How do you increase organic traffic to your e-commerce website?

Do you want to see a jump in the number of organic visitors to your e-commerce website? Who doesn’t? The more important question is how do you boost organic traffic in ethical, effective, reliable ways?

Increase Your Traffic the Smart, Organic Way

There are many ways to boost organic traffic. You can pick and choose from the following popular techniques:

• Encourage users to post product reviews. This unique content goes a long way toward bringing traffic to your site.
• Take the time to write unique, detailed product and service descriptions for everything you offer.
• Make it simple for visitors to explore and use your e-commerce website. One of the main reasons people leave is because they encounter slow page fills or other technical/technology obstacles.
• Avoid high-resolution images so that your site will load quickly. It’s a trade-off, so minimize the use of photos and streaming video.
• Make your site fully responsive and 100 percent mobile-friendly. More and more e-commerce is taking place on mobile devices these days. Don’t lose out by failing to optimize for mobile users.
• Include a forum somewhere on your site. Customers and prospective customers enjoy chatting about their purchases. Give them space to do so.
• Put social media (SM) buttons in a prominent place on your e-commerce website. Human beings are social animals and want to know how to tell others when they see something they like on your website. Don’t pass up this opportunity. Put those SM buttons where people can see them.

Know Your Terminology

For any kind of specific study, you have to understand the terminology that’s being used. In this case, we’re throwing around some key terms that show up over and over in marketing literature. Even if you don’t memorize the following definitions, try to get the gist of the meanings so you’ll have a fuller understanding about how to grow organic traffic for your e-commerce site:

• E-commerce web development: This term refers to an entire package of services that helps business owners fine-tune their e-commerce sites so that customers face no obstacles when purchasing, the site functions seamlessly, there are no limits on your ability to handle large numbers of orders, and more. E-commerce web development is an essential service for company owners who want to maximize their online profit-making potential.
• E-commerce solutions: When business owners speak of e-commerce solutions, they’re usually referring to the specific set of functions that an e-commerce website provides, like a shopping cart, streamlined order processing, sales tracking and analysis, customer profiling, etc. There are hundreds of e-commerce solutions available to owners who want to offer the very best customer experience to their loyal and new online clients.
• WooCommerce design: This e-commerce WordPress plugin works specifically for e-commerce sites. If you are a small, medium, or large merchant who typically uses WordPress for all your websites, WooCommerce is for you. Not only is it open-source (i.e., free to use and modify), it’s easy to install and offers an elegantly simple look and feel for users. And when you need to customize it, you’ll spend just a few minutes getting your changes made and saved.
• Shopify design: Similar in some ways to WooCommerce, Shopify lets company owners set up unique-looking e-commerce stores with comprehensive functionality and any number of payment options. Shopify has built its own loyal fan base due to the fact that it’s very easy to install and use.
• E-commerce service: Companies that offer e-commerce service typically help business owners install plugins like Shopify, WooCommerce, and others. In addition, they offer dozens of other services like search engine optimization (SEO), website maintenance, and market and customer analysis.
• E-commerce website optimization: This broad term encompasses not just SEO. It reaches further and relates to all components that make an e-commerce site successful, like conversion rate optimization, building SM links, eliminating page errors, maximizing the effectiveness of the product page, the entire site design, the user interface, and the shopping experience.
• E-commerce SEO: The entire group of efforts you make to boost organic traffic on your e-commerce site includes e-commerce SEO. It’s one of the many tools for using specific language in order to rank higher on search engines.

Choose Your Weapons

Keep three things in mind as you move forward:

1. You will need to adapt your marketing strategies from time to time. Traffic is not a static thing. Consumer tastes change over time and your own product/service mix might change as well. Some techniques will work for a while and then stop working. This is to be expected, so be ready to alter your marketing approach as you keep an eye on sales, traffic, and other factors that affect the success of your e-commerce site.
2. Don’t expect overnight results. No matter how perfect your strategies are, they will need time to attract users, shoppers, and buyers. Once you get things set up the way you want, wait at least a week or two before assessing the success of your efforts. Your goal is not just to sell products and services; it’s to create life-long customers. Anyone can make a profit for a few weeks or months. The truly successful entrepreneurs are able to build a large, loyal clientele base that returns year after year for services.
3. Take time to write original, informative content about your business niche and offer it as a guest post on relevant websites. Don’t focus on getting direct back-links (i.e., a linking referral). Instead, use these pieces to build your long-term reputation as an expert in a given field. For example, if you sell auto parts, you could do a series of guest posts on the best ways to take care of vehicles based on the different seasons of the year.

You could spend a lifetime trying to employ every known tactic for growing organic traffic to your e-commerce website. The truth is that you’ll necessarily have to choose which tools work best for you based on your company’s size, age, current level of income, products or services offered, and whether you need to bump local SEO efforts or focus on building a global brand, and numerous other factors. The decision is yours, so spend time analyzing and testing out different approaches and tactics before settling on a core strategy.