7 Tips To Increase Traffic to Your Online Store

By  //  January 20, 2023

As the owner of an online store, you probably recognize the value of traffic.

The more visitors you can attract to your website, the more chances you have to win new customers. However, getting significant traffic isn’t always easy.

With so many online shoppers out there, you don’t need to be the biggest eCommerce site on the internet to be successful. A site like Amazon gets over 2 billion visitors per month, but you don’t need to beat Amazon. You just need to carve out your customer base.

How can the average online store get more traffic? There are several strategies you can deploy. This post will cover some of the tactics you can use to increase traffic to your eCommerce site.

Refine Your Keyword

Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful tools for attracting traffic to a website. When it is done right, you will rank higher and get more traffic. What makes it even better is that the traffic will come from people who are interested in your products or business. However, successful SEO strategies start with the keywords.

According to an expert at Denver SEO from FirestarterSEO.com, “Using the right keywords can do so much for your website. They help search engines understand which searches your site is relevant for. Good keyword research will also go a long way toward pushing you to the top of the search rankings. SEO and keyword research also deliver a good return without the business having to spend a lot.”

Start Posting Blogs

If you are not blogging on your eCommerce site, you should be. Blogging can do so much to help you increase traffic and sales. To start, blogs can keep your site active, which can be a way to boost your SEO efforts. It can also help with SEO by providing more opportunities to use keywords and add links to internal pages. If you can build a loyal following, it can also be a way to build consistent traffic.

As much as blogging can offer value, you will need a strategy. You can’t just post when you feel like it and pick topics at random. Try to develop a consistent posting schedule to keep the blog active. You should also try to find topics that will offer value to readers. Instead of going for the hard sell in blog posts, be subtle and make it more about satisfying the reader. 

Build Your Social Media Presence

If you are not on social media, you are missing a lot of opportunities to grow your online business. Most of the customers you want to win are probably on at least one social media platform. Even better, it doesn’t cost a thing to set up a profile and start posting. Businesses can get a lot of traffic by just creating interesting posts and linking to pages on their website.

Take a little time to develop a social media strategy. For starters, consider the platforms you want to use. You won’t have time to use every platform, and some won’t have that much to offer your business. Narrow it to two or three platforms that are popular among the types of customers you want. Once you have your profiles created, make sure to post regularly and engage with other users. The more social you are, the more you can benefit from using social media.

Focus on Website Performance

No one wants to use a website that does not perform well. It won’t even matter if you have great products at great prices. If visitors have trouble getting pages to load or pages frequently crash, they won’t want to shop at your store. The same is also true for usability. If the site is difficult to navigate or it’s hard to find products, you will not see many return visitors.

As a start, do what you can to make your website as fast as possible. Enable browser caching and optimize images on your site. You should also make sure all your software stays up to date. Another point is to optimize your site for mobile. Mobile shoppers will not shop at your store if there is only a desktop version of the site loading on their phones.

Use Paid Ads

SEO should be your primary method of attracting traffic through search engines. With that said, PPC search ads can do a lot to help you boost traffic fast. With PPC ads, you can get your ad put right at the top of the search listings. It can also be a good way to supplement your SEO. If you see a keyword or segment that is not performing well in SEO, you can target it with paid search ads.

Beyond paid search ads, you could also consider using paid ads in social media. They are generally affordable, and they can be effective at steering lots of traffic to websites. Along with that, they can be great for expanding your reach and building brand awareness. You can also use the ads to build your social media following. With a larger following, it will increase the effectiveness of the free posts you put on social media.

Work on Link Building

Keywords and internal linking are the foundation of most SEO campaigns. However, you can take your SEO to the next level with link building. With link building, you deploy various strategies to increase the number of inbound links your site gets from other sites. Inbound links are valuable because they serve as a signal of value to search engines. Along with that, they can result in direct traffic if the readers follow the links from the sites where they appear.

One way to get inbound links is to write great content. If your content has value, other sites might link to it. However, there are ways to generate inbound links. For example, you could offer to write guest posts on other sites with an agreement that you can link back to a page on your online store. You could also consider contacting bloggers that write content relevant to your business. Maybe offer them a free sample if they write a post about your product and link to the page on your site.

Promotions and Sales

Various promotions and sales can be a good way to steer more traffic to your store. People love discounts, so they can attract traffic from visitors with a high intent for making a purchase. Once you get the first purchase from a customer, it should be easier to get return business. 

One example could be to promote a discount on the shopper’s first purchase. Post about the discount on social media or consider using paid ads to attract more traffic for the promotion.

A big sale event can be another way to increase interest and boost traffic. You could also leverage your existing customers by offering a discount for referrals.

These are some of the best ways to increase traffic for online stores. One final tip is to track the results of different efforts. You can track your success and test different approaches to these strategies.

You can then use that data to improve the results moving forward.