To follow up on our post about organic and paid search, for the eager search engine marketer looking to make sense of the analytics gobbledy-gook, is this post that breaks down the types of search traffic descriptors you can find in a data report like Google Analytics.

Website businesses linked to GA will usually show three types of main search traffic: direct, search engine, and referral traffic.

Direct traffic refers to the people that specifically typed in your web address, and went directly to your website. These are loyal customers, employees and other such people that have a high brand awareness of your Internet business and are looking for specific information, items or services.

Search engine traffic deals with those people that typed in a handful of keywords, or possibly just typed in the name of your website business and with the help of organic or paid search, found your website. You can dig deeper for the SEM information by clicking on “organic search” and looking up the information.

Referral traffic is the type of clicks your website business is getting from things like email campaigns. These are important, especially if you’re in e-commerce, for seeing which emails are successful, and how many people are coming into your website business. You can even track their bounce rates and click patterns to see how you can better optimize your referral traffic, and your website content to retain your search traffic.

Each of these pieces, combined with knowing how your search traffic is divided between organic and paid search, helps put together a comprehensive view of your website business’ health. Most search engine marketing people can figure out how to optimize their website to improve these metrics, once they have a clear path to follow.

Up next, internal search engines and how they can mess up your search traffic and SEO results.

When any SEM logs into an analytics page to measure the success of their search engine marketing campaigns for a website business, he/she is sure to be inundated with a massive tsunami of data. Parsing out the meaningful metrics from the ignorable can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you are not 100 percent certain of what you need. One of the best starting points, we believe, is in figuring out the types of search traffic coming into your website business. Once you have this piece figured out, you can capitalize on the metrics that work, and focus on optimizing that particular search traffic.

Today’s post will focus on the two major types of search results that impact your business. (We will follow up with the types of search traffic you can find in reports like Google Analytics, and what they mean to search engine marketing for your website business.)

The two types of search traffic are organic, and paid searches. Organic search depends on how much brand awareness people have of your Internet business in its niche market. Your optimized keywords, meta tags, and website content all work to increase the “natural” searches that lead people to your website. If your organic search results are healthy, it is a good sign that your website business’ Internet rankings will rise, and that your page is on the correct path.

Paid searches are the second type of traffic search engine marketers will use to increase brand awareness and Internet ranking to your website business. This piece of SEO and SEM involves bidding on top ranking keywords in your niche industry in programs like AdSense, and generating traffic whenever those links with your paid keywords are clicked. If this is successful for your website business, it basically means you are dominating in those keywords over your competition.

Stay tuned for the next post about braking down the different kinds of search traffic, and how to relate that to your website business’ search engine marketing and optimization.