What type of traffic for a website is considered good? Is it referral, paid, organic, or direct?
Ideally, direct. We can consider organic and direct as more or less the same. Direct just means the person looked up your website specifically, rather than finding it organically while browsing the web.
One way that might happen is if someone who loved your website told their friend in real life to check it out. So the friend looked it up on their phone. But in general, both direct and organic are great.
Paid traffic can also be good, but it costs money, which is a downside for most people.
Referral traffic can be good or not, depending on the context of the referral.
Let’s discuss.
The traffic that comes as a result of unpaid search results, primarily by targeting keywords, is known as organic traffic. It comes as a result of SEO measures, recommendations, and direct links shared by friends, stuff like that. No money was involved indirectly displaying an ad.
The traffic that does not come on its own, but rather comes through intervention and money spent by the business (such as by paid social media ads) is known as paid traffic.
Direct traffic comes to a website directly, that is, without visiting another site. If you hear about a website and choose to type it into your browser to go there, you are a direct visitor. Every time someone returns to a site through the auto-fill tool when starting to type in the address, that is also a direct visitor. Direct visitors are great because they’re usually fans, people who don’t care about anything else at the moment but coming to your site. Nothing led them there, they just chose to visit, usually due to liking the site and wanting to see more of it.
Referral traffic consists of people visiting your website from other sites, without searching it or trying to find it specifically. When any visitor visits a link from a website (other than Google and other search engines), that is considered referral traffic. It can overlap with organic, depending on how you define it.
As previously discussed, all types of traffic are good, but I would emphasize organic, direct, and referral traffic. Paid traffic can work, but you need enough money to test the right ads, otherwise, you’ll get low numbers and visitors who bounce off your webpage quickly.
To not complicate this answer, I have an article to share with you that would help you understand traffic-getting methods in a better way. My post: Hunt Down The Three Little Pigs of Online Traffic can help someone see traffic in a simpler way, where it’s about what kind of tactics you choose to do, instead of trying to memorize a bunch of terms like organic and referral.
In conclusion, for website traffic, more is always better, provided you keep chasing high-quality visitors, people who actually care about your site and what it has to offer.
Please feel free to message me or comment if you need clarification.
Good Luck!
Thanks,
Cleo