The entrepreneurship climate these days is shifting significantly thanks to digitalization. Brick-and-mortar stores aren’t the only way to run a business. There’s another platform, too, one which most entrepreneurs are penetrating these days: e-commerce.
As its name suggests, e-commerce refers to businesses over the Internet through a business website run by software such as Shopify. There are many compelling advantages to taking this route, particularly relating to reduced costs, ease of management, and a minimal need for office space. But the challenge is just the same. As you grow your business, there also has to be an effort to attract more visitors to keep your company competitive.
Whether your Shopify store is still in its infancy or you’re aiming to attract your 1000th Shopify visitor, increasing traffic is always a worthwhile effort. More traffic coming to your website translates to more customers, which, in turn, means more sales.
So, what can be done to drive more traffic to your online store? This comprehensive guide lays out the most valuable tips.
1. Optimize Your Shopify Store For Organic Search
Organic search refers to how individuals and businesses research new products and services. With that definition alone, you should now understand how this is, in fact, one of the most important ways to drive interested visitors and shoppers to your website. Hence, the need to optimize your Shopify store for organic search.
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to all the metrics and practices in place to improve the quality and quantity of website traffic. When successful, eCommerce SEO is a good strategy and key to making your page rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Start with understanding what it is precisely that search engines are looking for when they rank websites. Using the appropriate keywords is a no-fail. After all, these are the terms that individuals are most likely to use when searching for information on search engines.
That said, Shopify websites can’t go wrong with leveraging such tools. When using keywords, however, be sure that these are naturally incorporated into your content. They should neither sound too forced nor too obvious. Otherwise, those keywords will also hurt your ranking instead of uplifting it. Good places to incorporate keywords are in the alt text of images, headlines, product copies, URLs, subheadings, meta descriptions, and title tags.
2. Get To Know The Main, General Sources Of Traffic For Websites
Knowing where website traffic comes from is another crucial traffic-boosting strategy. These are the primary sources:
- Paid And Organic Search. It’s undeniable how many shoppers today head straight to search engines of their choice to begin their hunt for products and services. This is what it means by paid and organic search. Your items can appear in either one of two ways: an ad you paid for or the search engine’s SEO algorithms.
- Social. These refer to clicks on your website directly coming from any social media buzz, hype, or conversation.
- Referrals. These are clicks from other websites that lead to your website, as in the case of third parties or affiliates linking directly to your website.
- Direct traffic. This means that your Shopify visitor already knew about your website’s existence. They typed your URL right into their browser. This usually happens when the individual has visited your Shopify website before, so the URL is already remembered by their browser search bar.
- Email. This is the traffic generated through clicks on your email campaigns. If your emails are engaging and effective, the readers will take the time to read through them, leave their inboxes, and follow the link to your website.
From the suggestions above, identify where your website belongs to. By doing so, you can precisely tailor your strategies to fit your website’s traffic sources the most.
3. Satisfy The Prerequisites To Ensure Traffic Converts
From the marketing perspective, the good news you can bank on is that getting your first customer is the same as getting your hundredth. This means that returning to the basics of satisfying and mastering the prerequisites ensures that traffic converts are a sound enough foundation. When those are met, you also have the assurance that whatever cost was incurred for boosting traffic to your Shopify store is worth the while.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are the products good? A ‘good’ product means it passes the standards of your target audience. Perform cost-benefit analysis, too. When your audience feels the benefits of buying your products and services outweigh the costs, they’re more likely to return to your Shopify store. In effect, traffic increases.
- Is there any low-cost way to drive traffic to the website? The lower the cost, the better. It doesn’t matter if yours is still an up-and-coming or already-established business. All or at least a majority of companies always strive for the lowest cost possible to keep all their expenses in check.
- Is there a stable and large target market for the products and services? Without a target market, there’s no way to bring more traffic to your website. Hence, it’s equally vital to study whether or not the demand for your products and services is strong.
If this isn’t the case, you may want to look into what you’re selling and see if there’s any way to make it more marketable and attractive to your target market.
Once you’ve addressed the questions above, you’ll have a better and more defined sense of direction as to what course of action to best take for your Shopify store.
4. Assess Why You Have Traffic But No Sales
When your goal is to boost traffic, note that this means more than bringing more visitors to your Shopify store. It has to go as far as making sales as well. Otherwise, no matter how much traffic you have, it will only count that much when it translates to monetary value.
There are many reasons why a Shopify store has traffic but not enough sales. Yours can fall into any of the following:
- Poor store navigation. No one has the time to figure things out. Everything must be clear and defined as soon as your website pops open. Tabs should be well-labeled so your Shopify store visitors know where to find what they want.
Visitors often leave the website or stop engaging if finding their way around is difficult. Remember, they’re shopping online for one reason alone: convenience. So, it’d be best if you aimed to give that to them.
Assess your Shopify store navigation right now. Do you have a menu bar? Is the search bar visible and constant, even when a new page opens? Have you enabled a ‘wish list’ where shoppers can save products they’ve looked at and return to them later on? Those are only a few examples to help you improve your Shopify store’s navigation.
- Lack of mobile optimization. Many browse the Internet through computers or laptops, but so many more are browsing through their mobile phones. Shopify stores that aren’t optimized for the latter miss out on many potential buyers and visitors. This is because of the ease and convenience of browsing through a mobile phone.
A Shopify store optimized for mobile use is one in which the website interface isn’t distorted when switching or opening from a smaller screen. The tabs are still easy to click through, and navigation isn’t negatively affected. The images of your products and services and the content font size and style stay legible, despite viewing from a small mobile phone screen.
- Flaw in the checkout process. Imagine the frustration of finally already completing your cart and shopping, only to find out later on in the shopping process that you can’t proceed. If this happens, there could be a glitch in the checkout process, whether in the number of items a customer bagged or the payment details.
Take the time to test and try out your own Shopify store occasionally, so you can see what it’s like to go through it. If the checkout process seems troublesome for you, chances are, all your other customers will feel the same way, too. You don’t want to lose that potential sale and then drive your traffic to a low point when would-be buyers leave, close your site, and opt to shop at your competitor’s instead.
Final Thoughts
The slow growth of a Shopify store isn’t rare. There’ll even be instances when there’ll be no growth at all, at least for a few days, which can be worrisome. And, as an entrepreneur, you should strive not to make such instances too frequent and too familiar.
When you notice your Shopify store underperforming, it’s time to start thinking seriously about what you can do to reverse the situation. One of the things you can do in this regard is to boost traffic to your store.
After going through this article, you now have more insights into where to start and what to do to bring visitors in, promote your Shopify store, and convert all those visitors into paying customers.
