Organic search is traffic that arrives on your site from unpaid search engine results. A user types a query, sees your page in the results, clicks it, and lands on your site—no ad spend involved. In analytics, those visits are grouped as a distinct channel and compared to others like Paid Search, Referral, Direct, and Email.
Why it matters: organic traffic compounds. High-intent queries bring visitors who are actively looking for solutions, which usually translates into healthier downstream metrics like Conversion Rate and qualified leads. It’s also a durable signal for content quality and technical SEO: search engines rank pages based on relevance, expertise, and crawlability—not your media budget.
How it’s measured (analytics view)
Analytics platforms classify a visit as organic when the medium equals “organic” (or similar) and the source matches a known search engine. Check your Source and Medium dimensions to verify mapping. Key KPIs:
- Organic Sessions and Users
- Organic Conversion Rate and revenue/leads
- Landing pages that attract organic traffic (Landing Page)
- Query→click behavior (often analyzed alongside CTR and impressions from search tools)
Quick formula
Organic Share of Sessions = (Organic Sessions ÷ Total Sessions) × 100%
Mini-example: if you logged 8,400 organic sessions out of 21,000 total this month, your Organic Share is 40%.
Channel comparison (for classification sanity-check)
| Channel | Typical sources | Paid? |
|---|---|---|
| Organic Search | google, bing, duckduckgo | No |
| Paid Search | google / bing ads (cpc, ppc) | Yes |
| Referral | links from other sites | No |
| Direct | bookmarks, typed URLs, missing referrers | No |
campaign links with utm_medium=email | No (media cost varies) |
Practical use
Track which landing pages pull the most organic traffic, then improve internal linking and calls-to-action to lift conversions. Watch for misclassification (e.g., paid clicks missing UTM tags slipping into organic). When evaluating content ROI, compare organic trends against Campaign pushes and attribution models to avoid crediting the wrong channel.