Looking to increase organic traffic to your eCommerce site? Increasing your site’s organic traffic isn’t easy, and increasing your organic traffic can be time consuming and/or expensive. For most eCommerce websites, organic traffic converts much better than traffic from social media or other sources, and is also much more consistent.
In this article, we’ll show you how to increase organic traffic to any eCommerce site.
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic means the product / content you put on your eCommerce site or any website today will drive traffic tomorrow, next month, next year, and probably even several years from now. That’s why it’s important. You don’t see that type of ROI from paid traffic.
Your organic visitors didn’t click on a pay-per-click advertisement as they saw on a banner. A promoted post on Facebook didn’t encourage them to learn more about your website. Nor did Google AdWords to visit by positioning your post on the top of a list with a small blue “ad” label next to it.
They are your site visitors because of your organic marketing efforts.
Free Marketing!!! How Is That Possible?
Yes, it is possible to bring this kind of attention without too much expense as online marketing campaign, but there is an investment involved.
It takes time, creativity, and diligence to increase the organic traffic to your eCommerce website.
Many new business owners want to create this kind of online buzz immediately, so they just create a website and become a 24/7 social-media-promoting maniac. After a few weeks, their site traffic decreases, and no matter what they do, they can’t seem to get it to a place where it’s profitable.
The Truth About Organic Traffic
The reality is:
To create organic online buzz is hard to do, but it’s not impossible.
Sure, it may be easier to throw money by paying Google AdWords or to make a deal at Facebook, but to what end?
New site owners quickly find out this marketing model is not sustainable long-term, and wish they had started an organic marketing campaign much earlier.
Difference Between Organic and Referral Traffic
There are two types of traffic sources:
1) Organic traffic
2) Referral traffic
Referral traffic could be Forbes linking to your site. For example, if someone clicks from Forbes.com and lands on your site, that’s called referral traffic.
Keep in mind that the two is related to each other. For example, once you do get a back-link from a high-ranking site like Forbes, it can really push you higher in SERPs, which will also bring your site more organic traffic.
Every back-link you get from any site is like a vote of confidence. Think like an election. The person having the highest number of links, or votes, typically wins. Search rankings work like the same way.
So the real question is—how to increase organic traffic without relying on referral traffic?
How to Increase Organic Traffic
You will be successful in attracting organic traffic to your website if you do these following things:
1. Link Identification and Monitoring
For the last few years, back-links have been the essential element of SEO.
Though there are rumors that claim their value will decrease in the future, many Google employees have confirmed that links will remain a major ranking factor for the coming years.
You can get organic traffic from Google without many links, or with just a few of them.
But the fact is you’ll never be able to compete with the most authoritative sites in your industry without building or earning quality back-links.
If you’re serious about improving organic traffic for a site, you have to identify which back-links are helping your SEO and which ones are a threat to your rankings. We assume that you already know that not all back-links are good, and good search engine optimization is not only about the number of back-links you have.
To get best SEO results and continuously increase your site’s organic traffic, you have to monitor all your site’s back-links and compare their value.
Once you’ve identified your best back-links, try to get more like the same.
Some of the most important elements of a good back-link are: The Link is –
- From a relevant website in your industry
- Contextual
- From a high-quality article
- Do follow
- Added by an editor or site owner and not automatically built
- From a site with a good Domain Authority and Trust Flow
Monitor Backlinks can help you to check all these elements and more with its world-class, in-depth back-link tracking. All you have to do is just add your domain to track all your new back-links and determine their quality with just a few clicks.
2. Remove further bad backlinks
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to avoid further bad back-links. All websites have some, including popular and trusted websites.
But the more bad links a website has, it’ll be harder to increase its rankings and get more organic traffic. Too many low-quality back-links can even cause Google penalties.
You can improve your rankings in Google by removing the bad back-links.
Here’s how can do it:
After going through the first step and analyzing all your backlinks, tag all the bad ones that you want to remove.
If you’re using Monitor Back-links, this step is simple. Just select all the links you want to remove and click “Mark” from the menu. From there, you can mark all the links as “Bad” for easy reference.
Now, you have a list of your bad links, try to remove them. Do email outreach and send a request to the site owner to remove their back-link to your website.
Don’t get discouraged if that doesn’t work for all of the back-links. It may happens often.
Monitor Backlinks will automatically check the status of your back-links daily and send you email alerts if any of them is removed or deleted, so you won’t have to check manually to find out whether the links were removed.
3. Answer Your Audience’s Burning Questions
You have to realize that most people, when they’re searching on Google, are querying by typing in questions. These types of long-tail keywords are often low-hanging fruit and get a ton of traffic.
A great way to find the types of questions that people are asking is to search using Google’s autocomplete, look on Quora, and look for Wikipedia results. Whenever you see a Wikipedia result ranking really high, there may be some opportunity for you to show up on first page because most Wikipedia pages don’t have many back-links. You can also use paid tools like Moz to see the domain or page authority for the top five rankings.
4. Capitalize on Niche Topics
There was a time when many people became micro-site millionaires just by creating websites with hundreds of pages all about a specific niche topic. Today, you can’t skip this—but you can still end up ranking really high if you just focus on a niche topic or products.
If you start writing your content using Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique for a neglected niche, you don’t have to drive back-links at all. You’ll get higher rank.
So, find the niches that you’re interested in. If your niche hasn’t been attacked too much yet, you’re going to start ranking easily.
5. Do keyword research and create a keyword database
Keyword research is an important process for SEO as it can tell you the exact phrases that people are searching on Google.
Whenever you write a new blog post, you should check the most popular keywords with search volume. Long tail keywords are valuable opportunities with lower search volume, but you can still rank for them more easily.
The best way to find keywords is with Google’s Keyword Planner. You can also do keyword research with a Google Chrome extension, Keywords Everywhere. This extension automatically analyses every Google (or YouTube) search you type on Chrome, showing the Volume, CPC (cost per click, if advertising) and Competition of the search query.
When this extension is turned on, it also displays ‘Related Keywords’ and ‘People Also Search For’ options on the right hand side of the Google search page. This is where you can analyse the keywords and search for appropriate terms that perform well and fit for your content.
The keywords which has the highest ‘volume’, you’ll always find that the keywords that perform best are the highest CPC.
When you’ve finished your research, you should have a keyword that does all 3 of the following things:
- Fits the content topic that you’ve derived from your audience’s pain points
- Has a high search volume
- Is proven to work for Google advertisers (high CPC)
You will then need to arrange your content for this keyword and optimize your page for search.
6. Optimize your meta data and content
The first thing Google looks at when ranking your site is the meta data and the presence of keywords in the first paragraphs of your content.
If your meta data has the information about the user’s queries, your website has a higher chance of ranking.
This is what you have to do:
- Optimize your meta titles and descriptions with your target keywords
- Optimize the images titles, alt tags and descriptions with your target keywords
- Make sure your target keywords appear in the first paragraphs of your content.
7. Create Quality Content on a regular basis
People will visit your site on a regular basis if you give them a good reason to.
When visitors “favorite” your site by clicking star, it means they view you as a credible source, and the content on your website adds value to their life.
To earn that recognition, you a;ways have to provide new, engaging, and thoughtful information on a regular basis.
This content should include things like:
- Videos: Short and to the point, videos can help introduce you and your products or services.
- Infographics: Presenting images with text in an attractive way can help you to promote your business.
- Editorials and Blog Posts: Editorials and longer blog posts can expand your business.
- How-to articles: Step-by-step articles will keep your customers coming back for more.
- Interviews: Transcripts of interviews can help promote and sell your eCommerce business.
- eBooks: You can use eBooks as “giveaways” or “content upgrades” to your traditional blog posts.
- Podcasts: If you’re shy on camera but have no problem talking down a microphone, then this is the best option for you! People love podcasts and this trends is getting stronger daily.
- Product reviews: Depending on your industry, product or service reviews can generate a lot of traffic.
- Online polls: Online poll results can be a great way to open up discussion on your site.
- Guest posts: Both industry experts and regular customers can add value to your website. So, add guest post.
- Case Studies: By providing testimonials, you can convince visitors to buy from your website more often.
- Online Tutorials: People are always looking to learn from online. So, share useful information like tutorials to help your website’s visitors.
This is only a small sampling of the content options available that you can use to promote your business.
8. Create a powerful internal linking system
When visitors like one blog post of your site, they might want to read more of your work. So, having an internal link to another post can extend the conversation and the time readers spend on your website.
It is also wise to try and encourage other trustworthy sites to link to your website. These websites may include industry leaders, clients, fellow bloggers, family, friends, and suppliers.
Building back-links is crucial when trying to increase the organic traffic on your website. Back-links to your blog posts will help you rank up the Google rankings. And, the further rank you are, the higher chance you have to increase organic traffic.
Google favours sites that have many internal links, so the more, the merrier! Just make sure that they are reputable websites.
Always review your site links to make sure they are adding value to your site.
One thing to keep in mind don’t use too many of them.
One internal site links leads to another which leads to another, and yet another, and there’s no getting out – that’s not the best way to build online credibility.
9. Encourage readers to link to your website
As we mentioned earlier, more naturally earned back-links will help you to get more organic traffic and improve SEO.
You can encourage your visitor or readers to link back to your website by including a small widget at the bottom of your posts. Just as you have social media sharing links, an embedded linking widget will increase your chances of getting back-links.
However, don’t ask anyone directly to link to your website. The goal is to make it comfortable for others to link to your website, not force them to do so.
10. Monitor your SEO progress and incoming links
Organic traffic acquisition and SEO is not an ever ending process.
No matter how much traffic you have now and how well you’re going on with your SEO strategy, you should never neglect and ignore your SEO progress.
Always monitor how your organic traffic is engaging from week to week, and analyze what’s worked best and what didn’t.
Some Final Thoughts on Increasing Your Website’s Organic Traffic
You can increase your website’s organic traffic without paying someone. These above tips can increase your search engine rankings, help your website generate the organic traffic you desire, and give you a way to genuinely connect with your customers online.
How have you increased the organic traffic to your website? We’d like to know what’s been working for you, so leave us a comment below.
