Increase online shop traffic: How to increase the number of visitors to your online shop
Have you finished setting up your online shop but aren’t getting many visitors? We’ll show you efficient methods for directing visitors to your shop and thus increasing your online shop traffic. Because more visitors ultimately mean more sales.
What are the ways to increase traffic?
Basically, you first need to understand the different types of traffic. From there, you can then develop ideas and strategies to increase it.
- Direct traffic: Visitors go directly to your site by entering your URL in their browser.
- Organic traffic (SEO): Your online shop is found via search engines without you having to pay for it.
- Paid search traffic (SEA): You place paid advertising, e.g., via Google Ads or Google Shopping, to rank higher in a search engine.
- Paid social traffic: You place advertising on social media, such as Facebook or Instagram. The difference with search traffic is that products don’t have to be actively searched for; instead, they are shown directly to the desired target audience.
- Organic social traffic: Users find your site on social media and thus come to your shop without you having to pay.
- Referral traffic: Visitors who reach your online shop via links from other websites or media.
- Email traffic: Visitors who reach your site by clicking on links in emails.
Increase online shop traffic with SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims to organically appear at the top of a search engine’s search results for the right keywords. These days, free traffic is becoming increasingly difficult for smaller online shops to obtain, especially due to fierce SEO competition. For each Google search query, only ten organic search results appear on the first page.
Studies have shown that only the top entries receive the majority of all clicks. Almost 60% of all organic clicks occur in the first position. The second position receives only a quarter of the clicks of the first position, at around 15%. If you don’t make it to the first page, you’re practically invisible. MyCOMMERCE offers you options to make the most of this. Please see our Help Center.
Write product descriptions
Make the experience more pleasant for your potential customers and write unique product descriptions that offer real value. Google will reward you for it. But you should definitely avoid these 3 things:
- Copying and pasting product descriptions
- Artificially inflating text and descriptions with search terms you want to rank for.
- Don’t rely solely on SEO
Paid search traffic
Google dominates the search engine market. Most searches originate on Google. Therefore, it can be worthwhile to advertise your products there. Learn more about Google Shopping here.
Social Media: How important is social media for my shop?
Social media is also an important channel for online commerce in Switzerland. Whether Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest – more and more brands and shops are selling directly or indirectly via social media. This was confirmed by a study published by eMarketer in April 2019. This is especially true for Instagram, because while Facebook remains the leader, Instagram is enjoying growing popularity. Create a profile for your company on all relevant social networks. More information is available here.
Link building with backlinks
If you, as a shop owner, are active in communities such as forums, it may be worthwhile to place a link to your online shop there. However, you should contact the forum operator beforehand, as spam is frowned upon. You have the best chances if it’s a website or forum that has a lot to do with your topic/product.
Important: Links to your shop should not be excessively distributed. Place them selectively and carefully. Google penalizes websites with lower rankings if it detects excessive link building. It’s therefore better to place one quality link per week on a good website than to randomly leave ten links somewhere on the internet every day.
The most important thing: constantly developing the online shop
There are numerous ways to get more online store traffic. It’s important not to just make one-time adjustments, but to stay up to date on the latest developments. The competition never sleeps, and the market is constantly evolving.
In addition to the traffic sources mentioned, there are many other options. Be creative!
You can find more information about creating an online shop here.
