Attracting Website Visitors – Should you focus on direct or organic traffic?

You don’t have to be a professional digital marketer to know that attracting more website visitors is always a good thing. Because whether you’re starting a blog, trying to build an online presence for your small business, or venturing into larger e-commerce waters, you’re probably not building a website that’s going to be your private little online space. They build it to attract traffic.

There are now two main types of online traffic – organic and direct traffic. Traditionally, we refer to traffic that comes naturally from search engines as organic and traffic that comes from no apparent source as direct. However, there is more to organic and direct traffic than meets the eye.

Let’s dive deeper into the similarities and differences between organic and direct traffic and figure out which one you should focus on.

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is generally much easier to define. This is any traffic that comes to your website via search results in search engines such as Google or Bing. However, keep in mind that this does not include any Traffic from paid ads that you have invested in to make your website stand out.

It only includes the influx of website visitors who come to your pages because they appeared in the results of their search engine queries.

Let’s say you’re trying to make money online by starting a parenting advice blog. Someone comes along and googles “how to calm a crying child,” and your blog catches their attention because it shows up in the search results. In this case, your traffic would be considered “organic.”

Of course, the key to organic traffic success is developing a worthwhile website that ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERP). This is directly influenced by your search engine optimization (SEO), which we’ll get to in a moment.

What is direct traffic?

Direct traffic is a little more difficult to define and track. As the name suggests, it refers to the traffic that comes from users who visit your website directly. Not through referral links, Google searches, social media, ads or other websites, but directly from their browser to your website.

For example, this happens when someone enters your URL in the address bar. This can also happen if they bookmarked your website and clicked on their bookmark.

As you can see, these users do not have a specific source where they came from. They didn’t click on your paid ad or open the link you sent them in their email.

While this may indicate that the direct traffic is coming from people who already know your brand (since they seem to know your URL), that’s not always the case. Direct traffic could also come from you Word of mouth marketing campaignfor example newspaper advertisements, flyers, posters, etc.

Therefore, you need to increase your brand awareness and invest in many different marketing strategies to increase your direct traffic.

Other types of web traffic

It’s important to note that web traffic doesn’t just fit into the “organic” or “direct” categories. There are also other categories, like the ones below, that give a more complete picture of where your web traffic is coming from.

• Reference: This is the number of visitors who come to your website by clicking a link from another website. This is important if you focus on link building as it will help drive more traffic to your website.
• Organic Social: This is the same as organic web traffic, but comes specifically from social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.).
• Paid Search: This represents traffic that comes from paid ad placements (Google Ads).
• Organic video: This type of traffic comes from video-only sites like YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo. This is a great area to focus on as video content is at the forefront right now.
• Not assigned: This type of traffic is essentially a catch-all term for website traffic that cannot be attributed to the other channels.

This list is not exhaustive, as there are a number of other types of traffic that can be driven to your site and targeted (email, affiliate-based traffic, etc.), but it is enough to get you started on the Think about different ways to send traffic to your website.

Comparative Analysis: Organic vs. Direct Traffic

For example, if you want to make money from blogging or simply want to increase your website monetization and increase traffic, you need to understand exactly how direct and organic traffic differ.

Below are the main differences between the two:

• source – As mentioned, organic traffic comes from search engine results, while direct traffic has no identifiable source;
• Impact on search engines – Organic traffic depends heavily on your SEO and changes in search engine algorithms, while direct traffic is not influenced by search engines at all;
• Intention – Most organic traffic comes from users with a specific search intent, i.e. those looking for information or a specific type of product/service, while direct traffic comes mainly from users who already know your brand;
• predictability – Depending on your SEO, competitors and search engine algorithms, organic traffic can often fluctuate while direct traffic tends to remain stable, reflecting your brand loyalty;
• Cost – You don’t need to spend a lot of money, just time to improve your organic traffic; You only need to invest time in improving your website, while direct traffic usually requires various indirect investments that increase your brand awareness;
• Persecution – You can track organic traffic by evaluating your SERP ranking and analyzing your keywords, while you need detailed website analytics to track direct traffic.

Organic and direct traffic are not synonyms. If you want to be successful, you need to focus on generating both organic and direct traffic.

The role of Google Analytics in understanding traffic

If you’re building a website for the first time, it can’t be overstated how important it is to take full advantage of Google Analytics.

It is a comprehensive web analytics tool that provides you with all the essential insights into your website performance. Whether you use the free or paid version, you’ll get a clear overview of your key performance indicators to help you improve your website.

With Google Analytics, you can better understand user behavior, track your conversions, identify your target audience, analyze your costs, identify your website’s strengths and weaknesses, and more. Of course, you can also identify your traffic sources and evaluate your best performers.

With Google Analytics, you can seamlessly segment your audience by origin and assess your traffic patterns. The metrics provided can be key to measuring the effectiveness of your various marketing campaigns, allowing you to determine exactly which campaigns drive direct traffic and which drive organic traffic.

SEO and its influence on organic traffic

As mentioned above, SEO directly impacts your organic traffic. Whether you run a blog or a website, the more you work on your SEO, the more organic traffic you can expect.

In short, SEO is the process of making your website more attractive to potential visitors. This can mean many things – optimizing your website for mobile visitors, publishing informative content, reducing page load, using relevant inbound and outbound links, adding useful media to your pages, and more.

They are over 200 unique Google ranking factorsbut all of them are about ensuring a seamless user experience. All search engines primarily focus on improving the overall user experience. To this end, they do everything they can to present users with valuable and relevant results for their search queries.

So the more valuable your website appears to search engines (and users alike), the higher your website ranking will be in the SERP. Additionally, the higher your SERP ranking, the more organic traffic you can get.

The The first search result on Google receives 27.6% of all clicksand the number of clicks drops significantly the deeper you go.

The Google landscape has changed drastically in late 2023 and early 2024, making it unfortunately increasingly difficult to rely solely on organic traffic, especially for new or small websites.

We recommend not just focusing on Google SERPs, but also thinking about Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo SERPs.

Since we can no longer rely solely on Google traffic, it’s important to develop a varied traffic strategy that incorporates sources such as social media, forums, email marketing campaigns and video platforms.

It’s your classic case of “Don’t put all your eggs in the Google basket.”

Common problems with tracking and interpreting direct traffic

While organic traffic is fairly easy to track even if your ranking on SERP is not as desirable as you would like, the same cannot be said about direct traffic.

Without knowing where your website visitors are coming from, tracking and interpreting direct traffic can be extremely problematic. Of course, there may occasionally be direct access from brand new visitors. However, it can also come from existing customers or your employees, which doesn’t tell you much about the success of various marketing campaigns, for example.

You might also see an increase in direct traffic if you have an insecure website (HTTP) and the reference website is secure (HTTPS). Or when visitors come via mobile apps, desktop software and the like. In these cases, even though there is a “reference” to your website, you may not receive the referring information.

To solve the problems of tracking and interpreting direct traffic, you must first analyze your typical traffic patterns. Then monitor any changes with each new marketing campaign you launch.

Diploma

In the battle between organic traffic and direct traffic, there is no one winner. Organic traffic informs you about the success of your SEO. Direct traffic informs you about the success of your brand awareness campaigns and brand loyalty. You want both organic and direct traffic to be high, not sacrificing one for the other.