Q: Everybody keeps telling me we need more organic traffic to our jobs. What exactly does that mean?
A: Organic traffic is defined on Wikipedia as web traffic that comes from unpaid listings on search engines or directories.
If you are like me, that definition offers little to no explanation of what organic traffic is. So, I personally am going to take another shot at defining it.
Organic traffic is FREE traffic sent to your website from search engines such as Google and Bing; usually because they like the content on your site.
Not sure if that is much clearer, but I hope you noticed the word I highlighted. Hopefully that FREE word catches your attention and makes you want to learn more. On today’s internet most web traffic has to be obtained by spending money to market a website. If I had a lamp store online, one way I could drive traffic to it would be to buy a billboard on the nearest interstate that told people to check out my site. This might be effective, but solely depending on the billboard each and every week to send web traffic can be stressful and expensive. Another option would be to beg or pay a well trafficed lamp site to send me some traffic as a referral. This can be very difficult to do and also very expensive. The best and most efficient way to drive traffic to my lamp store would be to concentrate on building a good site with relevant content that Google and Bing liked to look at. If I did this, then I could just watch the visits pour in from organic traffic.
This is exactly what we have done with .JOBS Career Microsites. We have built a high quality site whose one purpose is to drive traffic from search engines. Just on Google alone there are 226 million monthly job searches, so there is plenty of traffic to be gained. The more organic job seeker traffic your jobs control the less you have to pay for billboards (career fairs and job advertisements) and links from well trafficked sites (postings on job boards).
Hopefully that helps gives you a better understanding of what organic traffic means, if you have more questions feel free to comment below.
- Mobile vs. Tablet, Which is More Popular for Job Searching? - October 8, 2014
- My.jobs Microsite Branding of the Week (P66onCampus.jobs) - August 13, 2014
- My.jobs Microsite Design Guidelines – Get them to the Jobs - June 18, 2014
Thank you so much for this article. I just started a website but am really clueless when it comes to directing traffic towards it. I noticed I had a few of those “google/organic” referrals to my site and your post clarified what that is. Thank you again!
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Thanks you this information. I was trying to find out what all of this meant. From my Google analytics. My organic is picking up very fast. Great blog very informational.