When you look at the analytics reports for your website, you will see a number of different traffic sources. Along with organic, referrals, social, and email, one that is sometimes overlooked is Direct Traffic. That direct traffic to your site is extremely important, as it helps to establish your domain authority.
DIrect traffic is the users who, in a nutshell, go directly to your website without Googling for your business or following a link from one of your social media channels. Oftentimes, the users are manually typing in your domain name or clicking on a link they have bookmarked. One of the things Google is looking at when putting together their search rankings, is domain authority. By having more direct traffic to your site, Google will view that as having more domain authority since users are going to your site on their own with no referral source. The goal for Google all along, has been to provide search results to users with the best sites and accuracy. One of the ways to weed out the less helpful sites, is by looking at the amount of direct traffic that a site gets. If a site has no problem getting a large number of users to the site on its own, that’s a pretty good clue that it’s a quality site and worthy of a high ranking for the given keywords.
So knowing what Direct Traffic is and why it’s important, the questions must be asked: How can we increase the direct traffic on our site? Unfortunately there is no simple snap of the fingers trick to make that happen. However, doing things like including your domain name on your business card or brochures can help point more people directly to your site, without needing to go through Google. I’ve seen success with my elevator pitch when talking to people by simply encouraging them to learn more about us at fullscopecreative.com. I recently ran an advertising campaign with a local radio station, and made sure that when we were writing the script that we included the domain name. In fact, when recording the domain name, we probably did more takes of that, just me saying fullscopecreative.com, than anything else. This is where the branding of your business really comes into play. How many times can you say www.mydomain.com to as many people as possible and get them to your site. Again it may not sound like much with getting people to check out your site, but it’s building up the direct traffic. The higher that number is, the more domain authority you have and the higher ranking you can get.
Direct traffic is one of the most common sources of user acquisition a site can have. Having more direct traffic, will help to increase your domain authority in the eyes of Google. When you look at your analytics report for your site, you’ll see a range of traffic sources. Taking the time to boost your sites direct traffic, can have a significant impact on the other traffic sources as well.