This may be the reason for you when you started your online store. You have certainly made the right choice because online stores can also provide many benefits apart from bringing in lots of customers, such as building a brand.
However, sometimes reality can be disappointing. You find your online store has low ecommerce traffic. You have trouble getting customers. You who originally hoped to increase your profits through an online shop now have to bear the loss for the maintenance costs of your website.
Where did those 2.14 billion people go? Why is it so difficult for you to get a share, even if a little, of that number?
Turns out, you not only need an online store but also know how to drive traffic to your online store.
Your online store is just one of the many online stores that exist, even if you only count shops in the same industry as you. In order to attract customers, you need to know how to drive traffic to your online store.
There are several ways you can do this. Some are effective, and some are not. Some ways are more expensive than others while you can do some for free.
Without further ado, let's take a look at several proven ways on how to drive traffic to your online store.
How To Drive Traffic To Your Online Store
1. Advertise Your Website
One of the ways that you can increase your website traffic is by advertising your website. There are two types of advertisements that you can use: advertising on search engines and social media.
You can use Google Ads to advertise your website on the Google search engine. Your website will appear every time someone searches for something with the keywords you are targeting. For example, suppose you want to place an ad with the keywords "Romantic Restaurant in Tokyo". When someone searches for these keywords, your website will appear at the top of the search results like this:
Besides on Google, you can also increase ecommerce traffic by advertising your website on social media. You can use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to advertise your website. Each social media certainly has its own advantages and disadvantages. You also have to consider your target market to make sure your ads on social media can increase your website traffic effectively.
Image taken from Twitter
However, advertising your website is a short-term solution in increasing your website traffic. Why is that? Because there is a chance that people will find it difficult to find your website again when you stop advertising your website. In addition, advertising is also a somewhat expensive way to increase website traffic. If you want to invest in advertising your website, make sure you have done a thorough calculation to make sure you don’t break your bank account.
2. Interact With Your Customers On Social Media
Interacting with your customers on social media is a long-term strategy that can provide many benefits. With this strategy, you can build a strong fanbase or customer base while you promote your website on social media.
A loyal customer can also help you to spread your tweets or posts, which is the best form of free advertising you can get.
If you already have a solid customer base on social media, you can ensure that each of your tweets or posts will get lots of interactions that can be more effective when you advertise your website on social media. The things mentioned above make this method one of the best methods to increase ecommerce website traffic.
Besides interacting directly, you can also use social media influencer services. Using influencers can also be a better choice than advertising because when choosing an influencer, you are indirectly choosing your target market.
For example, suppose you want to target women aged 18 to 25 to sell your cosmetic products. When choosing an influencer, you can choose someone who has a market or followers that are identical to your target audience.
Then how do you choose the right social media?
First, you have to determine your target market. You need to create a profile that can represent your target market, in general, to help determine the right social media for your business.
Then, you must determine your goals when creating a social media account. Will you be using social media to share content and increase your business's online presence or as a center for your customer support?
Lastly, you have to find your customers. You can find various reports on the demographics of each social media user. For example, if you are targeting young people, then you can use trending social media such as TikTok or Instagram where young people often make and share viral videos or posts.
Make sure you have done some in-depth study so that you can more effectively build your online presence which can have an impact on increasing your website traffic.
3. Create Great Content Routinely
If the previous two were concerned with something outside of your website, let's now look at how to drive traffic to your online store through your website.
The first way you can increase ecommerce traffic from your website is to create content on a regular basis. Why content? Because people are always looking for content every day. When people search for something on the internet, they will generally be faced with content that answers their questions. Whether it's summer clothes recommendations, lists of well-known fitness centers, to trusted car shops around them, all can be answered through great content.
You can create different types of content to attract people to your website. You can start a blog and regularly produce contents that answer people's questions. You can also create videos, upload them to YouTube, and post them on your website with a little extra text if possible.
You can also optimize your content so you can get more e-commerce traffic. You can find lots of articles on how to optimize blog posts on your website so that your website can appear on the main page when people search for keywords related to your content.
4. Create Mobile Friendly Designs
The second way you can go try on how to drive traffic to your online store from your website is by creating a mobile-friendly design.
According to data from Hitwise, nearly 60% of total searches in 2020 came from mobile, with sectors such as food and beverage making up 72%. This emphasizes the importance of mobile friendly website design.
If your website can only appear clearly when someone visits it via desktop, then there is a high chance that people will immediately look for other websites when visiting your website via mobile. This makes you lose a lot of website traffic.
To overcome this, make sure you choose a website builder that offers a mobile-friendly design or template. You can easily find a website builder that focuses on building websites for mobile viewing first before changing it to suit the desktop version.
5. Optimize Your Site's SEO
This method must be on one’s list if one wants to drive traffic to ecommerce site. SEO plays a vital role in how to drive traffic to your online store.
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO is the ability of your website to be found by people when they enter keywords in search engines. For example, suppose you want your website to be on the main page when people search for "beauty salons in New York". To do this, you must optimize the SEO of your website using these keywords.
How to do that?
You can use these keywords in several places on your website. First, you can use it in your page title. For example, "Mary's Salon - The Best Beauty Salon in New York".
Then, you can use derived keywords or keywords related to your main keyword. For example, the derivative keyword of "Beauty salons in New York" is "celebrity hair salons in New York." You can use these derived keywords in your website meta description.
To find keywords and their derivatives that you can use, you can use Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner.
SEO optimization is indeed a very technical thing. Even people are willing to pay a fortune to hire experts to do it all for their website. However, it's a good idea to learn to do this alone so you can save on your business costs.
Apart from the title page and meta description, you must also describe the images that you use on your website. You can add alt-text or alt-tags to your images. This is to help search engines read your website because search engines can only read text.
You should also use headings on your website. Headings can help both search engines and people to understand the hierarchy of information on your website.
Your website definitely has more than one section. Each section may have its own subsections, for example, you have a clothing section that has subsections of shirts, jackets, and so on. By using headings, you can tell search engines that t-shirts and jackets are part of clothing.
The clearer your website structure is in the eyes of search engines, the better it will be for search engines to rate and rank your website. This of course, has an impact on increasing website traffic that is consistent and reliable.
Those are proven ways on how to drive traffic to your online store. You can increase the traffic of your website in several ways.
You can advertise your site on the search engine or social media of your choice. You can use Google Ads or advertising features provided by social media. Make sure you have calculated the costs and the projected yield you will receive from this method. This is because advertising your website is quite an expensive way to increase the traffic of your website.
You can also interact with customers on social media to increase your website traffic. You can share content from your website on social media and answer customer questions which can elevate your business branding.
You can also use social media as your customer service center outside of your online store. Whatever you do with social media, make sure you have done your market research and choose social media with user demographics that match your target market.
You also have several options on how to drive traffic to your online store from your website.
First, you can create relevant content about your business on a regular basis. The more you have quality content on your online store, the more likely search engines will recommend your website.
Second, you also need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. This is due to the fact that more and more people are now doing online searches from mobile devices.
Lastly, you can optimize the SEO of your website, which is the most powerful way on how to drive traffic to your online store. You can hire an expert to help you optimize your website. However, it's a good idea to do it yourself and you can find help or guides that you can use to help you optimize the SEO of your website.
Build Your Online Store With Strikingly
Image taken from Strikingly website
Strikingly is an intuitive and feature-packed website builder that can help you build a high-traffic ecommerce online store.
You can easily build your online shop using Strikingly. You can add products, set payment methods, and supervise the delivery process directly in your online store.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Once you have built your online store, you can immediately start optimizing the SEO of your website. On Strikingly, you'll find guidelines that you can follow to optimize the SEO of your website. Now, you don't need to be confused about how to build an online store that can attract customers for your business.
Image taken from Strikingly product
You also don't have to worry about costs for your online store. You can start opening an online store at Strikingly for as little as $ 96 per year.
Image taken from Strikingly
So what are you waiting for? Start building your online store with Strikingly now and seize your chance in the online world!
