What Is Referral Traffic?

Date First Published: 4th February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 4/10

Learn more about what referral traffic is in this article.

Referral traffic describes traffic that comes from people clicking hyperlinks from one website to another. Any traffic that comes from sites other than the major search engines is known as referral traffic. A lot of referral traffic indicates that a lot of people are arriving on the website through other sources without looking for it on search engines. Search engines consider these links as positive ranking factors as long as they are coming from trusted websites. Examples of referral sources are social media sites, affiliate links, content partners, and blog posts.

Note:

It is called referral traffic as the originating website refers traffic from one website to another.

Importance

Referral traffic is important as it sends visitors to a website from other sources. This can get content to new people, giving an opportunity for more conversions, leads, and sales. The more referral traffic a website gets, the more total visitors it overall has. SEO is a long process and PPC ads can be expensive, so this is where referral traffic is useful. Monitoring the sources of referral traffic is essential for website owners to know which websites have linked to them and are generating the most traffic through their links. UTM tracking tags and Google Analytics can be used to track the sources of referral traffic.

Checking the sources of referral traffic can help online businesses to identify the needs and interests of the customers coming from the originating sites and what they are usually reading. This will allow them to optimise the content for them and convert those visitors into customers.

Increasing Referral Traffic

Ways of increasing referral traffic are:

• Publishing the website to online directories. Using a popular web directory will allow people to find the content more easily. Since website directories can be used to create a backlink to a website, this can greatly boost referral traffic.
• Getting listed on a review website. Review websites are a good source for getting more referral traffic. These visitors have reached the decision stage of the buyer's journey and are comparing products and services.
• Being active on social media. Every time someone likes, tweets, shares, or pins a piece of content, they are giving an opportunity to drive referral traffic to their website.
• Commenting on popular blogs. Commenting on blogs will definitely boost the referral traffic of a website, but people should make sure that their comments are valuable and they do not spam.
• Being active on industry forums. Similar to blog comments, effort should be focused on forums relevant to the topic of the website and always be trying to add value without spamming.
• Guest posting. Guest posting is the act of writing content for someone else’s website or blog. Guest posting is used to boost the guest's domain authority by posting backlinks back to their website.