Organic traffic: the visitors you don't pay for, and what they're worth to a shop
People who found you through an unpaid search result. Nobody bills you for the click, so every shop wants more of it. It's also the easiest traffic to misread.
- 099Organic Traffic
- Visitors that land on your website as a result of unpaid search results, as opposed to paid advertising.
- In Analytics
- The Organic Search channel, kept apart from Organic Social
- Split it by
- Branded and non-branded searches, before reading anything else
- Costs you
- Pages, development time and patience, instead of a fee per click
Branded searches flatter your organic traffic
Look, plenty of organic traffic is people typing your name. That's lovely, and it isn't SEO. It's demand your ads, press and emails created, arriving through the free listing.
Split the two in Search Console. Filter the queries for your brand name and its misspellings, then look at what's left. Non-branded traffic is what your SEO earned. Branded traffic tells you how everything else is doing.
Free to click, not free to earn
Organic visits don't come with a fee per click. You paid for them anyway, in category copy, guides, development time and months of waiting. The upside is that a page that's earned its place keeps sending visitors without a fresh invoice.
The catch is that Google owns the shelf. It reshuffles its results now and then, and some searches get answered on the results page itself. Visits from AI assistants are another thing again, and Google Analytics now files them under a channel of their own, listed in Google's channel definitions.
Organic visitors often aren't ready yet, so ask for an email address
- On a guide, they want an answer first, so offer more of it: a fuller guide, a fit checker, a sample
- On a category page, they're comparing, so first order offers and back in stock alerts make sense
- On a product page, they're close, so don't cover the thing they came to look at
Each sign-up then goes into a welcome flow that knows where it came from. That's how unpaid traffic becomes revenue you can count, not just a line on a chart that went up.
Related terms
FAQs
Why has our organic traffic dropped?
Check four things in order. Compare with the same weeks last year, in case it's seasonal. Check branded searches, because a fall there points at your ads or PR, not your site. If impressions in Search Console fell, you're showing up less: look for a Google update or a technical change. If impressions held and clicks fell, the results page changed around you.
Does organic traffic convert better than paid traffic?
It depends what's inside it. Branded organic visitors already know you, so they convert well. Non-branded visitors landing on guides are earlier in the decision and buy less on the first visit. Compare by landing page, not by channel average, or the branded visits carry the whole number.
Is social media traffic organic traffic?
Not in the sense this term means. Google Analytics keeps Organic Search and Organic Social as separate channels. People say organic about unpaid social posts too, so check which one somebody means before you compare numbers in a meeting.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
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