How to increase web traffic to your online store

Air: Ecommerce

How to increase web traffic to your online store

Whether you’re trying to attract your first customer or your millionth, driving more traffic to your online store is a vital part of growing your Ecommerce business.

If you’ve invested time, money and effort in launching your store and are wondering where all the traffic is, you need to consider how you’re marketing yourself online.

Perhaps you’ve hit a lull or slight downturn after some initial success, or maybe you made good early progress with one marketing method and are curious about what you should try next.

Good Ecommerce marketing is all about increasing the audience of your online store, driving traffic and boosting your sales.

It sounds simple, but in reality, parts of it can be a little complex. Some areas you can handle yourself, but other aspects are best left to digital marketing experts.

So let’s take a look at the best ways to increase traffic to your online store…

Get social

One of the easiest ways of increasing traffic to your Ecommerce site is by utilising social media to promote your content and your products. 

You might get good traction posting on image-friendly platforms like Instagram or Pinterest, but remember that social media is no longer just about organically increasing engagement and awareness.

From using each site’s native ‘buy’ buttons to a targeted remarketing campaign, there are an abundance of opportunities for Ecommerce firms to profit from social, many which can be expertly handled by a digital marketing agency.

And it’s not enough to simply share your content through social channels and forget about it – it’s much better to be actively reacting and participating.

If current or potential customers leave comments on your posts, respond and engage with them to create a community, show you’re accessible and that your brand has a human face.

Get reviews

One of the best ways to increase traffic is simply by gaining customers’ confidence. Actively seeking reviews from previous clients and setting up your business on sites such as Trustpilot and Google My Business to showcase them can have a noticeable effect on traffic and conversion rates. Sharing user-generated content like testimonials, product reviews or social media posts from clients can all help.

According to a recent study, a single product review can result in a 10 per cent increase in sales, while 200 reviews could boost sales by as much as 44 per cent.

Blog about key products and events

Publishing engaging, relevant content can drive stacks of traffic to your Ecommerce site. Most consumers are searching for more than just a retail store to buy from, and great blogs and images can elicit trust and loyalty from readers and potential customers, which in turn will lead to higher traffic, more conversions and an increase in sales. If you’re struggling to come up with topics to blog about, then look at your most popular products or services and create blog posts about them! Don’t have the time or skills to produce regular content? That’s where a digital marketing agency like Ascensor comes in. Content writers can produce optimised blog posts that will appeal to your target audience and help drive traffic, offering a great return on your investment. 

Join the video revolution

Video content seems to be on an unstoppable march online, and you can take advantage of its popularity to boost your Ecommerce store. By creating and posting video content such as product demonstrations, ‘unboxings’, reviews and comparison videos, you can target different audiences to visit your online store.

Don’t forget about email marketing

Many organisations focus on attracting new leads and sales through newer forms of content marketing and forget about more ‘traditional’ methods. When combined with good CRM software, email marketing can still be a very powerful tool.

A successful email campaign can result in a significant increase in traffic to your online store – just don’t swamp users with a flurry of emails about every little thing. A well-crafted, friendly reminder email about a new product or service can help boost your traffic, and if you’re unsure how to proceed, then digital marketing experts can take care of it all for you.

Make sure your site is responsive

More people than ever are using mobile devices to access the web.

If your visitors have to pinch, scroll and drag their way across your site, you’re pretty much asking them to go elsewhere. 

Some Ecommerce sites are still only optimised for desktops and ignore the needs of other devices. Bad mobile user experience means that your visitors will quickly end up leaving.

To get more traffic in the first place, you’ll need to ensure that your online store is optimised for Google, as the search giant has a mobile-first algorithm that ranks sites performing well on mobile higher than those that don’t.

Speed is key

Do you ever wait 20 seconds for a web page to load? Nope, us neither. If your current site’s taking forever to appear on screen, your bounce rate could be off the charts. So the faster your site loads, the better. You’ll need to find some digital experts who can ensure that your pages are as technically-optimised as possible, looking at areas including page structure, image file size and third-party plugin functionality.

Let’s get Analytical

Used by digital marketers worldwide, Google Analytics is an invaluable data source for just about every aspect of your Ecommerce site – from visitor demographics to your most popular products and pages. Keeping a close eye on your Analytics data means you can pay attention to what posts and pages are proving the most popular. Inspect visitor data to see how, where and when your site traffic is coming from.

Invest in ads

One of the most successful (and quickest) ways to drive online store traffic is to pay for it. Thankfully, even small businesses with a limited budget can make a real splash by advertising using platforms such as Google AdWords. This pay-per-click advertising method is designed to funnel more relevant visitors to your Ecommerce site, and you only have to pay when someone clicks on your ad or video.

Another platform that sees an impressive return on investment is Google Shopping – now rated as one of the most powerful tools for Ecommerce businesses. By uploading merchandise details and images into Google Shopping, your product information and pricing appears on search engine results pages, increasing traffic and conversion rates by engaging with people who are already looking to buy.

If the prospect of creating a Google Shopping campaign, placing bids, targeting and scheduling and building ad groups sounds a little daunting, then get in touch with the digital marketing gurus at Ascensor who can handle it all for you. 

On-site SEO

SEO is a term you may have come across before. It stands for search engine optimisation and is a marketing tactic that helps your online store appear as prominently as possible on results pages whenever users type in key terms that you want to be known for. 

Optimising your on-site content for both users and search engines will play a key role in driving more traffic to your site. Do your pages contain the right keywords? Are you using image alt text? Do you create internal links to new content? Are your meta descriptions accurate? 

On-site SEO is by no means a simple discipline, and parts of it should always be handled by specialists, but it will help boost organic traffic.

Conversion rate optimisation

If techniques we’ve mentioned above have proved successful, then you need to think about what happens when all that traffic arrives at your website. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is all about making the most of your web traffic, and it’s especially important on an Ecommerce site, where small increases in the number of transactions per user or average spend per user will really impact your bottom line and ROI. Digital marketing experts can use data analysis and testing to increase the percentage of visitors that convert into customers. CRO makes your site as intuitive and easy to use as possible so that users are happy and can quickly find exactly what they need. Happy users means increased sales!

 

Get in touch with the team and let’s find out how we can help your online store grow by increasing your web traffic.

In the Air