How much do branded search organic traffic & direct traffic impact the ranking for their non-branded topic/keyword?

[vtmoz]

Hi Moz community,

We can see many websites with a reputation will have more number of visitors landing with these two types of traffic mostly (>90%): organic traffic of brand queries and direct traffic.

Will these visits help and impact the ranking of these websites for the keywords/topics they been employing?

Ex: Moz will have many such visitors. Will this really impact the ranking of Moz for non-brand queries they try to rank for, like "SEO Software". If so, will this have a huge impact or it's just a minor ranking factor. Because we have this with our website and we don't see such boost in rankings compared to our competitors with less direct traffic; where as I been looking at some SEO articles that direct traffic is one of the most important ranking factors.

Thanks

[Igor.Go]

SEMrush did a study according to which direct traffic is the most important ranking factor.
Take it with a grain of salt, but there is some truth to it. No one knows how Google's algorithm works but it can't ignore direct visits otherwise Instagram wouldn't rank for anything. And it ranks first for some very high volume keywords: https://i.imgur.com/Ctby9TN.png

Link to the study: https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors/

[Dalessi]

Traffic is an important indicator along with onsite behavior once they are there. The more people visiting your site the better it should be for your search engine rankings as long as they are engaging with the site. Try to generally keep your bounce rate as low as possible and try to make the site as sticky as possible.

Best Regards