What the difference between organic traffic and direct traffic in Google Analytics?

[Billy Pro]

Direct traffic is one of the most common sources of visits to your website. Direct traffic is defined as visits with no referring website. When a visitor follows a link from one website to another, the site of origin is considered the referrer. These sites can be search engines, social media, blogs, or other websites that have a link to another websites for visitors to follow. Direct traffic, however, categorizes visits that do not come from a referring URL. Often, these visitors manually enter the URL of the website or have it bookmarked. In many cases, direct traffic can be due to internal employees logging onto your company’s webpage or current customers going to your login screen.
Organic traffic is what most marketers strive to increase. This traffic is defined as visitors coming from a search engine, such as Google or Bing. One thing to note is that paid search ads are not counted in this category. In HubSpot and Google Analytics, paid search traffic or PPC is marked in a separate category. Organic search traffic is labeled in green on the sources graph in HubSpot and can give additional data into the actual search phrase that brought in your traffic. When looking at your analytics tool, you may see traffic labeled as “unknown” or “SSL”. This means that the search terms are being withheld from the data set. This is a result of Google not sharing this information, rather than the analytics platform you are using.