5 different types of website traffic you can't afford to not understand

Your website is an essential tool for your business, acting as a gateway to your goods and services. So, it stands to reason that the more people that see your website, the better it is for your business. That's why trying to increase the amount of people, or traffic as it is known, visiting your website should be a primary focus of your online marketing strategy. 

 

The more website traffic you have, the more potential customers you have, and the more chances you stand of converting traffic into sales. You can check your traffic using tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console. 

 

However, you also need to understand that not all web traffic is the same, and growing it is not always as easy as you would like. The most successful online marketing strategies understand that there are different approaches to all types of web traffic and develop methods to prove the worth of each channel of traffic. 

 

Here's where your visitors are actually coming from — including a couple of newer channels that didn't exist when this article was first written: 

 

As the name suggests, this is the most simple and direct form of website visitor. This is traffic that visits your site directly by entering your web address into the browser. 

 

It comes as a result of good brand awareness and is usually repeat traffic from existing customers. Increases in direct traffic usually come as a result of greater brand awareness including business cards, sign writing, and print, and as such it is very valuable if often low in quantity — moreover, sometimes a generic domain name can also increase direct traffic. 

 

This is when people find their way to your site through external links located on other sites on the web. This could be in the form of a press release or a link in an external blog or even just times you've been quoted answering a question online in a forum, for example. 

 

To increase your referral traffic, you need to be producing content that other people feel comfortable quoting or mentioning on their own websites. Try and get your site mentioned on industry specific sites or partner with other relevant companies and your links will be relevant and help you in the search engines, or get your site mentioned on third party review providers. 

 

However, Google can penalise low quality links which can undo all your hard work, so be careful when and where you are posting your links. One good link is worth far more than low quality links from bad sources. Learn to measure the behaviour of anyone using these links and you can gauge the quality of the referral traffic. 

 

This is when people find your site through an online web search. The best way to increase this form of traffic is through search engine optimisation (SEO), which is an online marketing strategy that aims to boost your page rankings on Google and other search engines. One of the main ways of doing this is through high quality content, which the Google bots assess and rank. 

 

Therefore, it's well worth making sure your site is up to date, with fresh and good quality content so it is more visible. Organic traffic is the reward for doing everything else that search engines would expect a good website to have done. So don't expect it instantly if you are the newest kid on the block and certainly look into what Google would have expected a new website to have done already! 

 

As you might expect, this is traffic driven by social media platforms such as Facebook (https://www.facebook.com) and Twitter (https://www.twitter.com). The more followers you gain, the more site visits you can expect. It's worth spending some time trying to engage with potential customers on social media platforms. It's an easy and cost-effective way of opening up another traffic channel. 

 

Lastly, there are options where you can pay to boost your web traffic through online tools such as Google Ads. This allows you to directly target relevant keywords and demographics and is essential in highly competitive markets. 

 

Seek appropriate advice when using pay-per-click (PPC) — the learning curve to the point of creating a campaign that generates you a strong return on investment is steep and often likely to be expensive without expert advice — we are a Google Partner so we can help when advertising your it'seeze website in the search engines. 

 

Anyone who clicks through from a newsletter or a promotional email counts as email traffic. It's often the most overlooked channel, yet it tends to convert better than most, because these visitors already know who you are and have chosen to open your message. 

 

Building this channel starts with collecting email addresses in the first place: a sign-up box on the site, or a checkbox on your contact form. Once you have a list, regular, genuinely useful emails (not just sales pitches) keep people coming back to the site rather than forgetting you exist. 

 

Video has grown from a nice-to-have into one of the main ways people research a business before they buy. Visitors arriving from YouTube, or from video embedded on social platforms, are now tracked as their own channel in most analytics tools. 

 

A short walkthrough of your premises or a demonstration of your product can drive this kind of traffic, and video tends to hold a visitor's attention far longer than text alone. If this is new territory for you, our website videography team can help you get started. 

 

This is the newest channel on the list. AI chatbots and AI-powered search results now send visitors to websites directly, often citing a business by name in answer to a question, without that visitor ever seeing a traditional search results page. Most analytics platforms are still catching up on how to label this traffic cleanly. 

 

Alongside it sits "dark social": links shared privately in WhatsApp groups, Slack channels, group chats, or plain text messages, all arriving at your site with no referrer data attached at all. Both are a reminder that some of your best traffic will never show up neatly labelled in a report, however good your Google Analytics (https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/) set-up is.