What’s the Difference Between Direct Search and Organic Traffic?

Whether you provide office relocation services, cosmetic dental solutions, VoIP phone systems or anything else, you need high quality traffic streaming to your website on a regular basis.

However, as you may have already discovered during your trek through the inbound and online marketing galaxy: there’s more than one type of traffic. Specifically, there’s direct search and organic traffic – and knowing the difference is critically important to effectively allocate your budget, and avoid being hustled by fast-talking, jargon-wielding, acronym-addicted consultants and agencies.

Direct Search

Direct search — which is also referred to as direct traffic — refers to visitors who reach your website directly vs. from a referring source, such as a blog post, ebook, social media post, other websites, and pay-per-click advertising.

A properly configured inbound marketing campaign will have unique URLs assigned to each referral source, so that you can see which sources are driving quality traffic in your direction, which sources need to be fortified or improved, and which sources may not be a good investment.

So, if people aren’t clicking a link to reach your website, how are direct searchers getting there? Again, the answer is simple: they’re either typing the URL into their browser, or they’ve bookmarked your website. Because of this, it’s important to setup IP filters in order to distinguish visits from prospective customers vs. employees (who also typically type in URLs or use bookmarks).

Organic Search

Organic search is the kind of traffic that originates from a search engine. There are a number of ways to boost your SEO profile, including both on-page and off-page elements (we discuss the differences between these two in our blog post here).

It’s extremely important to keep in mind that “getting on page 1 of Google” is not always the best way to invest your marketing dollars. This is especially the case for highly competitive keywords. However, it can be the right move for less competitive (“long tail”) keywords. These days, it’s also beneficial to have a steady stream of blog posts getting indexed by search engines, since they are often a source of high quality traffic.

Also, as noted above in the discussion on direct search, traffic coming from pay-per-click advertising such as Google AdWords is not included in definition of organic search. Essentially, this difference is more about tracking than it is of type. Inbound marketing platforms like the one created by HubSpot do a great job of helping you see how many visitors clicked organic search result links, and how many clicked an ad. You can also see where they’re coming from, what time they clicked, and other metrics to help you understand what’s working and what needs to be improved/fixed/jettisoned.

Learn More

To learn more about direct search and organic traffic – and why you need both approaches working for you to drive a steady stream of high quality traffic to your website – contact the Leap Clixx team today. Your consultation with us is free.

For more information on how to use SEO to boost your inbound marketing results, download our FREE eBook: