E-commerce has become an inevitable part of the digital lifestyle. As the reliance of people on smartphones and the Internet is increasing, they are making more and more of their purchases through online stores.
According to Statista, over 2 billion people purchased goods and services online in 2020, and 24.5% of global retail sales will be generated by e-commerce by 2025. The online shopping trend is here to stay. If you have launched your online store but struggling to generate sales, then we can help.
In this post, we will focus on tips on how to drive traffic to your e-commerce store easily.
E-commerce website optimization tips
While there are several ways to increase your sales and drive more traffic, we will focus on strategies to increase organic traffic to your e-commerce store. As organic traffic lasts long, it is worth investing your resources in the following strategies.
Optimize your website’s SEO components
You cannot expect to generate sales if your customers cannot actually find you in search results. Usually, when people shop for goods or services online, they use search engines like Google to find the best stores. To increase traffic and drive sales, you must ensure that you are on the top of the search results relevant to your product or service.
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is how you can rank at the top in search results. It is important to be at the top because one-third of all clicks go to the first organic result on Google. Many owners do not understand how to increase organic traffic on e-commerce website with SEO.
Let us help you understand with simplified pointers.
SEO is the process of fine-tuning the technical components of your web pages and overall website to increase its chances of ranking higher in search results for relevant shopping keywords. It is the pragmatic science that gives results when you put in time and effort. Here is an easy SEO checklist to follow:
- Ensure that you are using only one H1 tag on your webpages
- The title of the pages must be under 60 characters
- Make the meta descriptions punchy and keep them under 155 characters
- If possible, include the product keyword in the page URL
- Ensure that all product images have descriptive ALT tags
- Your online store must be optimized for performance, especially as per Google’s Web Vitals
Optimize your product, and category pages for longtail keywords
Longtail keywords are longer and more specific keywords and phrases that customers use when they are near the point of purchase or using voice search. Your product listing pages and category pages must be optimized for longtail keywords.
Typically, a product listing page is shorter than other web pages, so optimizing it for highly competitive keywords is difficult. As you are restricted with the quantity of content, using longtail keywords puts the listing in a better position to rank for low competition and high purchase intent keywords. For instance, if you sell ring lights, then instead of optimizing your product listings for keywords like “best ring light,” you can use longtail keywords such as ring light with battery charging or purple neon ring light.
Category pages must be optimized similarly. Longtail keywords provide an easy solution on how to drive traffic to your online store free.
Use user-generated content to optimize your product page
Product pages might have a limited content scope, but you can work with user-generated content such as reviews to benefit their SEO. If your e-commerce store has decent traffic and generates sales, you should encourage your customers to leave reviews on the product pages. Such user-generated content can be optimized with keywords and longtail keywords to drive traffic to your store.
Utilize the power of social media
Most resources on how to increase organic traffic on eCommerce website often miss to include the importance of positive reviews. When 90% of people rely on reviews before making a purchase decision when shopping online, you have to utilize the power of customer reviews to drive traffic and sales to your e-commerce store.
Social media platforms are the best sources to generate a positive perspective for your brand or product by engaging the audience. Your social media presence will essentially decide your brand’s perception. You must use social media to drive traffic to your e-commerce store. Furthermore, you must use these platforms to provide your customers a safe place to share reviews-positive or negative about your business.
Here is an excellent resource for creating a social media strategy for your e-commerce business.
Create a blog and start producing content
While social media platforms will help you create a brand image among customers, you need to invest in valuable content to build brand authority for search engines and people who are not following you on social media.
Today, Google controls more than 92 % of the search market. Simply put, 9 out of 10 customers who find your business through organic search will come through Google. Creating a blog to deliver optimized, high-quality content that helps your target audience will put you on the favorite list of search engines.
If your e-commerce store still doesn’t have a blog, you can easily create one with WordPress.
Also Read: How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website in 20 Minutes
Create a rewards program
A white paper by Altfeld shows that it is 70% easier to sell to an existing customer than to chase new customers.
How to increase organic traffic on an eCommerce website by bringing back customers?
Rewards program.
Loyalty programs have proved to be excellently effective in creating recurring customers. It is a timeless strategy that works for any e-commerce store. You must create a rewards program that encourages customers to shop again. Here’s an example of how Sephora has created a lucrative rewards program.
Every dollar customers spent on their website earned a dollar in rewards. The more they spend, the better rewards they catch, such as discounts and free shipping. This created a sales funnel for their online store that keeps getting them sales automatically.
To create an effective rewards program, focus on two aspects. First, analyze the common features among your most profitable customers, such as location, interest, products, etc. Second, discover what makes them buy products. Is it free shipping, discounts, or early access to new product lines?
Build backlinks
Search engines like Google evaluate a website or a web page for ranking based on several factors. The quality and number of backlinks are among the most important factors that affect the position of your web pages in search results. It would be best if you created a strategy for backlink building. Our Ranklogs Backlink Analyzer can help you discover opportunities for acquiring backlinks.
Wondering how to increase traffic to your eCommerce website using our Backlink Analyzer?
Simply input your competitor’s website or product listing URL in the Backlink Analyzer to know from where they are getting backlinks to rank higher. Then you can target the same sources.
How to know if your e-commerce website optimization strategies are working?
If implemented correctly, the above-listed tips will boost your e-commerce website. However, to track your growth and monitor the effectiveness of the strategies, you should be familiar with the tools that can help.
Here are the three growth tracking tools we recommend:
Google Analytics
Every e-commerce website owner must utilize the suite of free analytical tools that Google offers.
Google Analytics is a web traffic monitoring platform that provides valuable insights such as traffic sources, audience demographics, most valuable webpages, website performance issues, broken pages, etc. The information you will get from this analytics platform will help you determine the strategy for how to drive traffic to your eCommerce website.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console offers a set of tools to measure your website’s performance, keywords driving the traffic, issues causing poor rankings, and other metrics to improve your website traffic.
Once you are done fixing the issues, use these tools to track the improvement in traffic on your e-commerce website.
Ranklogs Rank Tracker for tracking page rankings
Your e-commerce website might have dozens to hundreds of web pages. You might track the performance of these pages against hundreds of keywords. Manually tracking page rankings can be tedious and erroneous. Our Rank Tracker offers the most intuitive way to track your product page rankings automatically. We also provide a reporting feature to notify you every time rankings change.
Read on to know how to track keyword rankings with Ranklogs Rank Tracker.
Conclusion
We hope we have helped you recognize how to increase organic traffic on eCommerce website. Building organic traffic for your e-commerce website is a gradual process. Keep optimizing your website and product listing pages, engaging customers through social media platforms, offering great content via your blog, and exploring opportunities for building backlinks.
In the end, the consistency of your efforts and approach will help you beat the competition and increase your e-commerce website traffic.