9 Essential Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store
If you’re looking for more ways to drive traffic to your Shopify Store, we’ve got you covered! Online traffic is the lifeblood of an e-commerce business – the difference between having a growing business or failing miserably at generating sales.
The key to success in the generation of traffic, however, is to direct traffic quality for your store, targeted traffic most likely to convert. So if you increase targeted traffic, you will increase sales. So how do you drive more targeted traffic to your store to increase sales? Well, we have nine ways to do just that. In this post, we’ll give you our essential winning strategies to help you drive the right traffic to your Shopify store.
Let’s start!
1. Create a winning do-it-yourself SEO strategy
The first step to ensuring you can drive traffic to your online store, in the long run, is SEO. A winning SEO strategy means you’re not only building a steady stream of organic traffic over time – but using PPC to instantly increase traffic – it also means you’re building, by default, a shop-friendly store. Why? Because many of the SEO best practices for e-commerce will also ensure that your website is optimized for shoppers. Win, win!
Your SEO strategy is designed to help you increase your store’s discoverability and should include a solid keyword plan, optimized pages with good metadata such as alt tags, product deductions, and product titles, good website copy, and easy-to-find information pages like FAQs.
Navigating the science of SEO can be tricky, even for the most experienced online sellers. Here are seven steps to help you build a winning DIY SEO strategy:
Do a thorough analysis of your current traffic metrics to see where you are
Study your current customers and define your target buyers
Complete a thorough competitor analysis of your closest competitors
Review your keywords and rephrase keywords based on the first three steps
Make sure you follow one-page optimization for every page on your site
Establish a content marketing strategy around your main topics
Use free tools like Benchmark Hero to determine if your site is technically correct
2. Build an Ecommerce PPC Strategy to Drive Sales
There’s no denying that PPC is the number one way Shopify entrepreneurs can drive more targeted traffic to their stores. The secret to their success is building a multi-channel strategy that works for you at every level of your sales funnel, ensuring your campaign platforms work together to bring you
a steady stream of potential customers.
At the very least, your PPC strategy should include a variety of campaigns and ad types from Google, Facebook and Instagram that you tweak and optimize until you have a good flow of traffic across all contact levels. Here’s a breakdown of each PPC platform and the basic campaign types that every
Shopify store should use to drive traffic:
Google Ads
shopping announcements
Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)
Remarketing Ads
YouTube Ads
Display Network
gallery ads
Ads on Facebook and Instagram
Dynamic product ads
collection ads
carousel ads
Video Ads
Ads on Messenger
Shopping Ads (Instagram)
story ads
To build this strategy from scratch, we suggest you visit our complete PPC management guide for eCommerce [+ Tips and Optimization Strategies], but here are the 5 most important steps to get you started:
Use your e-commerce KPIs and metrics to set your goals
Choose the PPC platform and campaign types you want to start with
Get ready for quality data tracking for better optimization
Commit to constant measurement, tuning, and optimization to drive results
Automate your e-commerce PPC management with tools like Traffic Booster
3. Use content marketing to attract potential buyers;
Shopify store content not only plays a role in growing your SEO, but it is key to a solid content marketing strategy designed to drive traffic to your store.
This means that if you haven’t put the time and energy into your e-commerce blog yet, you’re missing out on a vital traffic flow for your e-commerce business. Having a good blog and content marketing strategy will:
Provide high-value content for your PPC campaigns that will bring in new potential buyers
Helping you build a solid e-commerce brand
Allow you to display credibility and therefore build trust
Define yourself as an expert in your niche
Increase organic traffic through SEO
But your content marketing shouldn’t stop there!
From social media posts, downloadable eBooks, podcasts, and video content, the possibilities are endless. The key is to find content that appeals to your potential buyers and is popular in your specific niche (i.e. create content for the platforms your potential buyers frequent) in a format that you prefer.
No matter which direction you go, you want to make sure your content is original and valuable.
If you are starting with an e-commerce content marketing strategy to drive traffic to your Shopify store, start with our posting of the 5 best ways to increase e-commerce traffic to get a step-by-step guide on creating a content conversion. For those of you who have a strategy that you want to scale or reshape for better results, these two guides will help you do just that!
4. Increase traffic to your Shopify store with email marketing
If you’re not looking at email marketing as part of your strategy to constantly drive traffic to your Shopify store, you’re falling behind. We all know how important email marketing is. Not only does this give you a captive audience – users that are all yours – but it allows you to customize your marketing to
drive high-converting traffic to your store. It’s important that you don’t just look at your email lists as a stream for your promotional products.
Instead, it’s a phenomenal tool you can use to build brand trust for new potential shoppers while bringing past customers back to your store.
To take advantage of the traffic-driving power of email marketing, you first need to start with a good subscriber list strategy. The best way to grow your lists quickly is to give them a good incentive to join – you can use apps like Coupon Pop to install a popup in minutes. Also, you want to make sure you tell them what they’ll get when they sign up to receive your emails.
Once you start growing your lists, you’ll want to segment them as much as possible to ensure you can customize your message and product specifically for them – increasing your chances of getting them back in your store – and even better, shopping! Here are some guides to help you formulate a winning
an email marketing strategy that drives steady traffic to your online store.
Top 4 things that are killing your email marketing and how to fix it
Track These 5 Email Marketing Metrics for Sales Success
9 Winning Ecommerce Email Campaigns You Should Borrow Today!
7 Ways to Win Customers Through a Welcome Email Series
5. Harness the Power of Word of Mouth Marketing
Another powerful tool in your traffic-driving arsenal is a reliable word-of-mouth (WOMM) marketing strategy. By harnessing the power of your loyal customers and brand ambassadors, you can cost-effectively bring new potential shoppers to your store. An effective WOMM strategy will build trust, loyalty, and excitement around your brand and products, all working together to not only attract new shoppers to your store but also increase the chances of conversion.
Here are six tips from our comprehensive guide to How to Use Word of Mouth Marketing to Drive Ecommerce Sales to get you started:
Strategically use UGC (User Generated Content) in marketing and on your Shopify store
Make sure your brand stands out and sounds human
Reward customers with high LTV to drive brand sharing
Include WOMM incentives in social and email marketing to encourage online engagement and sharing Create unique loyalty and reward programs worth sharing
Have a solid review collection strategy
6. Become a leading expert for your niche
We’ve written about how you can use your blog to establish your e-commerce brand as an authority in your niche. However, this is not the only place where you should show your knowledge. Creating and submitting guest posts will not only showcase your expert knowledge, but help spread the word of your brand (aka, new traffic) and help with organic traffic in terms of backlinks. The more links you have on other sites that rank well as SEO, the better your ranking will be.
However, it is important to note here that these links need to be quality links with relevant quality content. Here are five steps on how to find and submit guest posts for your e-commerce brand.
Look for online publications and business blogs that target the specific audience you want to reach – i.e.that your potential buyer is reading or following.
Use tools like SimilarWeb to ensure your site has as much or more traffic as your store.
Engage, comment, and share relevant content through your content channels
Search the blog or website to find the names of content managers and publishers to customize your pitch
Opt for genuine, human sales pitches over cut and paste.
Another way to expand your reach is by writing resources for market influencers, which brings us to the next winning strategy for driving traffic to your Shopify store!
7. Extend your brand’s reach with influencer marketing
Another way to get more people interested in what you’re selling is with influencer marketing. The trick here is to find influencers who not only have a good following but also get engagement; think of quality over quantity. To be truly effective, you should focus on those with highly targeted audiences, often referred to as niche influencers.
To find influencers that fit your e-commerce brand and establish a successful influencer marketing strategy, follow these six steps:
Set your goals for influencer marketing.
Choose an influencer platform channel to start with before casting too wide a net.
Narrow your niche on each platform to find influencers that align with what you’re selling.
Strongly evaluate your involvement.
Approach influencers and brainstorm content ideas for your brand.
Test your influencer list with one post before making long-term or multi-post commitments.
8. Use content, giveaways, and promotions to build enthusiasm (and traffic)
Another tried-and-true way to bring lots of traffic to your store is with contests, giveaways, and/or promotions. This is something you should add to your traffic driving strategies once the previous fundamentals mentioned in this article have been established. You also need to make sure that you
have found a way to make your promotions stand out and not show them too often, as this will eliminate their ‘uniqueness’. To run a successful promotion, you must:
First, clearly outline your promotion goals and budget.
Make sure you advertise your promotion on all your platforms (social, email, PPC, etc.) and
on your Shopify store
Plan and schedule your content marketing strategy
Make sure you have prepared your backend for interest and upsells
Go further by customizing each promotion as much as possible
9. Expand your sales channels (hack bonus)
The last but not least tool in your bag of tricks for driving traffic is extending your sales channels. By adding new sales channels, you can increase your brand’s visibility in new markets, while increasing your chances of revenue and expanding traffic flows. Before including marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, you should first do your research. Find markets with more buyers similar to your customers and make sure you only add one channel at a time.
There you have it, 9 winning ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store
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