Ecommerce entrepreneurs who switch from a marketplace like Amazon or Etsy to running their website realize that it’s not just about having a website – it’s about driving traffic to it.
The website’s conversion rate is also critical, and the more traffic your website attracts, the more people convert.
Although it can take a lot of time and effort to start ranking consistently high on Google, it’s possible to start attracting traffic to your website as a complete beginner.
You’ll start seeing results by studying this short guide, eliminating rookie mistakes, and implementing best practices!
Expanding to new marketplaces may get you a greater reach, so why not learn about one right here? Here is our latest article about OnBuy – a UK-based marketplace:
Why Do You Need to Drive Organic Traffic to Your Online Store?
The first thing most people turn to drive traffic is running Google Ads. It’s a great strategy and one you cannot forget if you need sales on your website. But it’s not the best thing in the long run.
With paid traffic, you have to pay for each impression, click, or conversion, and the customer acquisition price is very high. Even though Google Shopping Ads is a great solution, running regular ads may not be sustainable for a long time.
Instead of paying for every lead you get, you can invest in driving organic traffic. It is the traffic your website receives organically from Google or other search engines. When your website ranks well for a particular keyword, people who search for that keyword will see it and visit it.
The way to learn how to drive organic traffic is by ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). To do that, you need to optimize your website for Google. It is what we’ll discuss in this article — the basics of search engine optimization that get free traffic to your website.
Read more:
How to Check Organic Traffic to Your Online Store?
Before starting our journey to improve the way how to drive organic traffic, we must establish a starting point. Let’s learn the current level of traffic to the website.
The easiest way to do this is by using Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a must-have tool for SEO and PPC as it can provide insight into paid and organic traffic. However, place a tracking code on the website to provide accurate statistics on traffic.
Meanwhile, you can check your traffic numbers with a marketing tool like SE Ranking’s Website Traffic Checker. It can show you an estimate of the organic traffic any website receives, and you can compare yourself with the competition.
The tool also allows users to check what keywords and pages bring the most traffic from organic searches and get additional keyword data.
How to Drive Organic Traffic to Your Online Store
Now that you have a starting point to calculate how effective your efforts are let’s look at how to drive traffic to your website.
#1. Website audit
The first thing you’ll have to do is a basic website audit. It can ensure you’re not making major mistakes in search engine optimization. A misplaced no-index tag or broken pages may undermine your efforts. It’s best to tackle these mistakes right away.
Here are the areas of your website we’ll be focusing on.
- Discovering pages that might have crawling and indexing issues
- Finding status codes like 404, 301 or 501
- Finding meta tags and titles that require improvement
- Analyzing website user experience
- Finding duplicate content
All of these are easy to detect and fix. For instance, 404 pages should be either filled with content or redirected. You should improve meta tags and titles according to Google guidelines and fix duplicate content issues to avoid cannibalization in search.
Improving website experience can be a bit more challenging as it often requires making changes in the backend. Website experience, in this case, refers to Google’s set of objective metrics that reflect aspects of user experience.
For example, the Speed Index shows the time it takes to load the site, and the First Contentful Paint — shows how long it takes for a user to see the first bit of content.
For most of these, you’ll be given clear insights on what needs improvement in any audit tool you use. The only difficulty is that sometimes, improving these may take a while. For instance, adapting visuals with an image resizer on the website can be challenging.
After you do an audit and eliminate all the mistakes with your website, you’re ready to move on to the next step.
#2. Keyword research
One of the most important things about how to drive organic traffic is keyword research. Users find your website by searching keywords on Google. The more relevant keywords your website covers, the more traffic it can potentially receive.
The fastest way you can do keyword research is in Google Keyword Planner. Even though it’s a tool primarily used for PPC ads and doesn’t provide much insight, it allows you to discover new keywords fast.
Let’s say you have an art supply store in California. Go to Keyword Planner, select the Discover Keywords section, set up your language and location, and type in the main keyword of your website — art supplies.
The keyword planner will give you a list of similar keywords with some statistics.
These results mean people who need art supplies may search for art stores or craft stores.
You want to discover these additional keywords for all money pages of your online store. With the art store example, you’d probably want to find keywords for all category pages like drawing paper, ink, oil paints, etc.
Keywords like “buy oil paints” are called transactional. The user is probably ready to make a purchase when they search for these. There are also informational keywords — keywords that are used to search for information.
Finding informational keywords in your niche and creating content for them is one of the easiest ways to increase traffic. It is especially true if your website is new and hasn’t gained much respect from search engines.
When picking keywords, consider the monthly keyword search volume and the level of competition. It helps to find keywords that are easy to rank for and have the potential to bring traffic — those are the keywords you should focus on first. Also, if you are looking to find long-tail inquiry keywords in your audience, you should check the SERPs, utilize a keyword research tool, or simply use Google Trends API to extract thousands of relevant keywords that you can work with.
#3. Implementing keywords in the content for online store
Once you have a list of transaction and informational keywords, you should start creating content for them to drive organic traffic. Use transactional keywords for product descriptions and category pages. Informational keywords are best suited for blogs.
The idea behind a blog is that, at first, your website won’t rank for “art supplies” as there are thousands of competitors. You can still get traffic from the SERPs by targeting your core demographic, which in this case is arts and crafts folks.
Most of them will search for art tips and may discover your website this way.
For content ideas, refer to the keyword list. Create a list of ideas based on that list and research what content is already out there. You need to make your content better or at least cover the problem from another angle to give value to the reader. Here are some ideas of how you can create better content:
- Go into more detail
- Add illustrations
- Cover similar topics
- Add an FAQ section
- Write in a unique voice
- Make your content more readable
- Craft a more compelling headline
Since online store visitors may not purchase at their first website visit, you can try to retain them by asking them to subscribe to your mailing list. Another thing you can do is incorporate your goods into the content to interest the reader.
In the case of art supplies, it’s pretty intuitive. You can create a guide on a drawing technique and link it to the products used in the guide.
#4. Improve titles and descriptions
When it comes to the question “how to drive organic traffic”, every page has a title and meta description tags that tell Google what to display on the search engine results.
Your content’s title is by far one of the most important components. If it doesn’t contain a variation of the target keyword, you might lose opportunities to rank higher on Google. If it’s not click-worthy, users will read the competitor’s content.
Stick to the best practices. Keep your title under 60 characters, including a form of your keyword, and consider search intent when writing the title, what’s not as easy as understanding what is click-worthy.
To ensure your titles are working, write a couple of them for your best pages and run A/B testing on them. It means some users will see title A and others title B. Keep the one that performs better.
#5. Add schema markup
Google has vast capabilities when crawling websites, but it’s not omnipotent. You need to tell Google bots what they’re looking at to ensure they read the information correctly. Schema markup is the best way to give Google bots all the needed information. It also can create rich snippets.
You can add Schema markup by going to Google Schema Markup Helper and entering your URL and the type of content you’re outlining. Then, select the name of the article, its author, and a thumbnail from the page.
Once you select all the necessary parameters, generate an HTML code and paste it to your page. Then, you can create a rich view of your content like the ones below.
Alternatively, you can use WordPress plugins to implement schema markup.
#6. Remove duplicate content
eCommerce websites typically have issues with duplicate content. They have plenty of product and category pages with essentially the same content.
The worst perpetrator is pagination on category pages. Your website may create a separate URL for all ten pages of products in the oil paints category, each with an identical description. That can interfere with ranking the original category page.
A common practice to treat those pages is to leave a rel=canonical to the main category page. A 301 redirect can solve other cases of duplicate content. For instance, you can redirect an outdated category page with the same text to a new page.
Another way to remove duplicate content is by adding a no-index tag to the page. But you should only do it for the pages you don’t need to appear on Google.
Summary
Optimizing your website to increase traffic takes a lot of work. But it all pays off in the long-term — the optimized content will stay on Google forever and bring you more and more traffic. To recap this guide, here’s a checklist of how to drive organic traffic on an eCommerce website:
- Run a website audit
- Follow the guidelines to improve on major mistakes
- Reduce duplicate content
- Discover keywords relevant to your website
- Implement transactional keywords on product pages
- Create blog content for informational keywords
- Experiment with titles to boost CTR
- Add Schema markup
Use this checklist when working on your website, and you will start attracting more monthly traffic.
Comments 1