How to Gain New Traffic to Your Online Store

If you are fortunate enough to have a successful online store, then you’ll know full well that it’s impossible to make sales if nobody is visiting. You need people to come to your website if you’re hoping to get your product or your service off the ground, but how are you bringing people to your website in the first place? What you need is traffic, but the problem is that entrepreneurs often fall into the trap of thinking that any visitor is a good one. You need to know that there is a difference between good clicks and bad clicks.

The good clicks are the ones that click through, so the higher your click through rate the better. Because this means that people are exploring your website and they’re making decisions about your store and your products. A simple click just means somebody has clicked on your website before clicking back off of it again. If you have low quality traffic and people with no interest in what you sell, then you’re going to dampen your conversion rate. Instead, you need to have a great digital marketing and SEO strategy that will help you to gain new traffic to your online store while keeping people interested when they get there. So, we’ve got some strategies to help you to attract customers to your store and ensure that they are actually going to buy your products. 

• Use SEO for your social media bios.

One of the biggest ways to drive traffic to your online store is to use social media. It’s a pretty powerful tool, but only if you use the right platforms. Most social media platforms do not like it when brands divert people away. Instagram for example will only allow one link in your profile bio. You can work around these using link pop and this will allow you to create a landing page that will divert people to your most viewed pages instead.

• Reach out to creators and influencers.

Personally, you may not be a fan of influencers on social media, but that doesn’t mean they’re not going to be good for your business. Running influencer marketing campaigns shows that you can leverage a popular social media user’s existing audience and this will help you to push the right web traffic. Did you know that there is research that shows that more than 60% of consumers can trust influencer recommendations over any other method? The key is in finding creators or influencers that have a similar target audience to your own. If you want to build a relationship, you can collaborate with free gifts and paid sponsored content. You could also invite influencers to be an affiliate of your product and allow them to try your product privately before they go ahead and talk about it publicly on their platforms. 

• Make sure that you are running SEO optimized promotions.

If more than 35% of shoppers are looking for coupons before they make a purchase, you can capitalize on this by running flash sales and promotions that count. You can use these coupons and these discounts as a hook to stand out from the noise on social media, and it also gives people a very good incentive to visit your online store.you can do it with percentage discounts or you can do it with limited time sales if you have any free shipping thresholds such as spending a minimum amount of money for next day shipping. You can really supercharge your web traffic and make sure that your click through rates are higher when you do this. It’s a good part of the strategy to join some groups that allow discounted products and services so that you can expand your business wares and advertise your website on it. 

• Make sure you are optimizing your blog content.

While we discuss SEO and all of its merits, you should be ensuring that the blog content that you have on your website is fully optimized for on page and off page SEO. Writing blog content that targets your keywords is smart because your target audience will be looking for those particular phrases.

If you’re selling Apple Watch straps, for example, then making sure that you have that keyword within the first 100 words is a smart idea. When you follow SEO best practices, you’ll be able to get your blog content to rank in the search engines, and that includes embedding keywords in meta tags as well as alt text and headings, and building internal links that direct visitors to similar pages on your own website. Link building is so important for SEO as it will help to encourage people to go to other places on your website, not just the page they are looking for.

• Product descriptions should always be optimized.

While we’re on the topic of search engine optimization, you should ensure that your product pages, as existing pieces of content, are optimized to gain and drive organic traffic. Product descriptions should always be written with your target customer in mind as well, making sure that you are using phrases that you know that they will rank for. If you can pull on the pain points that they struggle with and reference the keywords that they are searching for, your organic search traffic will be a bigger generator of your sales.

• Start engaging people.

You can do this with a free quiz on your website because people love to learn about themselves. Whatever product you are selling, you can personalize your content at a big scale with the help of a free quiz. People will then have a reason to visit your online store, and this gives you a chance to do data collection which you would need for future retargeting.

It’s a good way to turn a first-time visitor into a paying customer because you are going to be able to tell them what the best product is for them based on the answers of their quiz. It may also help them to not randomly click through your website.to make sure that any clicks they do make are valuable.

• Start working on your PR strategies.

A good way to gain new traffic to your online store is to make sure that you are landing press coverage. Not only will this help you to gain some free online advertising, but you’ll be also able to connect with journalists and open your network out a little bit more to those who can talk about what you are doing. You can also get some free publicity by pitching to journalists directly.

You can shortlist the magazines or newspapers or websites that your target audience is interested in, and you can gain this information through free quizzes. If you’ve got something interesting to say that allows you to sound like an authority in your industry this should be done now.

• Don’t discount the power of texting.

SMS campaigns are still just as important now as they ever have been. People have their smartphones on them all the time, and they are likely using their smartphones to look at your website. 86% of smartphone users have SMS notifications enabled, and if you have their permission to email them, then you would also have their permission to text. SMS is a great way to give bite sized information or discount information to your customers in an instant. It’s also a cheap way to advertise. You can advertise subscriber exclusive offers and text to win competitions as well as loyalty program invites. All of these are going to help you to push traffic to your online store because you can embed a link within the text message that all they have to do is click here. 

• Make sure that your story is listed everywhere for free.

Craigslist, Google Business, Gumtree, Facebook Groups. All of these places are somewhere that you can reach your target customer. Advertising in free places is going to help you to increase your odds of getting to your customers, and you don’t have to invest cash into it. Not all advertising is paid advertising, and you can still attract your target market by listening to your online customers telling you where they like to go.

The best part about this is that free advertising isn’t going to drain your budget, and if you’re already a small business then you already have limited resources. All you need to do is invest some time in creating profiles on those free websites and upload your product listings, but you can outsource this if you don’t have the time yourself.

Give away some freebies.

A great way to build some organic traffic to your online store is to make sure that you are advertising some freebies to your customers. Sometimes being on social media can feel like shouting into the void, but the secret to attracting attention is to make sure that you are sharing something that someone wants to engage with. Competitions are a great example, as are discounts. If you can bundle up your best-selling products and give them away to one lucky winner, you’re going to have plenty of people liking the post, following your business, sharing, tagging and subscribing.