BLOG | Digital Marketing Effective Ways to Drive Organic Traffic for Your Ecommerce Website

Are you struggling to drive more organic visits to your ecommerce store?

If you are, then you’re in the right place.

Driving traffic without paying for ads can be challenging. It can also take a considerable chunk of your time and effort — but it’s not an impossible task.

If you use the right techniques and optimize them, you can effectively invite potential customers in and compel them to stay longer.

Once you do that, you can eventually convince them to buy your products, sign up for your offers, and others.

So, whether you’re trying to draw your first customer or the 10,000th one, consistently applying traffic-boosting strategies is key to naturally attracting your shoppers to flock your store.

That’s why I’ve compiled in this guide 12 effective ways to drive organic traffic to your ecommerce website.

Are you ready?

Let’s get to it.

1. List Building

   Ideally, you want every site visitor to respond to your offers and buy your products.

   In reality, though, not everyone does, and only a few of the visits can yield profitable transactions.

   What you can do to fix that is to build customer lists.

   That way, you can be in touch with your visitors, nurture your relationship with them, and market relevant products and offers that drive them to keep coming back to your site.

   You can build lists on email, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other communication channels.

   Start by inviting your customers to avail of attractive offers, and leave their email addresses, connect their social media messaging accounts with yours, and others.

   You can present these invitations through scroll boxes and pop-ups.

   The Perfume Spot, for instance, used the latter to build its email list. It offered a 5-percent discount for the customers’ next purchase in exchange for their email addresses.
   
   By building your lists, you can foster your customer patronage, develop further significant traffic, and increase more conversions and sales.

2. Optimized Keywords

   Optimizing the keywords on your ecommerce site is critical in driving substantial traffic.

   When you target the same keywords your customers use to search for products you’re selling, you’re more likely to show up on the top search engine results.

   When that happens, you increase your chances of online shoppers clicking the link to your store.

   Now the question becomes, how do you target the right keywords?

   The answer is by using tools like Ubersuggest.

   In this example, I typed in “coffee shop,” and the tool revealed the results below:
   
   Ubersuggest shows a list of suggested keywords, along with critical information like the search volume, cost per click, and others, to help you decide on which ones to target.

   Ideally, you should go for keywords that fewer competitors aim for but yield a substantial volume of monthly searches.

   Remember, when you optimize the keywords on your site, you boost your online visibility and draw more visitors into your ecommerce store.

3. Rapid Page Speeds

   Did you know that it only takes three seconds for your page to load to make your visitors stay on your site?

   Anything longer than that and you can frustrate and provoke your visitors to leave.

   The principle behind this is that you can’t keep your customers waiting long for your store to “open” before they can finally check out your products.

   So, if you want to drive more potential customers to your ecommerce store, you must ensure your page loads rapidly.

   You can do that through tools that measure your loading speed. One of these is Page Speed Insights.

   As an example, I typed in “ebay.com,” and the tool yielded these results:
   
   The tool revealed its rating for the site’s loading speed, indicating whether it was slow or fast.

   It also shows the technical details of your site’s performance, as well as opportunities and recommended actions for increasing your website speed.

   These actions may include optimizing your images and embedding videos instead of uploading them (so they don’t consume your site’s memory), among others.

   When you work on these improvements, you can expect to drive organic traffic to your site more effectively.

4. Straightforward Checkout

   You probably don’t know this, but you can lose nearly 30 percent of your customers if you have a complicated checkout process.

   Keep in mind that customers who find something worth buying are eager to have it as soon as possible.

   However, if they can’t complete their purchase immediately because of continual interruptions, they can get frustrated and decide to leave your store without buying anything.

   When that happens, you can reduce your traffic, sales, revenue, and more.

   To avoid that, you need to streamline and shorten your checkout as much as possible. The fewer your pages for it are, the better.

   You should also eliminate any steps you think are unnecessary, like the need to create an account first or download a free resource before proceeding.

   In this way, you make payment processing for your online customers more seamless. You also allow them to secure their purchases (and your sales) quicker.

5. Mobile Responsiveness

   Almost 80 percent of online customers shop via smartphones and tablets.

   That means, if you want to capture a substantial number of mobile shoppers and boost your traffic, you must ensure you have a smooth buying experience on handheld devices.

   You can do that by making your ecommerce site mobile responsive or mobile-friendly.

   Having a mobile responsive design lets the links, photos, menus, and other components adjust properly to the screen size of the device.

   To check if your site is mobile responsive, you can use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool.

   Type in your URL and hit “Enter” to get the results.

   To show you how the tool works, I used “moz.com” as an example, and Mobile Friendly Test showed the following:
   

   The tool tells you explicitly if your site is mobile responsive or not. It even displays how your store looks on mobile devices:
   
   Now, if you find out that your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you can check out some of the well-known ecommerce platforms today and choose the best one for your business.

   Instead of modifying your site’s coding (which takes loads of effort and resources), you can instantly adopt the platforms’ mobile responsive themes and layouts for your store.

   Doing so can help you shorten your transition to mobile responsiveness and hasten the growth of your site’s organic traffic.

6. Urgency and Scarcity Triggers

   One of the most potent ways to bring a flood of potential customers into your site is by triggering urgency and scarcity.

   Urgency and scarcity provoke fear of missing out (FOMO) in your customers, compelling them to act fast on your sales offers and calls-to-action.

   These elements can also prompt them to tell their peers, who will rush to your site as well and respond to your offers.

   A technique you can use to spark urgency, for instance, is announcing the end date of your huge sales. Here’s an example by Oi Polloi:
   
   Other techniques you can use are limited-time product editions, prizes for the first X number of customers, countdowns, pre-launch selling, and many more.

   With these triggers, you can increase your store’s number of visitors, amount of traffic, and, consequently, your sales and conversions.

7. Trust Badges

   Customers now are becoming more vigilant of the risks that come with online shopping, such as being victimized by data breaches that hit ecommerce sites.

   If you’re still a startup, you need to know that cyber attacks continue to target small businesses since they don’t often put strong security mechanisms in place.

   Customers are also aware of that, which is why they provide personal information to reliable ecommerce sites only.

   You may ask: How can they tell if a site is reliable?

   The answer: through trust elements displayed on the site, like cybersecurity badges and logos of guaranteed dependable service providers.

   Here’s an example by The Soap Co.:
   
   Soap Co displays logos of popular payment gateways to assure its customers that the money they wire to the shop online will be transmitted safely.

   Once you’ve set up solid payment gateways and other security systems in your site, you can now work on displaying their logos as trust badges, too.

   You can then showcase these badges on spaces where your customers can immediately spot them.

   In this way, they can quickly decide to browse longer on your site and continue their transactions with your store.

8. Relevant Content

   Blogging content related to your products and business is an excellent way to make your customers visit and linger in your site even more.

   That’s because sterling content on your store helps you establish your authority in the industry and supplement the value of your products and services.

   Take a look at this example by Beardbrand:
   

   Since Beardbrand primarily sells beard and hair grooming products, its blog posts relate to mustache styling, how to grow beards properly, availability of items in which branches, and more.

   You can do the same for your blog content. You can write about your customers’ pain points, how your products can help resolve these, and store announcements, among others.

9. Giveaways

   People love getting freebies and chances to bag giveaways. If acquiring these prizes means joining contests, then they’d willingly participate in them.

   Which is why you can leverage the enticing power of giveaways to drive traffic to your ecommerce site.

   You can post the announcement and general mechanics on your social media posts, with instructions to go to your site for important details. This is what FabFitFun did:
   
   FabFitFun announced on Instagram that they’re doing a giveaway, with official rules posted on their site.

   Doing this allows its participants to visit its store not only for the mechanics but potentially for other products they’d be interested in.

   Just be sure to make your prizes attractive, like giving away free airline tickets to the Maldives, special editions of your products, and more.

   When you do that, you can not only see your website traffic rates go up, but also market to more audiences, widen your customer base, and boost your conversions.

10. Free Product Shipping

    Statistics show that almost 50 percent of customers abandon their carts when product prices exclude shipping.

    In contrast, more than half of customers have added more items to their carts to avail of free shipping.

    From these figures, you can see how your customers don’t like to pay extra for shipping.

    That is why, if you want more traffic (and sales) for your online store, tell your customers you’re offering free product shipping.

    This is how Pura Vida did it:
    
    Pura Vida offers free standard shipping on all orders and displays this announcement at the top of their homepage.

    Like Pura Vida, you must place your free shipping notice on relevant areas of your site. This is so your customers can see it and browse your product catalog immediately.

11. Prominent User Reviews

    User reviews are among the most reliable sources of product details, which is why almost 70 percent of customers read them first before deciding to buy a product.

    User reviews give customers a glimpse of the product’s quality and if it’s truly worth buying based on other buyers’ experience.

    That said, you can leverage customer reviews, especially the positive ones, to lengthen your visitors’ stay and drive profitable activities in your site.

    See how Pink Lime did that:
    
    On the homepage, Pink Lime showcased its customers’ testimonials about their lovely experience with its spa and massage services.

    You, too, can place positive comments on more prominent areas of your site so your customers can quickly spot, read, and be persuaded in buying your product.

12. Site Link in Your Social Media Bio

    If you have a social media account for your brand (and you must), you can drive your followers to your site by placing the link in your bio.

    This points your customers to your store where they can primarily know your brand better, explore more items and offers, consume content, and do more things.

    Here’s an example by Fushi:
    
    Fushi displayed its website link in its Instagram bio.

    When you do the same, you make it easy for your customers to visit your store directly.

    Instead of exiting the app and typing in your business on search engine boxes, they only need to click the link to your site.

    By doing this, you can eliminate any delays and chances of your customers’ landing on the wrong site, which can frustrate and make them give up on searching for your store.

Let’s Recap

You can employ several powerful strategies to drive organic traffic for your online store. From this guide, we learned 12 of them:

1. List Building
2. Optimizing Keywords
3. Rapid Page Speeds
4. Straightforward Checkout
5. Mobile Responsiveness
6. Urgency and Scarcity Triggers
7. Trust Badges
8. Relevant Blog Content
9. Giveaways
10. Free Shipping
11. Prominent User Reviews
12. Website Link in Your Social Media Bio

As you implement these strategies, remember to monitor them regularly alongside your website analytics and apply any improvements accordingly.

With these techniques, you can reach the amount of traffic you’re targeting for your ecommerce store — and, over time, the consequent goals for growing your business.