signal, it is yours, and it is permanent.

— Source: The Anatomy Of A Search: Why Intent Survives The Journey

What is Organic Traffic and Why It Matters

Organic traffic refers to visitors who arrive at your website through unpaid search results. This type of traffic is crucial for businesses because it signifies that potential customers are discovering your site through search engines, often indicating a strong interest in your products or services.

Understanding organic traffic involves recognizing the different types of search intent behind user queries. There are three main types of search intent:

1. Navigational Intent: Users know where they want to go and use search to get there quickly. They might search for your brand name or specific pages on your site.
2. Informational Intent: These users are looking for answers or information. They might search for topics related to your industry but are not necessarily ready to make a purchase.
3. Transactional Intent: This is the most valuable type of traffic. Users are ready to buy or are comparing options. They search for terms like "buy X" or "X pricing."

By focusing on long-tail keywords, which are more specific phrases that potential customers might use, you can attract higher conversion intent traffic. For example, instead of targeting a broad keyword like "marketing software," you might target "best marketing software for a small business." While these long-tail keywords may have lower search volumes, they often come with less competition and higher conversion rates.

Ultimately, organic traffic is essential for driving growth and visibility for your business. By optimizing for the right keywords and understanding user intent, you can enhance your website's performance and attract the right audience.