Traffic Sources

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.