What is organic traffic?

Organic traffic is the visitor traffic generated from appearing in search engine listings. Typically, the higher a site appears in the search engine listings, the more organic traffic it is likely to receive. On average around 42% of people who search on a particular term will click on the first result displayed while only 12% will click on the second result!

The alternative to organic traffic is paid traffic. These are visits to a site generated by people clicking on adverts that direct the person clicking straight to the site.

While organic traffic might seem preferable as it's free, bear in mind that getting a site to rank well for a given search term may involve many hours of effort and hard work (so how valuable is your time). Competitor sites may also increase their efforts and supplant your site so reducing the level of traffic and the search engine algorithms also change from time to time so that your position 1 site that was generating lots of visits might drop to position 2 or 3 and generate much less traffic.