The short answer is, “yes”. Direct is basically a dumping ground for a lot of stuff that Google has difficulty attributing, as well as actual Direct traffic from sources such as URL-autocomplete searches.
If you are seeing traffic that you are confident is Organic being attributed to the Direct channel, you are not alone.
Even if your tracking is set up perfectly, you will still find a chunk of your SEO traffic being claimed as Direct.
Why Organic Traffic is Shown as Direct
This issue is caused by factors such as your site users’ browser privacy settings. If their browser is set to incognito or private mode, or they reject cookie permissions when they visit your site, then your site can’t track the visit accurately.
If the browser doesn’t pass HTTP Referrer information, then the traffic will appear to be Direct traffic from the perspective of your website analytics.
How Can I Avoid My Organic Traffic Appearing as Direct?
Unfortunately, there’s nothing that can be done about this issue. You have no control over how your site visitors configure their browsers.
However, one workaround solution is to pay attention to related data from Google Search Console.
If you must rely on analytics data, then make 2 reports: one from traffic sources, then one from analytics, and make sure your Organic data is cross-referenced with Search Console stats from the same time frame.
Here comes the science part
Back in 2014, the SEOs at Groupon carried out a risky experiment: they deindexed their whole site for about 6 hours and studied the traffic data during that time.
What they found was that Organic search dropped to near zero, as you would expect from a site that wasn’t on Google. But they also found that Direct visits fell by around 60%.
To read about that experiment, read this SearchEngineLand article, “Experiment Shows Up To 60% Of ‘Direct’ Traffic Is Actually Organic Search“.
Did you find this article useful? Perhaps shout me a coffee some time.