5 Tips to Drive Online Traffic to Your eCommerce Store

September 28, 2021

5 Tips to Drive Online Traffic to Your eCommerce Store

Guest Post Written by Kate Parish Chief Marketing Officer at Onilab

Do you know what drives an online store to its prosperity? It’s not just web design or decent site performance. These are steps on the success ladder indeed, but the principal value for any site is its traffic.

These are the people who visit your website. Once you’ve obtained them, you can persuade your visitors to buy something or lose them forever. But how do you attract leads to click on your store’s link? You need to leverage various traffic sources, including:

social networks;
search engines;
press;
and even QR codes.

If it is your target audience, then you’ll increase the chance of sales. This article will introduce five ways to drive online traffic to your eCommerce store and explain why you need them.

1. Optimize Your Store in Terms of SEO

Making your products easy to obtain is a point you shouldn’t overlook. Search engine optimization is among the high-standing priorities. Why? If the items that you sell can’t be found by users or search engines, you’re missing out on just too much.

First of all, evaluate your store’s page load. If something’s wrong, the search engine will consider it a direct and indirect ranking factor (i.e., it causes a high bounce rate and low average session duration). The steps to improve it include Magento performance optimization or tweaking any other platform your store is built on.

Then, research how people look for things you sell and focus on those keywords and combinations that best describe your product. Moreover, instead of taking a generic keyword with a large search volume that’ll be hard to rank for, such as “yellow sweater”, you should focus on a long-tail one that gives more details about the item that you’re selling, for example, “lemon yellow cashmere sweater”.

As you’re searching for keywords and making a list of the ones you want to use, you can utilize tools. Some of them are the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, Ubersuggest, or you can even look at the Related searches at the bottom of the Google search that you’ve input (like in the screenshot below).

Next, make sure to place these keywords in an appropriate not-too-obvious way and in adequate quantity. As such, ideally, different suitable keyword combinations should be present in your:

H1 (usually, this is the product name);
H2 or subheadings;
product descriptions;
alternative image texts;
meta information.

Screenshot taken on Google search results page

2. Get Rich Snippets as One of the eCommerce Traffic Strategies

We often find search results with additional information besides the title, URL, and description. Such results are known as rich snippets, i.e., with added data so that search engines and users get the idea about the page content. Your site may be among the top in the search engine results page (SERP), but users are more likely to click on the link with a more extended snippet.

Why are rich snippets more attractive? Because a user will see whether the page is relevant to their request and decide to open it or not.

Suppose two similar stores are selling the same item. Which link would you open? The one listing price, reviews, and availability, or the one with just a couple of description lines? I think it’s a choice in favor of rich snippets. Note that while rich snippets are more appealing to visitors, they don’t influence your rankings directly. You can see some examples of rich snippets in the screenshot below.

5 Tips to Drive Online Traffic to Your eCommerce Store -THEPRBARinc.com

Screenshot taken on Google search results page

3. Link Building for eCommerce

What is link building? These are actions to increase the number of links to a site. What is a hyperlink? It’s a string of words that take a user to another web page if he clicks on them. It promotes the store in search and, if done properly, leaves its mark on authoritative platforms.

By gaining backlinks to back up your website, you can leap towards a better place on the market, namely:

grow the store’s online visibility;
increase in your organic traffic;
drop costs on acquiring new prospects.

Another thing worth noting is that quality links that point to your eCommerce store are among the factors that compile your website’s PageRank score. It predetermines the position that the website gets among search results.

Importantly, it makes much more sense to aim at quality links rather than to double down on quantity. Keep in mind that one backlink from a great trusted resource with a strong Domain Authority, such as Forbes, will have much more influence than several hundred ones of low quality. Along the same lines, it is best to receive backlinks from various websites than to obtain multiple backlinks from one website.

But link building as an eCommerce traffic strategy is a challenging task. Why isn’t link building for eCommerce easy?

Just as with all SEO efforts (for instance, in comparison to pay-per-click advertising), the biggest challenge and downside of link building is that it doesn’t bring immediate results. It takes time to see if what you’re doing is working or not, thus, the process is not fast.

Another obstacle lies in the necessity to continuously build up the links. One-time campaigns won’t be effective. Similarly, if you overdo it and generate too many links in a rather short time, you can even do your website harm as such leaps often raise suspicion in the “eyes” of search engines.

4. Press Win

Another example of an effective eCommerce traffic strategy is a press win. What is a press win? It’s a third-party reference or mention of your company such as:

a quote in a digital outlet;
a contributed or feature article;
appearance or feature on a radio, podcast, or television program.

Why do you need to obtain a press win? Just like link building, getting a press win can assist you in building authority. The more trust you gain, the more confidence potential clients will have in doing business with you.

Put simply, if someone talks about your business, they are stating that you are worth the public attention. If your products and services are linked to and get featured off your website, say, in listings of “bests”, or are reviewed by celebrities, it will also raise credibility. Basically, you’re receiving more recommendations with your store mentioned and widening the opportunity to drive traffic to your eCommerce store.

5. Implement Social Media

Social media and messengers used to be a way to communicate with friends and share ideas. Something simply for fun and leisure. But now they’ve outgrown just one purpose. Online retail companies advertise and promote their products there and create full-fledged storefronts, attracting organic traffic to their sites.

Buyers want to get their queries answered quickly and effortlessly. Therefore, many brands began to develop social media business accounts.

As practice and reports show, communication with the brand doesn’t end when consumers subscribe to the account. It’s the first move to drive them to your store.

According to Sprout Social, 91% of followers visit the brand’s website or app, 89% will make a purchase, and 85% will tell a family or friend about it.

One of the ways to leverage social media for traffic growth is through video content. For example, if you go to the official Calvin Klein Instagram account, in the IGTV section, you will see that their commercials are marked with special tags. They allow you to access the products from the video and go to the product page immediately.

Screenshot taken on the official Calvin Klein Instagram account

Conclusion

Consistent traffic to your site ensures conversions and revenue. After all, who will purchase from you if there are no store visitors? That’s why you need to allocate time and budget to deploy eCommerce traffic strategies.

One of the most cost-effective ways to get quality traffic to your website is SEO. But you can use other channels as well. For example, invest in social media, link building, press, and rich snippets. As a result, you’ll increase site traffic even when the shopping activity of your competitors’ stores drops.

Are you ready to create your store? Or do you already have one and want to migrate to Magento and optimize it to succeed? Magento developers at Onilab will gladly help you.

If you want to know how we develop high-traffic Magento sites for our customers, click here.

About the author: Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab with over 8 years of experience in Digital Marketing in the sphere of eCommerce web development. Kate always aspires to broaden her competency in line with cutting-edge global trends. Her primary areas of professional interest include SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, Magento PWA development, and online retail in general. Find Kate on LinkedIn.