Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
Monitor the sources of traffic to your website
What traffic sources are there that we need to know about for SEO? Well, we'll want to distinguish between direct traffic and traffic that can help SEO.
Direct traffic
So direct traffic is when people type in a URL to a website, maybe they bookmarked a URL, it could even be an untagged email.
So, when you open an email in Microsoft Outlook, there's not a way for Google Analytics to track that usually, or it could be links from PDFs. That's direct traffic, which is actually separate to organic traffic, or SEO traffic.
Referral traffic
Referral traffic is very related to SEO traffic. So, when you get traffic from another website, it could be from a blogger, it could be from a journalist, could even be social media, quite often this is through backlinks. So the more referral traffic you get, particularly from sites that follow their links, the better you're probably going to be doing for SEO. So that's something that we look at.
Organic traffic
More specifically, what we're really interested in is organic traffic. This is visitors from search engines that are unpaid sources of traffic.
Back to TopJoe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
