Visitors on a website are measured broadly as traffic. Knowing how users get to your website is an important aspect of optimizing your digital marketing campaigns. Since visitors can come from a variety of channels, it can be confusing to understand what the different traffic types mean for your business.
Understanding where your visitors came from can help your business optimize its online presence. As an SEO company in Northern California, we understand the tangible benefits of helping businesses determine where their traffic is coming from and optimizing a well-rounded marketing campaign to cater towards driving predictable lead generation.
Let’s begin by breaking down the different types of traffic and what they can mean for your business.
Direct Traffic
When a visitor navigates straight to your website, they are typing out the URL to navigate directly to your website (for example wsismartmarketing.com). This is considered direct traffic. This streamlines navigation to your website as these visitors either know your business’s website or have been on it before. When thinking about how these visitors impact your business, these direct traffic numbers can be thought of as past or repeat clients who are familiar with your business.
Referral Traffic
Traffic sent by a link from a website other than your own is considered referral traffic. Since they referenced your website, this other website provided a link for users to use to navigate to your site.
When examining referral traffic to your website, it is important to investigate where this traffic is being referred from. Referral traffic comes from a variety of different websites. Therefore, it is a good idea to check these referring websites and block those that are non-quality or spammy. This is one strategy that Northern California marketing companies use to improve the domain authority and credibility of your website.
Social Traffic
Visitors that are brought to your website from a social media platform are called social traffic. When you receive social traffic, it comes from those who have interacted with your business profile and navigated to your website. Having social traffic means that your social media business profile is optimized in a way that promotes redirection and encourages visitors to explore your company’s website.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic is a visitor that enters through a paid search (or pay-per-click) advertisement that they clicked on. Paid search traffic can come from a myriad of sources: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, etc. The important thing to know about paid traffic is that you have a strategically built campaign designed to get you in front of your target audience when they are looking to purchase the services that you provide.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is visitors who found your website by navigating from a search engine results page. This can include visitors from Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Building your organic traffic is the main goal of search engine optimization as improving your online presence allows you to be found more frequently.
What separates organic traffic from the other forms of traffic is that these visitors may not have known about your business before they clicked on your website. With other forms of traffic, there is, at some level, a pre-existing knowledge of your business.
Each of these types of traffic has an important role to play in developing a robust, well-rounded digital marketing campaign that is focused on creating reliable, predictable lead generation. Knowing which type of traffic to index towards is a key part of fueling sustainable business growth.
As one of the top SEO companies in Northern California, our team knows what it takes to grow a business and help them stay aligned with their business goals. To learn how we can grow your business, contact us at (707) 843-3714.
