But driving traffic to your online store requires custom-built marketing strategies developed based on various factors that include the nature of your online business, the products you offer, the locations you serve, the price of your products, and the age-group of your ideal buyers.
And if there are competitors involved, it gets more challenging to dig up effective marketing strategies that not only boost traffic to your online store, but also result in increased sales and website performance.
This post explains some of the proven marketing strategies that will help you generate more traffic for your online store:
1. Blogging
There are innumerable advantages of blogging from a marketing standpoint. Blogging helps you in the following ways:
- Nurture leads and convert customers
- Keep your audience engaged
- Tell your stories and talk about products, offers, and customer issues
- Resolve customer queries
Apart from these, creating blogs consistently will help you grow traffic on your website.
There are two types of blogging – onsite and guest blogs. While onsite blogs are a part of your website, guest blogs or sponsored blogs are the posts that you create on popular, third-party blogging platforms.
Examples:
Typically, an onsite blog is the blog/news/article section of a website, which its webmaster uses to post a variety of updates on a routine basis.
Guest blogs are high-traffic platforms that invite authors and industry experts to write something informative for their audience. You can leave your link there in the article, and this will give your product or website huge visibility and traffic.
When you plan to blog, refrain from blogging about just anything. Find trending topics around which to create blog posts. Make sure your posts have catchy titles that clinch the attention of your audience in the first place.
There is a set of rules for blogging you might want to follow to make the most of your blogging efforts.
Bonus: Here is a list of powerful words you can use in your blog titles, topics, or headlines for optimal search engine optimization (SEO).
2. Keyword Optimization
No matter how beautiful your website is, if it has not been optimized for the right keywords, it is not going to yield anything in your favor. It is an important factor for your online store’s visibility and ranking on search engines.
Use your analytics tool to identify which keywords or search terms visitors are using on search engines to reach your website or web pages. This will help you develop a keyword strategy and kick start your optimization.
For example, here’s how TobaccoPipes.com is targeting keywords for their tobacco business:
They are doing very well with these keywords and generating traffic and sales on the website. Similarly, once you know your top performing keywords and their search volume, you can modify your keyword strategy and include more search terms for further optimization.
You can easily find high potential keywords for optimizing your website further using keyword research tools and you can leverage competitor analysis tools so that you can make a list of business keywords for your ecommerce store.
Your SEO, social media and content strategies will depend on these keywords to a greater extent.
3. Site Speed
So, you have built your ecommerce website and it has started getting visibility on search engines. But the issue is, it takes around 10 seconds to open.
If that sounds like your story, the bad news is, “Websites that load [slowly] see a 50% drop in traffic.” And about 80% of visitors will never return to your website if it takes more than three seconds to open.
Additionally, slow loading websites do not really make it in top search engine result pages.
So, test the speed of your website and identify the reasons why your website is slow, and fix those issues ASAP.
4. Mobile Responsive and Optimization
Is your website mobile responsive? Does it adjust according to the screen resolution of the device on which it is opened?
About 80% of mobile users have made a purchase using their mobile phone in last six months. So, if your website looks awful on a mobile phone, it is time to upgrade it to responsive design and layout to make it look good and work well on any mobile device.
Let’s take an example of WildLifeShowroom.com, the site that sells a variety of duck decoys, original sculptures and drawings. Below are screenshots of the Wildlife Showroom website from different devices:
iPhone X
iPad Pro
Dektop
you can see, the same website has a completely different interface on different devices. That’s a perfect example of a responsive website.
Likewise, you will also need to ensure that your website opens and looks good on any device it is accessed from.
And if your website is already mobile responsive, there is another important thing to ask yourself. Has it been SEO optimized for mobile?
Mobile SEO is a thing, and it refers to optimizing your website for mobile users.
A large number of people use their smart phone to search for products and services. In that picture, it becomes crucial for online stores to be optimized for searches performed on mobile devices.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is still alive, and people still use web browsers to find products you and your competitors offer. Take time to evaluate your traffic analytics and you will notice that 93% of traffic on your website comes from search engines.
And less than 5% of users visit the second page of search results. To get the highest possible organic traffic on your website, you will need to be on the top.
So, it makes sense that you should still be doing SEO for your online store. If you give a closer look, you would realize that everything we have discussed above has once been a part of SEO best practices.
6. PPC
In its simplest definition, pay-per-click (PPC) is paid search optimization. Blogging, content marketing, and SEO do bring traffic to your website, but they test the marketer’s nerve and patience, as they take time to show results.
So, if you want quick traffic to your website, you can shift your focus towards PPC or paid search campaigns.
With several risks involved, pay-per-click advertising has the potential to promote your products on search engine result pages, bringing a huge amount of traffic to your website, and increase the chances of sales. To display your ad, you just have to pay every time your ad is clicked.
If that appeals to you, here is how to get started on PPC.
Bottom Line
Some of the other ways you can attract more traffic to your website include upselling, referral marketing, email marketing, working on your calls-to-action (CTAs), and simplifying your website’s checkout process. You could also use AI-based tools to show users personalized recommendations and products based on their browsing behavior on your website.