10 Traffic Building Tips for Ecommerce Stores

Source: Vincent van der Pas

If you currently run an online ecommerce store, then you would probably like to get more sales. There are many factors that are involved in setting up a successful ecommerce store, but one of the most fundamental factors is traffic. You can have great products, great content, great sales pages, and great conversion rates – but you’ll hardly have a successful business without a decent amount of traffic.

If you have an ecommerce store and would like to grow your traffic, try out these tips.

1. Continuously Improve

Many of the traffic building techniques that you try will be failures, and others will work quite well. When thinking about generating traffic to your website, it is important to have the attitude that you will be continuously increasing the amount of traffic you get. You can keep what works and discard what doesn’t. If you are constantly improving, then it won’t be long before you have a steady stream of traffic, and you won’t worry so much about whether one particular technique will work or not.

2. Have a Great Title

Unless you are aiming for a multi-billion dollar online store, it is usually much easier to attract and keep traffic if the name of your store is relatively simple. If you sell boots, then a store name with “boots” in the title is a good idea. This will reassure visitors to your store that they are in the right place if they are shopping for boots. The title is also the blue link that is displayed in Google’s search results, so a simple, easy to understand title is more likely to get clicks and drive traffic to your ecommerce store.

3. Don’t Ignore the Meta Description

The meta description on your site has little to do with SEO traffic methods, but it is important for another reason: Google typically displays it below your site’s title when it shows up in the search results. You should write your meta description with this in mind. It should be a couple of sentences that catch an Internet surfer’s eye and compels him to click on your link.

4. Create More Content

Even though your ecommerce store mostly features products, it’s a good idea to write some articles and post them to your site. Internet users love free information, so your articles will compel them to stay at your site a bit longer than they otherwise would have. It will also be more fodder for the search engines to find, so they will send more traffic your way.

5. Conduct a Survey

Surveys are great ways to get more traffic while improving your product or service at the same time. Everyone loves to give their opinion, and a survey is the perfect opportunity for them to do so. You might offer to enter everyone who fills out the survey into a drawing to win one of your products for free. Not only will this drive traffic to your site, but it is free market research.

6. Collect Emails

It’s not a bad idea to ask for visitors’ emails when they are on your site. They might want to be notified of future sales or product releases. When you want a large amount of traffic in a short period of time, you can send out an email to everyone on your list to let them know that you are holding a sale.

7. Use Social Media

Although search engines were typically the largest traffic driver for ecommerce sites for many years, social media appears to be the wave of the future. You can keep in contact with customers, prospects, and business partners on these sites.

8. Buttons on Your Articles and Product Pages

It is usually an easy matter to add a couple of lines of code to your pages to make it easier for visitors to share them. The AddThis and ReTweet buttons are now common sights on many websites and blogs. When someone finds one of your products interesting, he may share it with all his friends.

9. Avoid Hard Selling

Although hard selling may be good for your conversion rate, it will rarely result in people wanting to come back to your site or to share it with their friends.

10. Use Video

People love entertainment, and they spend an inordinate amount of time watching videos online. Adding some video content to your site will make it much more engaging.

The more traffic you have, the more sales and revenue you will generate, so it is a good idea to concentrate on this aspect of your business. Start using some of these tips to attract more visitors to your website now.