Are you looking to boost organic traffic to your eCommerce website?
Getting more visitors to your website isn’t simple to accomplish. More likely than not, it’s going to be a continuous process with incremental results. However, learning what you can do to increase your eCommerce organic traffic is the first step you need to take.
In this blog, we’ll cover 7 effective tips that can help you get started with bringing in more visitors and, consequently, conversions.
Optimize Your Page Titles and Headings
Page titles and headings tell both visitors and crawlers what the page or section is about. In the case of online stores, these are most often your categories and subcategories. Optimizing titles and headings for relevant keywords and to match search intent is important for both search engine optimization and user experience.
From an SEO perspective, headings optimized according to best practices will help your website get indexed and rank for your target keywords, increasing your chances of being found.
When it comes to user experience, well-optimized headings and titles answer their intent and help visitors navigate your pages. In other words, headings tell them what value they can find in the content on your website. Hence, you should always keep in mind what the user is looking for, what you’re offering, and what type of title will grab their attention.
Mind the URL Structure
When creating new pages or optimizing existing ones, make sure to optimize their URLs according to URL structure guidelines.
In essence, the URL of your page should be descriptive but concise. It should contain the target keyword and make it clear to both users and crawlers what the page is about, without being too long. If there are multiple words you want to include, separate them with a hyphen “-“.
Avoid non-descriptive or unintelligible, complex URLs, as well as including numbers such as publishing dates, or years (such as ecommerce-organic-traffic-2021-guide), as they would need to be changed with each update to the content. Instead, future-proof the URL so that you can keep using it after each page update.
For example, the URL structure for an eCommerce website should look something like this:
https://www.yourwebsite.com/category/subcategory/product-name
Or
https://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/blog-topic
Optimizing your URLs and structure to make them accurate, descriptive, and user-friendly will be more inviting to potential visitors, as well as help search engines understand what your page is about.
Optimize Page Load Speed Across Devices
The speed at which pages load on desktop and mobile devices is important both for user experience and your ability to rank. Page speed is a well-known ranking factor as a part of Core Web Vitals, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s something you need to monitor at all times.
Further, slow-loading pages are one of the main reasons behind a high bounce rate, so if you are looking to increase your eCommerce organic traffic, make sure to optimize your website to load quickly both on desktop and mobile devices.
You can use Google’s own Page Speed Insight Tool to check how your website is performing across desktop and mobile platforms and identify what you can do to improve.
That being said, the most common and effective way to improve site speed is to use compressed images, if you aren’t already. Large image sizes can slow down your page speed significantly, so optimizing them is a good place to start. You can use a wide array of online tools to compress images and ensure their reduced size doesn’t equate to a loss in quality.
Optimize Your Product Page Copies and Descriptions
Naturally, you are probably most interested in increasing your product page organic traffic growth. Getting to the top of the SERP page and boosting your eCommerce traffic for specific products requires some search engine optimization, as well as writing engaging copies.
Apart from using keywords you want to rank for in your body copy and meta description, you need to make sure they are written to match the search intent and grab the attention of your potential buyers.
Your product page copies need to be descriptive enough to provide visitors with all the information they need to compare products and make a choice, while being concise enough to do so at a glance. Make sure you write unique content for your products instead of copying their descriptions from the manufacturer’s website.
When it comes to meta descriptions, they are often the make-or-break factor between a user visiting your store or scrolling further. For a relatively short bit of content, they have an important role in your eCommerce traffic – to convince the user that they can find what they are looking for on your website.
Hence, your meta descriptions need to stand out in the crowd, address the search intent, and invite the user to take an action – click through.
Although optimizing and writing content for all your product pages may seem like a lot of work, it’s a crucial step in driving more organic traffic and boosting your conversion rates.
Leverage Social Media
Social media can be a great way to extend the reach of your content beyond search engine result pages. While it’s difficult to tell whether it can help you rank better, you can definitely use social media to increase your eCommerce organic traffic by directing your followers to your website.
For example, if you are running a promotion or a discount on certain products, you can use your social media presence to spread the word and invite both existing and new customers to see what you offer. The same goes for blog content – If you’re writing about a topic that your followers may find useful, you can include the link to the blog page in your post.
Not only will this boost your organic traffic, but it is also a great way to keep your audience engaged. In addition to funneling traffic to your eCommerce website, social media can also help you interact with your customers: answer their questions, respond to reviews, organize giveaways, etc.
Naturally, it’s best to have a presence on all social media channels if appropriate for your business. However, if you need to choose where you want to post, it should be the platform most of your customers use, so take the time to analyze your target audience and their online behavior and create buyer personas for the products you sell.
Create a Blog Section and Post Regularly
Out of all the methods you can use to increase your eCommerce organic traffic, blogging will arguably take the longest to have a positive effect since it will take some time for the search engines to index and rank your content. However, if done right, content marketing can give you the best organic traffic growth results in the long run.
If you are looking to get started with producing blog content for your website, understanding who your target audience is is a good place to start. Knowing their pain points, questions they might have, and what type of content is going to grab their attention will help you plan your content strategy.
In the case of eCommerce websites, these will most often be articles based around the products and product categories you offer. You can write blogs that help customers choose the right product for themselves, educate them on their proper use and maintenance, safety precautions, the benefits they offer, or any other topic your audience will find useful.
When producing blog content, try to write with an angle. The truth is that most questions and topics have already been covered (at least to some degree), so coming up with 100% unique content can be challenging. That being said, you should always try to write high-quality content your readers can relate to, answering their questions and providing them with real value.
Another good way to appeal to your audience and boost the trustworthiness of your blog post is to invite an influencer or prominent expert in the field to collaborate in the creation of the article.
Bonus Tip:
By adding some convenient internal links that lead to your product pages or another blog post, you can help users find more information they’re interested in or drive traffic to pages where they can convert.
When it comes to external links, use them to provide visitors with additional value and validate your claims. Just make sure you are linking to reputable sites with decent authority. As a rule of thumb, it’s best to link to websites with higher DA (domain authority) compared to yours that aren’t your direct competitors.
Bonus Tip #2
When choosing the keywords you want to rank your blog for, the search volume shouldn’t be the only factor you consider. If you find that the competition for a keyword is tough, you may want to go for a related long-tail keyword with lower keyword difficulty. By using this tactic to find keyword opportunities, you can get indexed for both, while focusing on long-tail keywords that are easier to rank for.
Optimize for Rich Snippets
Optimizing for rich snippets is a great way to enhance how your page appears in search results, allowing you to provide users with a lot of information they would otherwise need to visit your page to see. These can include prices, discounts, reviews, ratings, availability, etc.
As you might presume, rich snippets stand out in search results, which can give your organic click-through rate a significant boost.
You can optimize your pages for rich snippets by using schema markup to structure your data. This way, you can essentially “tell” crawlers what certain bits of information on your website mean and help the search engine provide users with more detailed results to their query.
You can use plugins to add structured data to your page or do it manually. Once done, use Google’s Rich Results Test to see whether your page supports rich snippets.
Play the Long Game
As we’ve explained, most methods you can use to increase your eCommerce organic traffic will take some time. However, this shouldn’t discourage you from working towards your goal. Implementing some of the advice from this article, planning strategically, and leveraging all your marketing channels is bound to give you lasting results in the long run.