Does paid traffic increase organic traffic? Does it also increase the organic ranking of a website?

Hi! If I were forced to say yes or no, I would say no. But indirectly, it can do that. Here’s what I mean.

Paid traffic that comes to a website, if they like the content and have good reason to return, is likely to visit to the website again of their own accord, AKA organically. Also, many paid traffic measures, such as on social media, are actually content that can appear organically in those platforms.

In other words, if you make an ad or post and directly pay for traffic, but it also goes viral in the process, that was, arguably, an organic consequence. Then some of those paid and viral visitors also share your site, offer word of mouth recommendations, etc. You didn’t pay for that bonus visibility, it came from luck and getting your ducks in a row on content and message-to-market. But if you split hairs on the matter, it could be argued that in that scenario, paid traffic led to an increase in organic traffic.

It’s clear from the above points, paid traffic increases organic traffic, but not directly, as they are opposite concepts.

Moving on SEO, paid traffic does not increase organic rankings. A website’s organic ranking comes from the search result pages and what reputation and history the site has, in comparison to its competition under different search terms.

The first responsibility of any search engine is to provide users with the best possible results. On the off chance that websites could pay just to get higher organic rankings, even by implication, at that point, Google’s clients would be much less likely to get the outcomes they’re looking for because websites with the best worth and legitimacy toward serving the individual who looked for something probably won’t appear as high as websites that offered a higher amount for their position on the page. This is why Google beat Yahoo as the number 1 search engine and online index.

In other words, Google makes more money in the long run by making paid search result improvement difficult, forcing sites to compete amongst themselves with good quality content and optimization. At the same time, however, organic rankings are also depicted as fairly difficult (which they can be) so that most people trying to rank organically get discouraged and choose to also rely on adwords. It’s a strange mix of meritocracy and pay-to-play, and at the end of that cycle, Google ends up with both the biggest online advertising platform and the best meritocratic online directory for literally anything imaginable.

Pretty sweet deal for Google. Not so much for us, right? Well, the good news is that we can work with this cycle, like a surfer riding a wave, to skip ahead of our competition.

People see search results in order of supposed relevance, which caters to our deep psychological desire to rank things in order. What do you want to see? Here’s the best fit for you, and then the second best, third best, etc. We have all silently agreed that such a system works out the best for us.

Anyway, point being: paid traffic contributes to more visits on a website, and with that, the content of the website is more likely to be shared on various platforms, thereby contributing to a bigger profile. The site has to be good, and the paid traffic needs to be targeted and specialized for potential fans who would want to share it, but it’s possible. So in a sense, paid traffic can improve the ranking of the website, but not very effectively. At best it would improve popularity statistics, which do help a bit. I would definitely not seek out paid traffic as a crutch, or a way to dodge creating a good free or low-cost organic search strategy for my website.

In case you are seeking ways to improve the ranking of your site, then I would recommend implementing a content-driven approach like One Minute Traffic Machines (OMTM). It is a video tutorial program on increasing traffic to a website, while also improves the SEO ranking of the website in the process. And naturally, most people want a better ranking to get more traffic, so the two things feed into one another.

In conclusion, paid traffic does not increase a website’s organic ranking directly. It can help somewhat, though.

Please feel free to reply to me if you have any questions.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo