With plenty of e-commerce platforms available these days, including Shopify, BigCommerce, and Weebly, creating an online store is not as difficult as it may sound.
But is setting up an e-commerce store enough to succeed in today’s vying online marketplace?
Can your online business survive without sales and conversions?
We know there are hundreds of free Shopify themes, BigCommerce templates, and numerous other user-friendly features that make it incredibly easy for an online store owner to set up and run their store.
But did you know all of your efforts will simply go down the drain if your strategies fail to boost traffic to your online store?
What Is Website Traffic?
Website traffic means the number of visitors a particular e-store or a website receives. Whether you want to improve your Shopify store in terms of conversions or want to have more sales on your BigCommerce store, you need to have quality traffic to drive highly targeted buyers continuously to your store.
Website Traffic – Sources
There are a number of web traffic sources that can direct people towards your site. Some of them include:
Organic Traffic:
The organic traffic is something you get on your website organically through search engines. Organic visitors find your store by typing particular keywords and phrases in prominent search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Paid Traffic:
Paid traffic, on the other hand, is acquired using paid sources. This could either be in the form of paid ads, paid social media marketing, or through a PPC model.
Social Traffic:
As its name suggests, social traffic is something that you get from your social media networks. For example, if a user clicks on a Facebook post or a tweet, it will redirect them to your website. This type of traffic could either be paid or organic.
Referral Traffic:
You get referral traffic to your website when a website visitor clicks on a link to go to an entirely new page on a different site.
Referral traffic is crucial for the success of your e-commerce store as it directs prospective customers to your website.
Why Is Organic Traffic Important For The Success Of Your Online Store?
You must be wondering why to go after organic traffic when you already have options to grow your business through paid promotions.
Before we start exploring some of the proven ways to boost traffic to your online store organically, first have a quick look at some of the reasons why organic traffic is better than paid traffic.
Boost Sales
According to research, more than 89% of users use search engines to research about the products they intend to purchase in the coming days.
With the right strategies to boost organic traffic to your website, you can have more potential visitors directed towards your site. As a result, the overall sales and conversions in your store significantly increase.
Expand Customer Base
When you target organic traffic, you can find more potential customers who’re interested in your product range.
Delivers Long-Lasting Results
With paid strategies, you cannot expect long-term results. But when you use the right e-commerce SEO strategies, you can expect an influx of organic traffic to your site.
It’s Affordable
The ROI you get with SEO and organic traffic is generally much higher than the ROI you get with paid advertising and promotional strategies.
Improve Customer Experience
Since getting organic traffic involves the implementation of the best SEO practices, it significantly improves the overall customer experience.
10 Easy Tips For More Organic Traffic On Your Online Store (Proven Methods)
1. Identify Your Target Audience/Competitors
Identify your target audience and look for ways to attract them. You can take help from Google Analytics to know who your target audience is likely to be.
Carefully assess data available in Google Analytics and identify customers on the basis of different factors, including age, location, buying preferences, etc.
The next thing you need to do is to evaluate whether those customers are converting, or it’s just a flow of passive audience you’re receiving on your website.
Collect information about the audience you want to attract and segment those visitors into personas.
2. Conduct A Website Audit
Before you start creating and implementing any strategies to boost traffic to your online store, just ensure you get your website’s audit done by a professional.
This step is crucial as without knowing your website’s current status and performance, it would be difficult for you to devise a result-driven long-term success strategy.
3. Conduct Competitive Analysis
Once you’ve successfully identified your target audience and also conducted a website audit, it’s time to pay attention to other online businesses that are offering the same products and services like yours.
Start digging into their content and SEO strategies to see what they’ve done to achieve the margin you’re still struggling to gain.
You can check their age domain using free domain checker tools available online. The idea is to find out the secret that makes your competitor’s website more interesting, engaging, and profitable than yours.
You can also research your competitor’s backlink profile to assess which specific landing pages on their websites are converting more.
4. Creating A DIY SEO Strategy
SEO is one of the pillars of digital marketing strategies that ensure organic traffic and sustainable growth over a period of time.
Both on-page and off-page SEO strategies contribute to the success of e-commerce stores. Here, it is important to understand that there is no generic formula that you can apply to boost organic traffic to your website using the best SEO practices.
You must create a DIY SEO strategy that is consistent with your business type and the products or services that you offer to your customers.
5. Content Marketing
Content marketing revolves around creating valuable content that your website visitors will love to read and share.
An effective content marketing strategy is the right mix of keyword research, brainstorming the trendiest subjects, and creating fully optimized and unique content that can drive more organic traffic to your e-commerce store.
6. Promote Your E-Commerce Store
Once you have your SEO and content marketing strategies in place, it’s time to start promoting your website. You can achieve this by strengthening your paid advertising campaigns and Pay-per-click (PPC) model.
7. Improve Website Architecture & Design
Did you know good website architecture increases organic traffic by positioning your online store higher in the SERPs?
Make sure your website is fully organized with the right amount of category pages for each product category. Also, there must be enough internal links to help increase your website’s DA. Add a sitemap in your Google Search Console account to help crawlers know which are the most important pages on your website.
8. Appear In Featured Snippets
One of the best ways you can drive more organic traffic to your website is by increasing your chances of winning the featured snippet slot on Google.
Use high-quality images with keyword-rich content to drive organic traffic using Google’s featured snippet feature.
9. Optimize For Higher CTR
Use Google Search Console to pinpoint your website pages that have a low CTR. Based on this information, you can tweak your SEO strategies and create more keyword-focused meta titles and meta descriptions that can drive more organic traffic to your website.
10. Maintain Your Rankings Over Time Last but not least, implement the best digital marketing practices to keep an eye on your past and present performance. Make efforts to achieve long-term results that remain consistent with your business plan and objectives.
