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Direct vs. Organic Website Traffic – What’s the Difference?

Direct vs. Organic Website Traffic
With a good digital marketing strategy in place, your website will receive a variety of visitors every single day. These visitors are driven to your website in different ways.

If you’re just starting out as a business, you need to adopt smart, relevant approaches to driving website traffic. This decision depends on your niche, as well as your objectives and goals as a business owner.

Here’s the low-down on direct vs. organic website traffic.

Common Types of Website Traffic

In broad terms, direct traffic is caused by people who directly and purposely enter your website URL into their browser’s address bar, whereas organic traffic is generated by those who find your website through the use of a search engine (such as Google or Yahoo).

Apart from direct and organic traffic, other common types include paid (through digital advertising campaigns), email (the clicks you get as a result of your email marketing), social (through social media channels like Facebook and Instagram), and referral (traffic you get via existing users or another website linking to yours).

Direct Website Traffic


A “referring website” is the online location from which a visitor clicks a link to go to your website. Search engines, social media, blogs, comment sections, and captions with links to other websites all fall under this category. Therefore, visits that do not originate from a referring URL are grouped under direct traffic.

This type of website traffic used to be mainly ascribed to a) users who manually typed in the URL of a website into their browser’s address bar, and b) those who clicked on a saved link, e.g. in their bookmark folder.

Organic Website Traffic

Organic website traffic is generated by visitors who reach your website after using a search engine. Your website’s position on search engine result pages influences the amount of organic traffic you receive.

You will get more organic visitors the higher your website ranks for search queries related to your business or niche. That is why the majority of inbound marketing strategies and approaches are built to improve search engine rankings in order to drive more visitor numbers that fall under organic traffic.

Your website’s chances of ranking higher for the Google search terms your prospective customers are using increases the more you optimize your site for search engines. Local SEO services can be especially beneficial to increase your sites visibility.

Increasing Direct Website Traffic


Here are some actionable tips on how to increase your direct traffic numbers.

Increasing Organic Website Traffic


Increase organic traffic by implementing some of the following techniques:

Final Thoughts


While organic traffic is frequently viewed as more relevant in terms of marketing, direct traffic is more focused and, often, more likely to lead to conversions.

The best way to gauge the success of your website and marketing efforts is through testing different approaches to driving traffic. Consider investing in a report builder tool that will analyze your results and help you understand your strong and weak points. It is important to track your metrics and results, but also link your efforts to actual ROI when you regularly publish and promote your website content.

Therefore, make sure to examine your traffic statistics at regular intervals to spot trends and document progress. This will equip you with the insights needed to tweak and improve your strategy going forward.

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