Whether you’re an old hand at online selling or you went online in response to Covid, website traffic is the lifeblood of your eCommerce profitability. Without good traffic and the right kind of traffic, your sales will suffer. That means you need a clear understanding of where your traffic comes from and why.

In terms of website traffic, there is a broad direct vs organic traffic divide. If you’re not clear about the difference or how they affect your business, keep reading. We’ll give you a quick breakdown of both and ways you can improve your traffic.

What Is Direct Traffic?

Direct traffic comes in a couple of forms but usually refers to someone typing in your website address directly into their web browser. The other possibilities are that they bookmarked your site or found a direct link in a document, like a marketing brochure PDF.

As a general rule, these are current customers or warm leads for your business.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic refers to most of your other website traffic. This traffic comes when someone does a keyword search for a kind of business or a topic. In the case of a topic, the search engine will typically provide the searcher with a link to a piece of content on your site about that topic.

For example, let’s say that you sell silicone cooking utensils. Someone searches for silicone utensil benefits. The search engine might provide them with a link to a blog post you wrote specifically about the benefits of silicone cooking utensils.

You also see organic traffic in the form of links people share through social media sites either directly to your products or to your content.

A good web analytics program can usually help you sort out what kind of traffic you get from where.

Paid Traffic

The third category of traffic you see is paid traffic. That’s website traffic you get from online advertising, such as PPC marketing. While it can be effective, it can also prove very expensive in the long run.

Boosting Organic Website Traffic

Most businesses prefer and look for ways they can increase organic traffic. In general, you draw the most organic traffic as a product of the content on your site. That means you need a content strategy in place and a way to create that content.

You can produce content in-house if your employees have the right skills. You can also look for outside help from SEO content specialists. If you’re curious what outside help would mean, click here to learn more.

Direct Vs Organic Traffic and You

The direct vs organic traffic divide is really about the difference between existing customers and potential new customers. Direct traffic comes from people who already know about your company, likely bookmarked your site, or have marketing collateral from you.

Organic traffic comes primarily from people who need a service or product like yours or want information about it. You get those people with a good content marketing strategy that provides them with useful and relevant content.

Looking for more digital marketing tips? Check out the Online Marketing posts on our blog.