So you have launched your business website, now all you need to do is to figure out how to get traffic to your website to increase sales.  It’s simply easier to monetize a larger audience, whether that is through sales, referrals, advertising, or data. With that goal in mind, let’s dig into the specific areas where you can increase your traffic.

This article will help you figure out what it really takes to learn how to increase website traffic on your store. 

What is website traffic?

Website traffic refers to web users who visit a website. Analytics tools will often tell you both the number of page views and the number of unique page views. Page views are the total number of times anyone has visited your site, while unique page views tell you how many people visited your site.

The more website traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to convert users. You’ll often see that with more traffic comes lower conversion rates. This could be because the traffic isn’t as targeted, though more people are coming to your site but they might not all be highly qualified leads likely to purchase your products.

Ways to increase website traffic

Here are some of the ways to increase your website traffic. Let’s have a look at them.

1. Optimize your website for search

When starting remember to focus on keywords that define your niche to base your blog content and store pages. You’ll choose to focus on one or two main keywords per webpage. You can use SEO tools like Keywords everywhere to help you find relevant keywords.

In the beginning, focus on keywords that have the search volume of under 10,000 searches a month. After a few months of creating blog content and optimizing product pages, you can then focus on going after higher volume keywords.

The secret to get website traffic is to build a strong foundation of relevant keywords first. Be sure to take advantage of the blog on your online store as it can have the biggest impact on driving organic traffic to your website.

2. Mobile-Friendly Portal

With the increase in the number of mobile users around the globe, it is essential to make your website mobile-friendly. Today, most of the users open websites on their small screen mobile, so you have to design your website so that they can easily navigate it. You can Google’s Page Insight Tool to check the mobile-friendliness of your web pages. On the top, ensure that all your posts are AMP specification ready.

3. Experiment with content freshness

Refresh your content, it’s a refreshing SEO hack. You need to remove the outdated content from your webpage and add new sections to keep your content relevant. It’s basically a quick touch-up on old webpage content.

A simple way to do content freshness for product pages is to have a product review app like Stamped.io’s Product Review Addon. This allows your customers to leave reviews on your product page, which shows Google that there’s regular activity on the page and new content.

4. Submit your site to search engines

Also helpful for SEO, you can request search engines to crawl and index your site, increasing your odds at appearing on results pages for relevant queries.

• For Google: Submit your site via Search Console.
• For Bing and Yahoo: Learn how to submit URLs here.

5. Build your backlinks

Another important component to SEO are backlinks. An external site links to your site, signals to Google that your site is trustworthy and relevant to the words in the anchor text (the clickable words). Beyond SEO, backlinks have the potential to drive traffic to your store in and of themselves. 

6. Spy on your competitors

Research the main traffic sources of your competitors. This will help you understand which marketing channels you should prioritize. You can use the free Alexa tool. All you need to do is type in your competitor’s website, scroll to “Upstream sites,” and look at the list of websites that were visited immediately before landing on your competitor’s website.

If you see that Google tends to be the top choice, then you need to focus on Google Ads and SEO. If Facebook is the top website then you know you’ll need to create Facebook ads. Or if a niche blog is the highest source of traffic you can then focus on building out an outreach strategy to collaborate with that blog.

7. Optimize for long tail keywords

While many shorter keywords may come up in your keyword research, it’s important to also pay particular attention to the long tail keyword opportunities. Often, these keywords are more specific. As such, they typically have less search volume and, as a result, less competition. That means it’s not only easier to rank for relevant long tail keywords, but it’s also easier to guess the searcher intent.

8. Host exclusive content on your website

Start a blog, create a free course, develop Slide share presentations, host webinars, and publish other relevant content on your site. Maintain a regular publishing schedule and allow users to subscribe so they have a reason to keep coming back.

9. Create quizzes

Quizzes are an effective lead generation tool to use in your content marketing mix. When users finish a quiz, they get shareable results. They then post those results on social media, and their networks can click on the link and take the quiz themselves. This tactic can be used to drive more traffic.

10. Start a podcast

Podcasts have a huge audience, and starting one to support your online brand can also drive traffic to your site. Podcasting benefits you in a number of ways:

1.Brand awareness: Users might discover you first through your podcast, and then visit your site to learn more.

2.Nurture customer relationships: Provide extra value to your customers through podcast content. You could also incorporate an interactive component to give them a more intimate brand experience.

3. SEO: If you transcribe your podcasts, you can embed the audio and post the text to your site’s blog, giving you more opportunity to optimize for search.

11. Host contest and giveaways

Make this as a regular part of your ecommerce. This will give users a reason to visit your site and to keep coming back. When users enter in your contests and giveaways, you’ll also have a chance to market to them in the future. Plus, you’ll have specific insights about them as far as their interests go, so you can tailor strategies to their shopping preferences.

12. Write on medium

Medium is an online publishing platform where people and brands can post blog posts with basic HTML and CSS editing and styling. The platform has also created a community of publishers who can follow, engage with, and promote others’ posts. You can tap into this existing community and introduce your brand. By including links back to your site, you can pull readers to your online store.

13. Guest blogging

There are two ways to do guest blogging. You can submit posts to other sites or you can accept posts from external contributors. Or you can do it both ways. Search for popular publications and blogs in your niche. Pay particular attention to those with active, engaged audiences and posts that get a lot of social media attention. Some blogs will have guest post submission guidelines, so it’s important to check for that first.

Many times, guest posts will include a link to your site in the content, your author bio, or both. This will drive traffic from that site to yours. 

14. Drive traffic with Facebook

You can obtain website traffic from Facebook groups, Facebook Ads, Messenger, social media posts, and of course your own business page. For online store owners, you can promote products in buy and sell Facebook groups to help ensure you receive website traffic from people who are interested in buying your products. 

Also, Facebook ads can help you drive traffic, you’ll increase the chances of getting website traffic from various areas in Facebook.

15. YouTube marketing

You can increase traffic from YouTube by creating YouTube ads, adding links to your description, or by getting other YouTubers to share your links on their videos. By creating a new video at least once a week, consistently and over the long haul, you’ll be able to drive more traffic back to your website.

16. Instagram Marketing

By the time, Instagram becomes a better marketing channel for online retailers because of its business-friendly features and large audience size. By adding link to your bio, you can increase website traffic. Additionally, reach out to influencers with big followings to share your link in their bio. You can boost website traffic by creating traffic ads. And you can even add links to Instagram Stories, posts, and photos.

So, if you add the link in your bio, it directs Instagram followers to the shoppable galleries on your website instead of a third party app.

17. LinkedIn Marketing

Yet LinkedIn is not the biggest priority but still you can get a steam of traffic from this source. Many online retailers use LinkedIn to share their PR news. For example, if you recently donated to a charity, want to highlight an employee from your team, or achieved a big milestone for your business, you might share an article from your website on LinkedIn.

18. Add social share buttons

Add social share buttons to shareable pages like blog posts, product pages and images, and other website content. These social share buttons make it easy for users to post your content with links, giving you social proof and traffic. When their network sees these posts, they can click through to your site.

19. Email marketing

This is another great way to increase website traffic. Email marketing helps you to drive website traffic to your store as long as your customers stay subscribed. It is one of the only marketing channels you can have complete control over. You can build an email list by adding Email Pirate, which adds opt-in forms to your website.

20. Use Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the best ways to get website traffic flowing. By pinning your products and blog content, Pinterest traffic can potentially perform like Facebook. All it takes is for one pin to go viral to get an endless stream of traffic to your website.

Let’s say you want to promote a product page. You can upload custom pictures to entice clicks to your website if the product photos on that page aren’t the most inspiring. To increase website traffic from Pinterest, you can try the Pinoculars app which re-targets visitors on Pinterest.

21. Try influencers marketing

There are multiple ways to leverage influencers for site traffic:

·         Pay influencers to post about your brand and products, including links, on social media

·         Get influencers to feature you in their email newsletters.

·         Develop relationships with influential bloggers so they talk about your brand in their blog.

·         Send products for free to influencers and invite them to post an honest review on their channels.

·         Get featured in influencer round-up articles.

·         Mention influencers in your content and share the links with them.

22. Participate in forums

People ask questions and have discussions about any given topic on different forums. Reddit, Quora, and Yahoo Answers are a few most popular and well-known forums. There are discussions, groups, and threads about almost any topic imaginable. You need to add value, build relationships, and earn respect as a member before you promote your business. Only after you’ve done that can you add links to your website.

23. Collaborate with other brands

Brand partnerships validate your company and put you in front of a targeted audience. Every brand collaboration should have some sort of digital component, especially if you want to drive traffic to your site. This could include cross-promotion on social media or email, as well as links to your site from theirs.

3 Website Traffic Checker Tools to Try in 2021

1. Shopify

Shopify’s website traffic checker reports help you understand how much traffic your store is getting. Under Reports, in the left menu of your Shopify store, you can browse “Sessions over time” and select specific dates to see how much website traffic you have. By cross-referencing this with other reports, such as “Online store conversion rate,” you’ll better understand if you’re getting traffic from your target audience.

2. Alexa

The website traffic checker Alexa helps with competitive research. In other words, if you want to know what your competitors’ traffic sources are, this is the tool you can use. Plus, it’s free.

Moreover, you can use this website traffic checker when building new stores to see what the main traffic sources of your competitors are. You can also use it to monitor the competition’s popularity. You can even see the website’s global or national rank.

3. SimilarWeb

The SimilarWeb website traffic checker tells you the total number of page views, visit duration, top traffic sources, and more for competitor websites. This website traffic checker even gives you the top referring sites so you can create a game plan to reach out to those websites to get links to your own website. You’ll know the percentage of paid versus organic traffic to help you better understand how to better strategize your traffic generation.

Conclusion

In today’s over-competitive online era, if you want to constantly generate and retain your traffic, you have to try everything. You have to post on third party sites, appear visually, target social media platforms, and have to try all relevant methods to boost your traffic. In short, you have to plan your content strategically and efficiently.

Though there are tons of ways to drive traffic to your online store, from social media to in-person marketing and everything in between. The most effective method depends on your brand and your customers.