For all online businesses, website traffic is the key to measure revenue. Website traffic ultimately generates the conversion in the major business. So, driving traffic to the website becomes the primary function of the marketer and business owners.

First off, let’s talk about what actually “traffic” term is. Website traffic is a number of people who come to your site through various channels. The channels can be different which we are going to discuss in detail in this post. Overall, engagement, lead, conversion, and profit entirely depends on website traffic. The more traffic to the site, the more the revenue is.

Well, in this article we are not going to discuss how to drive the traffic to the website. We are only discussing the different types of website traffic. Because it is important to know what are the different channels to bring traffic. The ultimate aim of the article is also letting you know which channel you should be focusing on.

Website traffic is categorized in different types depending on where the users came from. Here, in this post, we are going to talk about 6 different types of website traffic.

1. Direct Traffic
2. Organic Traffic
3. Paid Traffic
4. Referral Traffic
5. Social Media Traffic

1. Direct Traffic

Direct traffic refers to the traffic that comes to the website directly by typing the website name. People come to the website without the help of the referring source or channels. Generally, direct traffic comes only after being a famous brand or familiar in the market. Driving direct traffic has become everyone’s dream.

Getting direct traffic needs lots of effort and marketing campaigns because this is all about capturing establishing the brand in the consumer’s mind. For example, Google, Facebook, Youtube, Amazon. People from every corner of the world can type these domain names as long as they are from some remote part of the Amazon jungle.

Features of Direct Traffic

• It takes lots of effort and time to get direct traffic
• It is free
• Direct traffic is highly scalable
• Direct traffic signifies loyalty, trust towards the brand and people already aware of your brand

Read – 15+ Actionable On-Page SEO Techniques for WordPress Website

2. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic comes from different search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex. Organic traffic is the best source of traffic without paying any cost. However, driving organic traffic need lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) works to rank for specified keywords. SEO is the collection of strategies to maintain the health of the website so as to rank in the SERPs by satisfying the algorithms defined by the search engines.

Study shows that two-thirds of all online searches go through Google. However, traffic from other search engines like Bing, Baidu, and Yahoo are also included in the organic traffic metric. The amount of organic traffic depends on the amount of content and the overall website OPTIMIZATION level.

Organic traffic is comparatively high quality because users come to your site because they want to. When talking about organic traffic, On-page SEO and Off-page SEO play a great role.

Following image shows the organic result. The traffic comes by clicking on the link is considered as organic traffic from Google.

Features of Organic Traffic

• It is free
• Organic traffic depends on the level of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Getting result takes time but will be long-lasting
• Organic traffic ultimately means a website is in good condition. Because without optimizing the website in a good manner, google does not rank any post on top.

3. Paid Traffic

Paid traffic is the traffic you get from different channels like search engines or social media platforms by paying a certain amount of money. One of the best examples of the Paid ads platform is Google AdWords where companies or individuals pay to Google for displaying their business website on the Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

One good thing about the paid ad is, you to get geo-targeted ads on a Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. You have control over which audience from which part of the location to show the ads. Some other paid ads examples are Bing ads, Social Media ads like Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Instagram ads and so on.

The following image shows the example of Google AdWords’ results. The traffic from the following link is considered as paid traffic.

The following image shows an example of how Facebook Ads look like.

Features of Paid Traffic

• You need to pay for this traffic
• You can have control over which audience to reach
• Paid ads work on the CPC principle so you can control the ads preferences

4. Referral Traffic

Referral traffic is traffic that comes from various websites and other channels. More the referral to the site, the more the trust, and authority of the website. Referral traffic comes when other known or unknown people link the website in their blog post which means you have created some kind of value to them. That’s is why they are recommending for other people as well.

Referring links can be known as a backlink. You can track the referring domains from the Google Analytics>Acquisition>Chennels as shown in the fig below.

Features of Referral Traffic

• It is free
• Referral traffic signifies other people trust towards the brand
• Referring can be in terms of giving  links also known as backlinks

Read – 10 Off-Page SEO Techniques 

5. Social Media Traffic

As the name suggests, social media traffic is traffic that comes from Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram, and other social media links. The good thing about social media traffic is, it is 100% free unless you decide to pay for promoting products or services. But if you pay to social media then the traffic falls on the paid ads traffic.

Google algorithm doesn’t consider social signals as part of its search ranking algorithm. Therefore, any links you’ve built on your Facebook profile, page or group or Twitter will not have any significant impact on your off-page SEO efforts except the traffic. However, social media plays a vital role in driving traffic to the site. Especially, in recent days people spent lots of time on social media platforms than any other online platform.

Features of Social Media Traffic

• It is free
• The amount of traffic depends on the number of followers, engagement level, value you create for followers.
• Traffic comes from social media channels considered as no-follow links. Google doesn’t consider social signals as part of its search ranking algorithm.

6. Bot Traffic

Haha.. you might be wondering that why Bot Traffic is listed in this article. Because no one lists the bot traffic in their traffic list.

Wait…. we are just giving information about bot traffic even though this is not ordinary traffic for the website.

Bots are software applications developed with the intention of carrying out specific tasks. Bot Traffic is nonhuman traffic that comes to the website. In general case, the term Bot Traffic is defined from a negative perspective. But this is not the case. It all depends on what purpose the bots are being used. We are not going to talk about those parts because this article is all about the types of traffic.

Google bots can be the best example to describe here. According to Wikipedia –  Googlebot is the web crawler software used by Google, which collects documents from the web to build a searchable index for the Google Search engine. This name is actually used to refer to two different types of web crawlers: a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler.

Conclusion

Although we have talked about different types of website traffic and their features, the true fact is that you need all types of traffic to your site. It is important to focus on accumulating all types of traffic. There might be a situation where you need to run paid as well. There is a separate benefit of running paid ads to get traffic.

But the important fact is if you focus on producing quality content and provide value to the targeted audience then you can get tons of traffic to your website without paying single bucks. This is where comes the term Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short. SEO has become one of the best subjects to learn in this competitive world. Because there are millions of websites and online businesses out there. If you maintain proper SEO for your website then only you will stand ahead in the competitive world.

So, if you are a business owner and your business revenue is highly impacted by the website traffic then you should think of driving online traffic. You should know the different strategies to bring visitors to your site. So, we hope you got the overall idea about the different website traffic sources and their features.

Cheers!

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