What is Referral Traffic?

Referral Traffic is an activity when users visit a web page not from the Google search engine, but from direct links on other websites or social media.

When users click a link on a web page or social media, and users are redirected to another website, they are then considered referral traffic.

Advantages and Functions

Referral Traffic is very useful for users who have web pages. By building backlinks, we can get new visitors and market content to them. By performing UTM tracking, users can find out which social media profiles contribute the most visitors so that they can be used appropriately.

Referral Traffic is also useful for SEO because when visitors visit a certain website that comes from another website, the Google algorithm will rate it as a positive rank because it provides various kinds of relevant information. This increases the visitors' trust in the websites. The advantages of Referral Traffic are as follows:

• Increase visitor traffic and brand recognition
• Make SEO better with the consistent backlink
• An ability to deal with diverse visitors
• Increase the website rank
• Increase page and domain authority

How to Improve Referral Traffic

• Publish on Guest Blog Post

Guest Blog Post can create many potentials for increasing the referral traffic on a website by inserting an external link that is pinned on the authors' profiles, and users must focus on a website that is related to their own website.

• Make Use of Social Media Maximally

There is information that users who are marketing their businesses on social media can increase their referral traffic by 89%, because every time the owners share or insert parts of content, they can create an opportunity by directing the traffic to the website, and users must be creative in creating content.

• Give Comments on Blog Actively

Giving comments on many blogs can increase referral traffic if it is done correctly. Users must give valuable comments, and they should also be relevant to the topic discussed. Moreover, users have also inserted the link to the website after giving comments.

• Actively participate in a forum

If users actively participate in a forum, they will extend their connection with other users, thus it can attract the traffic from the followed forum.

• Use Unique Design on Contents

Users have to be creative in creating content, because the more unique and creative the content, the more visitors' attention that website owners will get. This can increase the referral traffic of the websites.

Difference between Organic Traffic and Referral Traffic

Organic traffic comes from the search engine which website users try to increase the visitors to their websites naturally. This is done without paying third parties for increasing their traffic. Normally, when visitors type the keywords of what they are looking for, and they directly get the page containing the information that they want, it is considered organic traffic.

The difference between organic traffiic and referral traffic is in the source of the traffic itself. In this case, visitors mostly come from other website pages or social media. For example, when website owners share a link on a social media timeline such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and there are also visitors who visit the link through that social media, then it can be considered referral traffic.