Recent research has shown that visits from organic search query results is the biggest source of website traffic.

The findings, which marked organic visits against traffic from paid search campaigns and social media accounts, showed that in every sector  analysed, organic traffic was the best performer.

Overall, the industry study found that organic search drives 51% of all business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) visits. Paid search accounted for only 10%. Meanwhile, direct visits and other channels accounted for 34%.

It was found that there were large variances between the amounts of traffic being directed to websites, depending on the business sector analysed. The business service industry, for example, was the clear leader, with the percentage of visits from organic searches clearly the largest at around 70%.

In all sectors, the amount of traffic being driven to websites from organic queries was impressive. For retail, technology and hospitality, the figures were all very high.

However, the findings also discovered that paid search, organic search, and social were all effective, particularly when coordinated effectively. Social was found to be very much the third best in the study, offering the smallest number of visits, just 5%, and the smallest ratio of traffic to revenue.

Conversely, paid search was the outright leader for driving traffic for the media and entertainment sector. However, overall, it did vary much more widely from sector to sector, when compared to organic and paid search results.

It also performed incredibly well in regards to the conversion rate from visits, posting a very high ratio from traffic directed to revenue. At Pressroom, we feel this makes sense with organic traffic, likely building awareness just as much as conversions.

It is also interesting to note that users are more likely to go with a paid ad click when they are clearly targeting a purchase during web sessions, rather than browsing and looking for information.

John Murray

John is every inch the wordsmith and loves a game of Scrabble above all else. With experience writing for newspapers, John’s time at university was spent studying Creative Writing – something which comes across in his love of the pun.