How to Block Bots & Bogus "Direct Visits"?

Hi, I’m hoping one of you smart people can help me ??

We have a client who appears to have an unusually high level of “direct visits” reported within Google Analytics. This started back in July. These visits, which I suspect are spam bots, are drastically skewing our Analytics data with 95%+ bounces rates and very little time on site. I suspect this is also having a negative impact on our organic search ranking because we were ranking much better before all of this started. I have a sneaking suspicion that one of our competitors is behind this.

We’re currently using iThemes Security but this does not seem to have an impact on this bogus traffic. We also have Sucuri virus monitoring and removal service enabled.

The website is hosted on GoDaddy as a Managed WordPress account. I spoke with GoDaddy earlier and the said they don’t have any products that would help.

How about something like the CloudFlare Firewall/Proxy? We can sign-up for this via Sucuri too, but I’m not sure if it plays with with the Managed WP Hosting.

Anyway, if somebody could help me get to the bottom of this issue I’d sure appreciate it.

Thanks for your help.

Eric