6 Overlooked Ways to Vastly Boost Traffic to Your Ecommerce Site From creating a value-driven blog to publishing videos, here are a few ways to increase traffic to your online store.
By Bryan Lovgren •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It doesn't matter if you own a small shop on Etsy or a major ecommerce site, the fact remains that online traffic drive sales. Discovering ways to increase traffic can be time consuming and really difficult. So I've devised six often overlooked ways to vastly increase traffic to your ecommerce site:
1. Create a value-driven blog
As you know content has become the new form of search-engine marketing. It's estimated that over 80 percent of companies employ some sort of content strategy but only 32 percent feel their strategies are effective. The truth is, content marketing is a tough animal to wrangle. To outsiders content seems simple: write a blog, post an image, create a meme and presto you've got a blog. It isn't that easy. Companies must create highly targeted and quality content to receive the results they desire.
Related: In Today's World, Only the Constant Marketer Survives
One of the secrets to powerful content marketing is making your customer the hero. For example, seek out your customers and get their stories. Ask them why they choose your brand over others, what your brand means to them and how your brand makes them feel. Imagine the meaningful content you could create while putting your customer center stage.
2. Produce and publish videos of your products
I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to buy clothing online but refrained, because I had no idea what it would look like on me. Video is a powerful selling tool that provides the right information at the right time to consumers. Take 6pm.com for example. Almost all of their shoe products have a custom-made video showing off the item on a real person.
There are two ways to publish the video on your site. The first is to self-host the video on your site. Self-hosting is great for sites that want their sites to rank for the videos (remember to correctly optimize the video when uploading). The second way is to use a third-party service like YouTube or Vimeo. One of the nice things about using these platforms is the video is hosted on their servers and won't affect your site's page load time. A benefit of publishing on YouTube is the fact that it is the second largest search engine behind Google.
3. Buy misspells of your domain
This is an often-overlooked strategy by most online businesses. Most companies focus on buying domain variations like .net or .org, but fail to buy misspells. Let's take modest swimwear line LimeRicki for example. At the time of publication LimeRicki could buy:
LimeRicci.com (available)
LimeRiki.com ($6,425)
LimeRikki.com ($1,250)
LimRicki.com ($299)
TheLimeRicki.com (available)
LimeRici.com (available)
LimeRicky.com
These are just a few of the dozens of misspells for LimeRicki.com. If you own 50 misspell of your domain and each misspell averages 10 visits, you've essentially increased your traffic by 500 per month or 6,000 visits per year. It can add up really quickly depending on your per visit value.
4. Social-media campaigns with purpose
Social campaigns are a no brainer but often poorly executed. If there's one thing to understand it's this: Social campaigns shouldn't be used to drive leads but to drive brand awareness and engagement.
Social media is an opportunity for ecommerce brands to engage with their customers. To once again make their customers the hero. Don't shy away from asking questions, being concerned, and genuinely caring about your fans. When your customers know you care about them, they'll start to really care about you.
Related: 9 Tips to Make Your Ecommerce Business Wildly Successful
But besides engaging with customers, it can also affect your traffic volume. For instance, Google+ is tied into the Google search engine algorithm. Google looks for social signals when ranking websites and pages. Building a robust community that actually engages with your posts will increase the likelihood of your blog posts or product pages ranking higher within the Google search engine. Thus driving more traffic.
5. Use tools and apps to promote your product
There are new tools being released every single day that can benefit your online efforts. Here is one tool that I consider to be on the cutting edge of ecommerce sales: Liketoknow.it
This tool allows users to convert their Instagram photos into commerce. In other words Liketoknow.it's technology gives users the ability to tag items in their photos that links to the item online where people can actually make purchases.
Users are incentivized to publish and tag photos, because they receive a portion of each sale made from their tagged photo.
If you own or run an ecommerce site I recommend either signing up for Liketoknow.it and publishing photos or reaching out to trendy bloggers and Instagrammers and incentivizing them to publish/tag photos with your products in them. Oh and guess what? Liketoknow.it allows you to track which photo generates the most revenue and drives the most engagement. More analytics and data to make better decisions, yay!
6. Push users to leave reviews
By now, most ecommerce sites and storefronts have the capability to receive user reviews; however, most sites are not effectively pursuing this strategy. Did you know that 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations? Each user review has an immense impact on the purchase decisions of your customers.
So how does this impact traffic? First off, user reviews are unique and relevant content. Second, user reviews keep your static pages fresh and search engines love pages that are constantly refreshed with new content. Third, people who take the time to leave reviews are generally the people who take the time to share their experience with friends. User reviews give your product pages higher chances of ranking as well as more social engagement.
These tips are just a few ways to increase traffic to ecommerce sites. Continually audit your efforts and look for innovative ways to provide value to your customers.
Related: What Adults Can Learn From Teenage Ecommerce Entrepreneurs
