Does direct website visits affect SEO?

Websiteowner978172 · Jul 3, 2021

I was wondering what everyone thought, do you think direct website visits affect SEO? I saw a study from SemRush that is saying that it is an important ranking factor. Referring to this image:

If you all do think it is a ranking factor, do you think purchasing high quality traffic through bots or microworkers would help?

CPANathan · Jul 3, 2021

This is a checklist from essential to non-essential. Bot traffic is dodgy too...

Edit: You want a bit of everything, when they're all together then quality is key.

tazarbm · Jul 3, 2021

yes, direct traffic affects SEO.... positively.

And if you buy quality "fake" traffic (if I can even express myself this way) it will help improve the rankings... well, for keywords with low competitions anyway. I purchased traffic off Fiverr one year ago for one of my micro-niche websites for $5 (3000 hits a month, or something like that) and 3-4 days into the campaign a couple of the keywords I was targeting at that time have jumped from pages 5-6 to page 2. After the campaign had finished those keywords have immediately went back to their initial rankings, and eventually got out of top 100 (not necessarily because of the traffic, but probably because of the shitty backlinks that I've purchased soon after). But hey, for me it worked back then!

GNews · Jul 3, 2021

I'm a firm believer in keep it natural.

Yes, it will help to have 'type-ins' or direct traffic

Retention after that will still be important, I would think

If you can think and generate a reason to get people to visit your site naturally, I'm sure your long-term benefits will be much better

If using fake traffc, I'd assume you're trying to ride a short-term exploit?

Websiteowner978172 · Jul 3, 2021

GNews said:
I'm a firm believer in keep it natural.

Yes, it will help to have 'type-ins' or direct traffic

Retention after that will still be important, I would think

If you can think and generate a reason to get people to visit your site naturally, I'm sure your long-term benefits will be much better

If using fake traffc, I'd assume you're trying to ride a short-term exploit?

Well I am already getting a couple thousand direct visits a day and interestingly I'm seeing correlation to direct visits in ranking. For example, just this week direct traffic is up about 200% and all our major keywords went from 2nd page to 1st page, even to ranks as high as #5.

I am currently looking at this site, https://en.upseo.io/ as it seems to have a lot of customizable options but ideally I would always like to go with someone from BHW

Rankster · Jul 3, 2021

Traffic bots are considered the most damaging type of bot, particularly those enables huge traffic.
As it can cause a skew in the data analytics and replicating web traffic.

IamKing · Jul 3, 2021

If your Bounce rate is less then it would helps.

Panther28 · Jul 3, 2021

The part that they are missing out on is you have to be found on search, and then clicked on. That's how google determines if people are visiting a site thanks to them.

Also time on site can't be calculated unless you have analytics or count the time they were on the site before they come back to google. The thing is if you found the site useful and are reading it, why would you need to go back to google? So this could easily affect the rankings if it wasn't mostly based on analytics.

You can't use bot traffic just directly on a site with google analytics, and it will rank higher. Why would they leave a huge ranking hole like that open?

Panther28 · Jul 3, 2021

I just noticed this when I was searching for something just now.

If google can highlight the text on your site once a visitor comes from a snippet of text in search, then they MUST be able to inject some sort of analytics too, so they probably can measure a few more things.

hideath · Jul 4, 2021

The 1st thing to keep in mind that these are actually based on the analysis of some top-ranking websites,
Naturally speaking, any ranked website with organic traffic should have some direct traffic as well, which sounds just like normal cooperation more than a factor,
so unless someone did have actually some good experience or made a proper case study with this, it's just a simple guess,
One thing that i can confirm is that search traffic & ctr manipulation does improve the website ranking when it's done right

blackbeans · Jul 6, 2021

Direct website visits do affect SEO but in an indirect way.

If you think about it hard enough, the reason why people would visit your website directly is that you've established some sort of brand.

They are aware of what kind of content you have, and they enter your domain directly into their browsers.

As you probably already know, Google is great at picking up browser habits because of Chrome.

When people set up an account, and they're logged into Chrome (so their bookmarks don’t get lost and all that good stuff), Google is effectively “listening in” on their traffic behavior.

It’s not that hard for Google to get a hold of this type of information.

But if it does notice that people are entering a domain name directly, this is an indicator of content quality or positive user experience.

As you should already know from Google’s RankBrain update, user experience plays a big role in how your website is ranked in search results.

Websiteowner978172 · Jul 6, 2021

blackbeans said:
Direct website visits do affect SEO but in an indirect way.

If you think about it hard enough, the reason why people would visit your website directly is that you've established some sort of brand.

They are aware of what kind of content you have, and they enter your domain directly into their browsers.

As you probably already know, Google is great at picking up browser habits because of Chrome.

When people set up an account, and they're logged into Chrome (so their bookmarks don’t get lost and all that good stuff), Google is effectively “listening in” on their traffic behavior.

It’s not that hard for Google to get a hold of this type of information.

But if it does notice that people are entering a domain name directly, this is an indicator of content quality or positive user experience.

As you should already know from Google’s RankBrain update, user experience plays a big role in how your website is ranked in search results.

See this was my thinking as well but technically speaking couldn't someone have thousands of microworkers that each visit their site daily, visiting multiple pages each session, and spending a lot of time on the site and use this to help rankings?

Does direct website visits affect SEO?

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