Organic vs Direct Traffic Sources – Which Is Better & Why?

By understanding the traffic of your website, you achieve one fundamental step of search engine optimization. While updating the content on a website, it should be kept in mind who are you contacting with and what will entice them. In addition to this, the quality of website audience can improve depending on which source was used. For instance, paid search traffic is always of higher quality.

Other sources of traffic are not as straightforward as this. More often, the websites witness the most traffic from both organic and direct search. It is, however, needed to know these 2 website traffic sources in detail and see which one is better.

Direct Traffic

Direct traffic can be named as one of the most common sources for web traffic. In HubSpot, this type of traffic is highlighted with blue color, at the end or bottom of sources graph. This traffic can be defined as visits without referring website. The referring sites can include blogs, social media, search engines or other websites you may have back linked.

However, this particular kind of traffic categories the visits which are not a courtesy of a referring URL. In some cases, the sources of traffic can be internal like customers going for login or simply current employees. In order to keep this data out, make a habit of filtering out internal IP addresses. This will make sure that the employee traffic is not measured in the traffic numbers.

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic and organic search are something that needs to be increased for better web traffic and website ranking. Organic traffic can be defined as the audience directed from a search engine like Google or Yahoo. Paid search ads are not included in the category. In Google Analytics and HubSpot, PPC or paid search traffic is counted as a separate category. This type of traffic is highlighted with green in the sources bar graph. It can also give additional information into the actual phrase which drove the traffic. If you look into your analytics tool, you will find traffic named as SSL or unknown. This implies that the search terms were being hidden from the set of data.

Organic vs Direct Traffic

When talking about Organic vs Direct Traffic sources, the organic one always takes the lead as websites become popular mostly because people find them through authentic resources and this is what happens in organic search. For instance, I am looking for a PDF version of a book and I found your website that sales and at the same time keeps free copies of PDF books. If you have incorporated some of the best attracting tools in your website, I will soon become a regular visitor, craving for more. A search engine can definitely make and break a website traffic and therefore, organic traffic is declared the winner.