Organic vs Direct Traffic

The aim of any SEO campaign is to obtain traffic from a variety of different sources. After all, this tells technicians that users are clicking on a website in order to find out more information, enquire about the services that are on offer or simply browse the pages. With this said, traffic to a site can be found in two forms: organic and direct. Read on as the team here at Internet Marketing Questions go over the differences…

Where is traffic sourced from?

In order to understand the difference between organic and direct traffic, it is important that technicians understand how traffic is classified in the first place. After all, it can be obtained from a variety of different sources like e-mail, PPC, SERPs, referrals and social media. Depending on the source, the traffic is then categorised into an easier format: direct or organic.

What is direct traffic?

When traffic is obtained without a referral or source, it is known as direct traffic. Traditionally, direct traffic was thought to come from URL searches or bookmarks, and whilst this is still correct, the entire principle is more complicated than it was several years ago. After all, direct traffic tends to increase as organic traffic increases because some pages are often sourced incorrectly. With this said, common sources of direct traffic include internal employees whose IP address is not filtered from the analytics, customers who log-in from a portal and e-mail traffic being incorrectly sourced as well as true direct traffic from URL searches and bookmarks, which tells technicians that a website has obtained brand awareness.

What is organic traffic?

On the other hand, organic traffic is obtained when visitors find a site and enter it through a search engine like Google. In fact, it is the most sought-after type of traffic because it tells marketers that a site is being ranked favourably in the SERPs. With this said, it is important to note that paid search ads do not create organic traffic, but many ethical SEO campaigns are often affected by the competition that PPC marketing creates. Unlike direct traffic, organic traffic does not come from multiple sources and is primarily obtained through high-quality SEO where technicians rank a site on a search engine results page (SERPs) for a selection of keywords where it can be found by a user.

Although a lot of weight is placed on the importance of organic traffic in SEO, direct traffic also has a lot of necessity too. After all, it often comes from branding and tells technicians that potential customers are finding a site because they know about it from other platforms like social media and billboards. To find out more information about traffic sources in SEO, get in contact with a member of the SEO Enterprise team today!