BigCommerce helps growing businesses, enterprise brands, and everything in-between sell more online.
Increasing traffic to your website increases the number of customers who find your products and helps you make more sales. Here are the methods most commonly used to attract traffic to an online store:
Search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to gain traffic to your website. By optimizing each page in your store, you can increase your search engine ranking and find customers who are more likely to buy your products.
SEO involves researching keywords or phrases. Today, SEO focuses much more on context, and you are unlikely to be successful by just the same keyword or phrase all over your site. Instead, you need to create quality, engaging, unique content that tells a story. More people are using long-tail key phrases in searches. For example, people no longer just type in "shoes" if they are looking to buy shoes online. Instead, they type in something more specific, like "sale on black heels with a red bottom sole." This means your keyword/phrase strategy needs to be well planned, well researched, and implemented carefully as to avoid any "black hat SEO" techniques like keyword stuffing or other other strategies that could be considered unethical. Remember, SEO is affordable if you put the right strategy in place. Write for intent, not keywords related to your products and use them in URLs, page titles, meta descriptions and throughout the page content. Each page should be optimized for its own set of keywords. You can do keyword research using a tool like Google's Adwords and the Moz keyword difficulty tool. You can also Google search the keyword/phrase and look at their recommendations in the "did you mean?" section. Another option is to use relevant keywords in image file names and alt tags. Consider going after long-tail keywords, which are often less competitive and more specific to your unique products.
Another element to SEO is building links to your website. When websites gain more links, this signals to search engines that the information and content on these sites is trustworthy and credible, which increases your ranking over time. Utilize internal linking on your pages to begin building your rank.
Content marketing is part of the larger SEO picture. Another way to drive traffic to your website is to focus on creating unique and high-quality content. While SEM and SEO can help you gain new visitors, producing useful content can help keep visitors engaged over the long term. These articles and pieces of/content also get displayed within Google search results, so ultimately, they drive a lot of new visits and encourage repeat visits.
Blogging - Blogging can keep customers coming back. Using this content to build links to your store by hyperlinking to relevant product pages can also increase your search engine ranking. Blogging can generate 97 percent more inbound links (1).
Social media - For business owners, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube are effective ways to keep customers engaged. Social media is also a distribution channel for blog content. Whenever you post to your blog, share it on social media to increase traffic to your website. In addition, more visually-oriented formats like Instagram and Pinterest can showcase your products and increase click-thrus to your site.
Email - Email is another way to keep customers engaged. You can send out emails that showcase blog content or reengage with customers who abandoned shopping carts "in an attempt to" drive them back to your website.
Similarly to SEO, PPC relies on targeting keywords. With this method, known as pay-per-click advertising, businesses can use keywords to target potential customers and post paid links in Google for these keywords. Each time they receive a click, your business will pay a certain amount to the search engine. The cost will vary depending on how competitive the keyword is. In addition to Google, Bing and Yahoo also have PPC platforms. You can also purchase ad placements on other websites.
Asking for external assistance to get your store's name out there is another way to increase traffic. Look for bloggers or companies with audiences that have already been established and use these influencers to grow your own audience.
Find influencers - There are many platforms that gauge influence on social channels. Kloutis one of the most well-known resources and it includes blogs in its ranking algorithms. Search for keywords related to your business to find influencers in that area. Blog search engines like Technorati can lead you to bloggers with a lot of followers.
Guest blogging - Once you've identified influencers, ask them if you can do a guest blog post for them. This is free content for them and free exposure for you. You may also want to ask if they will write a guest blog for you so they can gain more readers.
Answer a HARO query - Help a Reporter Out is a resource for journalists who need an expert opinion on various topics. If you can find one related to your business, you could get free press.
Share your URL everywhere - Put your website on business cards, email signatures and anywhere else you can think of.
BigCommerce helps growing businesses, enterprise brands, and everything in-between sell more online.
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