9 Best Ways to Drive Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store

Creating an e-commerce website is insufficient for selling and showing a stable financial result. You must achieve a certain level of attendance and popularity for your online store. At the same time, it is crucial to control the budget to avoid going into the minus and monitor the quality of the traffic attracted. According to AgencyAnalytics, small to medium businesses invest 7x in PPC than SEO. Google Shopping and Google Ads have already become common tools for driving traffic to an online store. 

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But you shouldn't rely on these traffic channels alone. There are other equally effective traffic sources for attracting customers to your website at a reasonable price, which we will discuss further.

How to Drive Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store?

Let's figure out how to increase e-commerce traffic to your website and sell more products.

Create an SEO Strategy

Thanks to a proper SEO strategy, your online store's pages can reach the top of Google’s search results for relevant search queries. 

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Meaningful and relevant content on an online store's pages can be ranked higher, bringing traffic for dozens or millions of search queries. What other actions should you take:

• Conduct keyword research. Using Google Keyword Planner or other professional software, you can collect a list of phrases that potential customers use to find your site. With this list of keywords, you can optimize existing content and create new content. Your list of keywords can include not only commercial and transactional queries but also informational ones. You can create new web pages (for example, blog pages), thus creating more content that will drive traffic to your e-commerce site.
• Write metadata correctly. The title and description tags show search robots which main queries to rank the page for. 
• Make your website mobile-friendly. Hundreds of thousands of people make purchases from mobile devices every month. Setting up the correct display on mobile devices will make your online store attractive and convenient for a solvent audience. Google's web crawler prioritizes indexing the mobile version of a website's content over the desktop. So, it is very important to have a mobile-friendly website.
• Speed up page loading. Visitors will leave a slow e-commerce website, saving their time.
• Get high-quality backlinks to your website. The more reputable high-traffic websites link to your site, the better. This will increase your Google rankings and search traffic. It is essential to avoid spammy links and use the proper link-building techniques. 
• Monitor the completeness of product information. Complete and informative product pages with high-quality photos increase the likelihood that a visitor will place an order. 

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Getting organic e-commerce website traffic is a competitive task. Keeping track of your website's ranking positions helps you understand if your SEO strategy works. By regularly monitoring these positions, you can identify any sudden drops or fluctuations, which might indicate issues such as algorithm updates, technical problems, or changes in competitors' strategies. The keyword rank checker shows the change in positions daily, so you can immediately notice the problem, react, and prevent traffic loss.

Observing your competitors' activities and changes to their websites can provide valuable insights into their SEO strategies and tactics. If you notice competitors making adjustments that improve their rankings relative to yours, it's essential to analyze these changes and determine whether similar adjustments could benefit your site. Additionally, monitoring competitor activity can help you stay informed about industry trends, new content strategies, and emerging keywords, allowing you to adapt your SEO approach accordingly.

Start a Referral Program

This is a fairly popular method of promotion through recommendations from existing customers. Referral links work like word of mouth. The only difference is that users recommend you for personal gain rather than for their initiative. To make the referral program work, establish fair rewards, make it easy to use, and always show your appreciation.

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This method can be very effective and, most importantly, inexpensive. But it only works if you already have a reasonably large loyal audience. Running a referral program at the start of an online store often makes no sense.

Start Geo-Targeting Campaigns

Understand your audience's demographics to pinpoint their countries and regions of origin. This invaluable insight allows you to assess the most sought-after products and craft tailored messages for your advertising campaigns. You can use Google Trends to see which regions offer the most conversion potential.

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By leveraging geographic targeting in platforms like Google Ads, you can precisely aim your ads at specific locations, maximizing their relevance and effectiveness. By honing in on your audience's geographical preferences and delivering compelling content that resonates with them, you can significantly increase e-commerce traffic to your online store.

Work with Influencers and Partners

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Often, e-commerce store owners understand influencer marketing as searching for influencers on Instagram. This is a mistake that narrows down your promotion opportunities. Another wrong decision is to order ads only from influencers with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Both of these beliefs lead to the fact that work with bloggers is built inefficiently and becomes unprofitable.

How to choose an influencer for your e-commerce store promotion:

• Published ads. Look not only at the general content of the comments but also at what businesses the blogger advertises. If they are similar to your products, this influencer fits you.
• Quality of the content. The better photos, videos, and texts a blogger has, the more attention they deserve.
• Audience engagement. Posts should have the maximum number of comments and reactions. It is strange and suspicious if one post gets 10-20 likes with several thousand subscribers. This means that the influencer is cheating.
• Frequency of advertising posts. Here, you need to find a reasonable medium. If an influencer sells too much advertising, their audience will get bored. The unsubscriptions will be visible, and the advertising will become less effective.
• Price. It is better to compare the cost of advertising on several bloggers with similar audience parameters. Choosing the average cost of advertising is a smart decision.

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We recommend focusing on micro-bloggers. Micro-influencers usually have a more loyal and trusting audience that is more engaging. As a result, such influencers bring a higher conversion rate for you.

Encourage UGC from Your Customers

User-generated content is content (images, videos, articles) created by existing customers. It helps to expand your audience's reach, typically on social media. According to Entribe, 84% of people are more likely to trust brands if they use UGC in their digital marketing efforts.

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UGC can drive traffic to e-commerce sites even better than digital ads. Motivate customers to create such content with valuable discounts for the next purchase, showing their work on your social media accounts or gifting the product for the best one. This can help you reach new audiences with almost no effort.

Take Advantage of Retargeting

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Retargeting (remarketing) involves showing ads to users who have already been on the site or seen the product. It can drive traffic to an e-commerce store and improve sales conversion.

You've often seen this phenomenon: you look at skis in an online store, and then ads for skis follow you everywhere. Retargeting (remarketing) is a great tool to bring users back. If users visit some pages on your website, you can show them an ad on social media.

Additionally, you can use email retargeting. With its help, you can reach out to users who have interacted with your brand but quit before taking the desired action.

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Leverage Pinterest Marketing

Pinterest is one of the social media platforms that often escapes marketers' attention. Still, it has great potential for e-commerce stores to demonstrate their products and drive traffic.

First and foremost, participate in relevant group boards. These boards enlist numerous contributors who can furnish them with pins, allowing you to harness the traffic streams of other users to amplify exposure for your pins.

However, before affiliating with a board, meticulously acquaint yourself with its regulations. Some boards stipulate a minimum contribution quota of pins per week.

You have the option to establish your boards on your profile. Each board should encompass a minimum of ten pins. Maintaining consistent pinning activity on each board is essential to sustain traffic flow.

For every board – and every pin therein – integrate relevant keywords that resonate with your audience's search intentions into your descriptions. Therefore, creating a comprehensive keyword strategy is imperative for maximizing organic traffic. The judicious selection of keywords can significantly impact visibility.

Create Videos

According to Zight, video accounted for 82.5% of all web traffic in 2023! Videos on YouTube, TikTok, Reels, and other platforms are perfect for driving traffic to your e-commerce website. Only YouTube offers excellent audience reach with its 2 billion users! Combined with TikTok and Reels, your possibilities of driving traffic increase exponentially.

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Your e-commerce brand can:

• Create educational content
• Explain product features
• Tell inspiring stories that communicate your brand’s ideals
• Entertain with engaging videos that cater to your audience’s interests

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You can publish product instructions, video reviews, product tests, training videos, and more. If you find an exciting idea and unusual execution, the video may go viral and multiply your audience.

Summary

We have briefly analyzed all the main tools for driving e-commerce traffic to online stores. You can leverage SEO, influence marketing, UGC content, Pinterest marketing, retargeting, geo-targeting, video content, and referral programs to drive targeted traffic to your e-commerce store. 

They all have different specifics. Nevertheless, if you focus on several simultaneously, you will get faster and more beneficial results. You need high-quality analytics and a holistic marketing strategy to increase your store's traffic and e-commerce sales.