If you're looking for a company online, do you hazard a guess at their domain and go directly? Or do you search them in a search engine? I'll hazard a guess that you'll turn to good old Google to point you in the right direction.

Once I've visited a website once, though, I will then usually revisit as "direct traffic," typing the site straight into my address bar. But that would apparently make me something of an exception.

Plenty more users will, irrespective of whether they know the web address of the site they are looking for, will Google the brand name (or a variant of it) and let the search giant do the work for them.

But how do the numbers of brand searchers to direct visits stack up? I took a look at some data.

The Data

I pulled some numbers out from the statistics on 10 different websites, each in different industry areas with average monthly visit numbers ranging from 1500 – 1.2 million.

The direct traffic data was taken straight out of Analytics. The brand searches data has been taken from non-paid search data in Analytics, with a filter applied so that only keywords containing the relevant brand name are included. These brand searches will include all manner of phrases including staff names plus brand names or searches such as "contact + brand name," for example.

Brand Organic Visits vs Direct Traffic

The date range applied was 1st September 2010 – 28th February 2011 to give us six months of data.

Case Study

Conclusion

Of course, there are countless factors that can affect just how much of a site's total traffic its brand organic makes up.

• Where the site ranks for its primary non-brand target keywords.
• The search volume of its primary target non-brand keywords.
• Other (non SEO or even non-web) marketing schemes that could affect brand awareness.

However, the ten sites above are all very different. They are going for different non-brand keywords and achieving incredibly different levels of non-brand traffic. What they do have in common though is that:-

• Each of them has many different brand terms referring traffic by search
• More than 5% of their traffic comes through brand searches in search engines

What we can see clearly though is that seven of the 10 sites we looked at get more traffic through searches for their brand terms than they do direct traffic.

Brand organic traffic is made up of searchers already looking for you or for something associated with you. Why would you want them finding anyone else?

Ranking for Brand Terms

If you are actively carrying out SEO on your website, there's a decent chance of it ranking naturally for its brand terms already. However, if your domain name does not contain your brand terms or you have other sites competing for your brand terms (common particularly for those who also sell their own products wholesale) you may need to carry out brand SEO, perhaps even going as far as adding your brand terms as keyword to your existing SEO campaign.

If you are active on social media channels under your brand or you blog on other websites, write for e-magazines and similar, you'll find you naturally acquire brand links. By the same token, directories generally result in brand links. Before hitting the directories though, it's well worth a gander at this SEOMoz post and this one too.