Organic and Direct website traffic sources
In digital marketing, traffic is what everyone is concerned about. To sum up, website traffic can be a referral, direct, or organic. Whatever website you are hosting, you will always have this question about where your visitors are coming from. By coming from doesn’t specify the location but the searching sources. Navigating and interpreting your data simply means you want to know who is visiting your site and how they got there basically. We are going to discuss the difference between direct and organic website traffic.
Difference between organic and direct website traffic sources
But before we begin, let's understand the difference between all the traffic sources. Breaking down the sources of traffic:
- Referral- When visitors find you through a site that is not a major search engine.
- Direct- The source of visitors/ traffic is unknown.
- Email- Traffic from email marketing tagged with proper parameters.
- Social- Traffic from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
- Paid search- When you pay for promoting your website or give ads to attract traffic.
- Organic- Traffic that you don't pay for, but earn on your content and optimized website.
Understanding Direct Traffic
As the name suggests, direct traffic is the traffic that comes directly to your website. It is like someone who is directly typing your URL in the search engine. Visitors can fall in the direct category by clicking your site link from an email or pdf. Any short URL searched in a secure site or from social media pages like Facebook. Sometimes the organic search can end up being shown as direct traffic. So, if you see your organic traffic reducing, it can mean an increase in direct traffic.
As a security protocol, you must have a secure site ‘HTTP’, or you will not be able to track your visitors coming from a secure site. There can be trouble or some miscalculations in tracking your direct traffic because of redirects or broken codes. There can be links that are redirected or the kink is broken which is why it gets recorded as direct traffic
Understanding Organic website traffic
Organic traffic comes from Google, Bing, or even Yahoo. You earn organic traffic when people visit your website directly from the search engines without any ads or paid promotions. What impacts organic search is SEO. If your website has the right content and keywords it will be easy for the visitors to find you. Just like Google page ranking depends on the SEO parameters, the organic search also does. Search Engine Optimization helps in boosting your page or website rank.
“From experience, we’ve found SEO and content marketing to be one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to drive relevant user trafficfor any website,” says Donald Chan, founder of marketing tech blog MarTech Wise.
With search engine optimization, you can boost your page ranking by maintaining the keywords and using citations and image alt-texts. If your content is unique, you have a user-friendly website and optimize the keywords, you will have traffic on your site.
The only different point is the user and what he is searching for. When there’s a lot of traffic on your website, it means you are providing the right word that your visitors are using to search. Therefore, what the user intends to search is what makes the source and ranking difference.