You’ve chosen a great product and designed your store. Now, you feel overwhelmed by the infinite options for driving traffic to your website? You’re not alone.
From social media to nontraditional marketing hacks, this article will help you figure out what it really takes to learn how to increase website traffic on your store. You’ll also hear what the experts do to increase traffic on their websites. And we’ll throw in some website traffic checker tools for you to find out how much traffic you’re getting and from where.
Write guest posts
Guest blogging is a tactic where you write for other blogs. In return, the editor/site owner will usually allow you to link back to your site.
The benefits include:
More referral traffic;
More backlinks (which correlate with rankings);
Increased brand awareness.
The biggest challenge with guest blogging is finding blogs that are willing to accept your guest posts.
To circumvent this issue, most SEOs use Google search operators to find sites with “write for us” or “become a contributor” pages.
Experiment with content freshness
Content freshness is an SEO hack people do to drive traffic to your website in a big way. Essentially, you’ll need to remove outdated content from your webpage and add new sections to keep your content relevant. It’s basically a quick touch-up on old webpage content.
A simple way to do content freshness for product pages is to have a product review app like Stamped.io’s Product Review Addon. This allows your customers to leave reviews on your product page, which shows Google that there’s regular activity on the page and new content. You can also keep your product pages “fresh” by taking the most common customer feedback and turning it into a sentence in your description.
Write on Medium
Medium (where you read this article now) is an online publishing platform where people and brands can post blog posts with basic HTML and CSS editing and styling. The platform has also created a community of publishers who can follow, engage with, and promote others’ posts.
You can tap into this existing community and introduce your brand. After you’ve invested resources in creating a great content experience on Medium, you’ll gain traction and readers. By including links back to your site, you can lure readers to your online store.
Target topics with search traffic potential
Without a doubt, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to achieve consistent, long-term results. For as long as you rank highly in Google, you’ll be able to generate passive organic traffic to your site. To do this, you need to write about topics people are searching for. In other words: topics with search traffic potential.
Here are two quick ways to get started.
A. Find high-volume, low-competition keywords
Enter one (or a few) relevant words or phrases into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then choose one of the keywords ideas reports to see hundreds or thousands of ideas.
Filter this list by two metrics:
Search volume — the overall search demand for this keyword, or how many times this keyword is searched for in Google each month, in a specific country;
Keyword Difficulty — the ranking difficulty of a keyword, represented as a numerical value between zero and a hundred.
This gives you a manageable list of low-competition topics with decent search volumes.
The very best topics strike a balance between high traffic potential, low competition, and high business value.
B. Use the Content Explorer ‘hack’
Content Explorer is a searchable database of over a billion web pages.
To find low-hanging content ideas that are easy to rank for, search for a broad topic and apply two filters:
Referring domains < 5 Organic traffic filter > 1,000
This will give you a list of relevant pages that get lots of organic traffic while having few or no backlinks.
Scroll through these pages and look for topics with business value that make sense to cover.
Start a podcast
51% of Americans have listened to a podcast, and 32% have listened to a podcast at least every month. Podcasts have a huge audience, and starting one to support your online brand can also drive traffic to your site.
Podcasting benefits you in a number of ways:
Brand awareness: Users might discover you first through your podcast, and then visit your site to learn more.
Nurture customer relationships: Provide extra value to your customers through podcast content. You could also incorporate an interactive component to give them a more intimate brand experience.
SEO: If you transcribe your podcasts, you can embed the audio and post the text to your site’s blog, giving you more opportunity to optimize for search.
Drive website traffic with Facebook
While Facebook’s organic reach continues to decrease, as Facebook prioritizes posts from users’ friends and family members, that doesn’t make this platform less of a powerhouse. You can obtain website traffic from Facebook groups, Facebook Ads, Messenger, social media posts, and of course your own business page.
For online store owners, you can promote products in buy and sell Facebook groups to help ensure you receive website traffic from people who are interested in buying your products.
Also, by combining Facebook ads with consistently posting on your Facebook page, you’ll increase the chances of getting website traffic from various areas in Facebook. Feel free to check out the Facebook Chat app, as you can share links to product pages or blog content to potential and actual customers.
Check out Pinterest
Pinterest is one of the best ways to get website traffic flowing. By pinning your products and blog content multiple times a week, Pinterest traffic can potentially outperform powerhouses like Facebook. All it takes is for one pin to go viral to get an endless stream of traffic to your website.
If you’re sharing a blog post, you can pin all of the images within the post. This gives you multiple opportunities for a pin take off — one of your pictures could potentially outperform the rest. As a result, you could drive even more traffic back to your website.
Let’s say you want to promote a product page. You can upload custom pictures to entice clicks to your website if the product photos on that page aren’t the most inspiring. To increase website traffic from Pinterest, you can try the Pinoculars app which re-targets visitors on Pinterest.
Post on Product Hunt
Product Hunt is a website that helps users share and discover new products. Lifestyle brand Startup Drugz used Product Hunt to drive 35,000 unique visits to their online store.
Here’s how it works: Create an account, wait a week to gain posting privileges, then post your product. Remember to use high-quality product photos, add well-written descriptions, and use URL parameters so you can track the traffic coming in.
Create retargeting ads to win back visitors
Only 2% of visitors will make a purchase the first time they come to your site. Retargeting ads are so effective because you’re marketing to a warm audience — you’re trying to get them to come back for a follow-up visit. Because of that, you have an easier time convincing them to convert.
In the case of retargeting ads, the conversion is the click through to your site. To drive more traffic to your site using retargeting ads, consider basing it on user behaviour. Automations can trigger based on actions they’ve taken online, allowing you to create a personalized, more engaging experience.
Summary
There are tons of ways to drive traffic to your online store, from social media to in-person marketing and everything in between. The most effective method depends on your brand and your customers — and you’ll only learn through trial and error (plus a bit of optimization).
