Wednesday, 22 August 2018 / Published in Hacks All Successful Blogs Use to Get Noticed, online business, online store owners

How to Get Droves of Traffic to Your E-Commerce Site

Traffic to Your E-Commerce Site

Shopping has evolved tremendously within the last decade, with over half of the consumer population preferring to order online than walking into brick-and-mortar businesses.

This may come across as good news for e-commerce site owners, but it comes at a rather hefty price. Because setting up online stores is now easier than ever, there are hundreds to thousands of competing businesses in almost any given industry.

The challenge marketers now face is in standing out from this smorgasbord of options available to the average online user. And one good indicator that your business is doing well lies in the volume of web traffic.

In this post, we’ll be sharing with you the importance of online traffic and how you can generate more for your e-commerce site.

Excited? Well, let’s dive in:

Why More Traffic Leads to Increased Sales and Revenue

It stands to reason that the more exposure your e-commerce site gets, the more traffic you’ll create. And the more traffic you create, the more chances people will buy from you.

Why is that?

The answer lies is in the numbers.

We all know that the end goal of any retail business, whether online or offline, is to sell products. But for that to happen, people first need to stumble onto your business so they can see for themselves what you have to offer.

Let’s say you notice that one out of twenty people who visit your site in one day end up buying something. That’s not much.

But using that statistic, you can calculate that increasing your website traffic from 20 to 500 will lead to a daily projected sales of 20 if the trend stays true to the math. This is just an example, however, and usually, conversion rates tend to be much lower.

The bottom line remains the same in any case: more traffic equals more sales. Sound simple enough? It usually is.

Analyzing Your E-Commerce Site’s Current Traffic Performance

Before we go into the ways you can get people to your site, you’ll need to find out where you currently stand.

There are a couple of tools you can use to get that information. Common favorites are SimilarWeb and Alexa.

If you’d like a more detailed analysis, however, you can also check out Google Analytics. It’s powerful and provides you with more actionable data that can help you build better marketing strategies.

Remember that you won’t just be looking at the total traffic you’re getting, but also where you’re getting them from. This is crucial if you want to create a traffic-generation strategy that’s ideal for your specific e-commerce business.

Another thing to think about before you start generating traffic to your site is to take care of your SEO foundations. Matthew Woodward talks in detail about not only the importance of getting your ecommerce site audited but he actually takes you through exactly how to do it in his Ecommerce SEO Guide.

After you get that information, you can now move on to the fun part:

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Online Store

1. Optimize your website’s page loading time.

If even one of your pages isn’t lightning-fast, you better believe you’re already losing customers. They’ll quickly get out of your site and move on to faster stores, just to get a better experience.

Another reason to boost your website’s loading speed is it makes your site more favorable to search engines like Google. Yes, Google will reward you for a faster website.

To find out your website’s current loading performance, you can use tools like GTmetrix. It gives you a basic overview of how long it takes for your pages to load and even suggests ways to improve it.

Some examples of hacks you can do to improve loading time are the following:

Use a content delivery network (CDN)
Optimize your high-quality images
Cache your pages

2. Leverage on Social Media Advertising

Facebook advertising is gaining a fantastic reputation as a source of traffic for many online businesses. They offer a cheaper CPC (cost-per-click) than even Google and other display ad platforms.

Facebook also owns Instagram, so you can expect the same powerful search and display advertising on this social media as well.

Fast tips for getting the most out of social media advertising:

Conduct A/B testing on different ad placements and display designs to find out which produces the best results.
Use ‘carousel’ type ads if you want to display a selection of top selling products.
Retarget customers who have visited your site before to remind them to come back.

3. Use Search Engine Optimization

For your online store, you’ll need to consider building SEO value through your content and through backlinks. It isn’t enough to just have a fast website and a nice-looking theme anymore.

Keyword-optimized content helps search engines determine what your page is about and raises its value for people who are searching for related or specific search terms.

Backlinks are often used as the building blocks of good SEO. Search engines will find websites with quality backlinks as popular and relevant, and they’re likely to rank them up higher, too.

You can use tools like Monitor Backlinks if you want to find out how many backlinks your website currently has and where they’re from.

In terms of content optimization, you’ll need to take care of your product pages. And this can often cause a huge headache. Common problems are usually duplicate content and non-existent metadata.

The good news is that you can often work around it by focusing on writing unique product descriptions using target keywords. Just don’t forget to make it appealing for human readers and not just for search engines.

There you have it!

Now that you’ve read through the tips we’ve shared with you on boosting your online store’s traffic, you should be well on your way to getting more sales and increasing your conversion rates.

Just don’t forget to keep your consumers at heart with everything you create and write. Because in the end, e-commerce is a business that’s purely customer sales driven, so customer experience must always remain a priority.

There’s never been a better time to be in online retail. As long as you’re ready to take on the challenge of making your website stand out, then you’ll surely reap the rewards of your hard work.