Not all web traffic is the same. How people come to your website determine what kind of web traffic you’re getting. Some people come to your site through referral links – links to your site that are found elsewhere on the internet, including social media and news articles. Others enter your website URL directly, and come straight to your page. Finally, some web traffic gets to your page when someone enters a search query on Google or Bing, find your page is on the search engine results page, and then click on it.
This last way of generating web traffic – through search engines – is what we’re about to break down, because it has two crucial categories embedded in it: Paid traffic, and organic traffic.
Paid Web Traffic
Where your site ranks for a particular search engine query has a huge impact on how many people will click through to it. If your site is at the top of the results, there’s a 31% chance that it’ll get clicked on. Together, the top three results take 55% of the web traffic. Not being on the first page of the results means that your site will be clicked on well below 6% of the time.
Paying for advertising space at the top of the results page is one way to get a share of the prime real estate up there. Using advertising programs like Google AdWords lets your law firm’s website jump ahead of the competition for the particular searches that you designate, netting one of the coveted spots near the top of the listing, albeit, with an “ad” tag. Someone who comes to your site by clicking on one of these paid search engine results is an example of paid web traffic.
Even though it sounds like a great way to get to the top of the listings, paid advertising is not an absolute solution to all of your firm’s marketing problems. Once you stop paying for website clicks, your site will fall back into its normal spot in the search rankings, making you rely on the advertising program for web traffic. Additionally, internet users are becoming more and more aware of paid search engine marketing, and are slowly learning to avoid advertised search results.
Organic Web Traffic
Organic web traffic is the search engine traffic that comes to your site without clicking on a paid link in the search results page. By investing in the quality of your firm’s website – including the content it contains, how optimized it is for search engines (SEO), and how influential it is on social media – your site will gain recognition by search engines as a relevant and important website. Search engines will give it better and better rankings for certain searches. As your site builds its prominence in the search results, it will get more organic clicks when web searchers find your site in the results page and click through to it. Search engines see more organic web traffic as a sign that your website is a good one, making them rank the site higher, and higher, and higher, in a kind of snowball effect.
The perks of organic traffic are obvious. Because you’re not paying directly for online prominence, you won’t rely on your pay-per-click budget for online traffic through search engines. Additionally, your web ranking becomes one of your firm’s most important assets, because it doesn’t rely on other factors to generate leads, and won’t disappear if your stop paying your advertising bill.
Myers Freelance’s Legal Blogs Boost Organic Web Traffic
One of the best ways to improve your website’s ability to generate organic traffic is by populating it with quality content. A blog is an excellent way to do this, as it provides the means for you to talk about developments in your field, and elements of your legal practice.
Myers Freelance writes some of the best legal blogs on the web. Our writers have legal degrees and law firm experience, and are also incredibly talented writers. Contact us to get your legal blog started, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ for updates, news, and more information.