10 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your eCommerce Website

Have you ever wondered how you may have exhausted all your efforts into building your e-commerce website and still get zero traffic? You can have a visually pleasing website and great content, but why isn’t your target market biting the bait? The answer is simple: you are invisible to the eyes of bots on the web, making website traffic almost impossible to happen.

It isn’t hard to remedy this, in fact, there are tons of ways to improve your brand’s visibility online. Marketers nowadays widely make use of a strategy called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, which has been proven time and time again of its effectivity in increasing traffic to websites.

Search Engine Optimization has become an invaluable ingredient in the web development process. It has a common set of purposes, and that is to increase the visibility of a brand online. SEO practices are being implemented to make sure that businesses thrive and make the most out of choosing the web as an extension platform for their services. However, you have to note that owning an e-commerce website changes the game a bit in terms of handling your brand’s SEO. It has a common role that it plays but does not work the same way as when you merely create online content such as regular blog articles to market your business across the web. The components of an e-commerce website are much more complex than blog content, therefore have a slightly different set of SEO rules and guidelines you need to keep in mind.

To help you drive your e-commerce website out of invisibility, we have gathered 10 tips below that are sure to help you maximise the use of SEO in marketing your brand online.

10 Tips to Increase Your E-commerce Website Traffic Using SEO

1. Optimise Your URL

Your URL is one of the most important things you’ll find on your website. Its main role is to help Google detect and understand your website better. Optimising your website means incorporating keywords for search engines to easily lead users to you when they look up certain keywords. It also helps when you also add these targeted keywords in your URL. Be concise with your URLs and make them easy to read for users as well as search engines; hyphenate them instead of using underscores, and avoid capitalisations in your URLs.

2. Hire a Competent Web Host

There are multiple advantages in hiring a good web hosting and domain company for your eCommerce website. You can add features to help facilitate your business such as chat options, forums, and community features to help in facilitating your business. These features can help you improve your general online presence by collecting feedback and suggestions from customers. Additionally, your eCommerce website should be able to operate all throughout whether you have a small or a large business. This is another benefit to hiring reputable web hosts; regardless of the location, you can offer your services at any time of the day, meaning you can still make profits since your customers will be shopping at their own convenient time.

3. Make it Mobile Responsive

SEO strategies and methods gradually progress because search engines evolve into becoming smarter technological authorities every day. One of the things they count as worthy of being granted high ranks on the web is the eCommerce websites that have already made the switch to being mobile responsive. This is to ensure that they handpick the websites that are accessible anywhere, on multiple platforms for fluid user experience.

4. Create Original Content

Originality goes a long way. Being able to create unique content proves your credibility and skill in finding various ways to elevate your brand on the web. Google rewards websites with exceptional content and copy that are made for SEO. To get on the good side of search engines, avoid copying product descriptions and statements from other websites. And as such, you can also monitor and protect the originality of your content by watching out for other websites that may plagiarise you. Focus on generating meta titles that range from 50 to 90 characters, and meta description that doesn’t exceed 158 characters.

5. Optimise Your Images

One of the essentials in optimising your page speed is to optimise your content. There are a lot of ways you can do this, but one of the easiest ways in web development is to downsize your images which helps speed up your webpage’s loading time. First, identify what file type to format your image in. Generally, there are 3 types you can use for your website depending on what your priority is.

• A JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image type is for when you are prioritising high-quality photos that can be compressed. This is the most ideal file type to use for your website because of how it can compress photos in much smaller sizes without sacrificing the quality of the images.
• PNG (Portable Networks Graphic) types are the ones in high quality and are generally larger than JPEG types. These are perfect for images with transparent backgrounds.
• The last type, the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), can generate small, 8-bit images. They may be largely out of date but can support animations, in case you’re opting out of putting videos on your website to save up some space. If they are less than 70 KB, the better it’ll be for your website as this won’t take up much of your website’s horsepower to make it load.

6. Optimise Your Website for A Fast Page Loading Speed

E-commerce web development has turned up a notch ever since Google started making site speed a factor in ranking websites in 2019. Google not only ranks fast-loading websites on desktops but also already closely polices websites that are accessible on mobile. Criteria for these include the way it functions with optimised speed on both on desktop and on mobile. The web is now more user-centric since web developers have prioritised delivering good user experience for web surfers everywhere.

7. Market Your Content

Online selling can be quite a challenge since your customers can neither feel nor touch what you’re selling before they purchase it. Visuals are heavily needed in e-commerce websites, so ensure that you maximise the use of multimedia creation in marketing your products.

Original photos

Google recognises the websites that utilise original content, and that includes the use of photos that can portray what your products actually look like. These help customers know what to expect upon purchasing an item.

Video Content

Since there are only so many images that can tell and most of the time leaves the rest to the imagination, videos can go as far as to tell the entire story. Selling your products by means of video production increases its average order value. Consider uploading videos on your website product pages, blogs, and social media profiles as these are all platforms that can disseminate your content quickly.

Blogging

Since nobody knows your product as much as you do, start your content marketing strategy by writing about what you sell through a blog. This may not be the most popular approach for e-commerce companies, but it’s very beneficial to your brand in terms of SEO.

Also read: Why is Blogging Important for Businesses?

8. Be Active on Social Media

Imagine pouring effort into putting up a lemonade stand at your front yard, but there’s a gate in between your stall and everyone else outside with no sign hanging outside that will make people aware that you’re selling lemonade at all. It’s a waste to spend all that time and creativity on making something marketable without actually going outside to market it. You’re going to need to incite curiosity and make people want to know more about what it is you can offer them.

Spreading awareness about your business on social media is just like that; putting up signs everywhere that creates noise about your products and services that would prompt people to go to your website. These are external factors outside website development. Marketing your product or services shouldn’t stop at building your website. One of the fastest ways to get users to visit your website is to utilise the power of multiple social media platforms to entice them into purchasing from you. Create urgency or scarcity in your marketing materials such that users can’t pass up.

9. Email Your Customers

Successful e-commerce websites should have strategies on how to maintain their relationship with their customers. It’s important to constantly let your buyers know about how your business is doing so that they can keep your brand on top of their minds for better brand recall. The secret is to get a hold of your customer’s details so that you can get in touch with them on any new updates about your business. Give them a reason to keep in touch with you. You can provide them with exclusive offers that are too irresistible to pass upon. To help your customers save time from having to keep tabs on your website 24/7, email marketing can bring them the convenience of giving them regular updates and newsletters that will keep them looped.

10. Gather Social Proof

Southeast Asia has the highest percentage of people who put their trust in the tradition marketing power of word-of-mouth. In Singapore, a survey states that 83% of their population rely on what their peers have told them about a specific product. It’s all about the feedback, and for businesses to rank high in search engines, it should be backed up by a lot of good reviews for it to be recognised as a credible and reliable store. While marketing campaigns do a lot to paint your business in a positive light in the eyes of your potential customers, nothing beats what other people have said about what they experienced in purchasing from you so that users can avoid having any regrets once they have checked their items out.

For web developers, they can improve user experience by assessing customer feedback to know how to further improve certain aspects of the e-commerce website.

Develop the Best SEO Practices for Your E-commerce Website

SEO strategies multiply and progress every day as Google and other search engines become smarter and smarter about flagging down the websites that are not optimised. It takes more than just 10 ways to market your brand through SEO, but the fore-mentioned points are one of the basic and easiest ways to drive traffic to your website.

Verz Design is equipped with the ins and outs of SEO implementation, and with our team of professional web developers and SEO experts, we possess the ability to enhance your online presence with our services and web development solutions.

Get in touch by calling us at 6841 1680 or email us at [email protected] for a free consultation!