6 Quick Tips to Improve Your Traffic in 2015

What would you say is your main focus in ecommerce?

Improving conversion rate?

Getting a higher email engagement?

Or perhaps gaining sales from a particular channel?

For me, it’s always been increasing relevant traffic. Let’s face it, without relevant traffic, none of the above would matter.

But with ecommerce market growing at a fierce rate, attracting new customers is becoming more difficult. This is especially true if you’re already focusing on all key traffic channels and need new ways to bring visitors.

Here are 6 ideas that might help you.

Improve Your Search Listings

It’s true, the higher your site ranks in search, the more people are likely to click to it. According to a CTR study conducted by Catalyst, 83% of clicks on Google’s page 1 go to the first four organic results.

But which of the listings searchers click on largely depends on how well you optimize it to their needs.

A more engaging meta-description, sitelinks, video listings or rich snippets might grab their attention and prevent them from clicking on the highest result.

So your first task should be to improve the way your organic listings appear in Google.

Here are few ideas:

Write your meta-descriptions from a sales perspective. That short copy describing your listing is the first thing many searchers will see, and thus it should do a great job at selling you to them.

A good meta-description should tell your potential visitors:

• Your USP
• Why you are the best option
• Why should they believe you
• Why should they click to your site
• And if possible, include your phone number too (because some users might prefer to reach you this way)

Set up sitelinks. Sitelinks help visitors directly access important pages on your site.

Even though you can’t specify which pages and when should appear as sitelinks, you can denote the ones you don’t want Google to display. And doing so will help prevent unwanted links showing up in rankings.

Add rich snippets and markup. Schema.org markup can enhance your search listings with such elements as reviews, star ratings, price information and others making your listing stand out from the competition.

Some sites report up to 30% increase in Click Through Rate after implementing a structured markup so it’s worth experimenting with different snippets to enrich your organic listing.

Analyze Your Audience

Researching your audience buying behavior can suggest new ways to attract them to your site.

Find out how they seek new products or solutions, which advertising channels they respond to or who might influence their buying decision. Run a survey for instance to learn your audience’s current preferences.

Get Publicity From Bloggers and Press

Bloggers can help you expose your site to completely new audiences. And since these people already trust a blogger, they are likely to follow their recommendations.

Reach out to bloggers and journalists in your industry to find out if they could run a feature on your store, review your products or mention you in any other way on their site.

Shopify ran a thorough article on attracting bloggers’ attention. Read it here.

Create Content that Drives Brand Awareness

Customers prefer to buy from brands they know. When seeking products or services, they respond better to the ones they’re already familiar with.

Content marketing is one way to ensure that your potential clients are aware of your brand.

Therefore, create content that aims to raise your brand awareness. It should:

• Target a wider audience,
• Aim to solve their problems and,
• Be memorable and helpful.

Good examples of such content include:

• Videos,
• Vine clips,
• Infographics,
• Comics or Memes,
• List Posts,
• Interviews and many more.

Run a Contest

Contests are an old and proven marketing technique. They help spread the word on your brand and gain insight into your audience.

But, they also go viral. It doesn’t matter how big or small it is, a well-designed contest will spread like wildfire.

And bring traffic.

There are many types of contests you could run for your store:

• Giveaways,
• Coupon codes,
• Product promotions.

But one that works especially well to promote ecommerce site is a sweepstake.

According to Wikipedia: “Sweepstakes with large grand prizes tend to attract more entries regardless of the odds of winning”. It means that as customers we continuously fall for this marketing tactic … and get compelled to visit a store’s site.

Go Multichannel

Not all people have to buy on your site. Online retailers use a variety of other channels to attract new customers and sales. Amazon Marketplace, Ebay, comparison shopping engines and online marketplaces are just some examples.

One of the key benefits of multichannel selling is that it helps to attract customers who wouldn’t normally visit your site.

Of course, you have to give away a percentage of a transaction in return. But if these channels increase the number of sales you make, it can be worth it.

Find out more about multichannel selling from these two articles:

• What is Multichannel Selling? via Practical Commerce
• Multichannel Retailing on Wikipedia

What initiatives are you employing to boost traffic in 2015? Let me know in the comments!