You’ve chosen a great product and designed your store. Now, all you need to do is figure out how to get traffic to your website so sales roll in.
From social media to nontraditional marketing hacks, this article will help you figure out what it really takes to learn how to increase website traffic on your store. You’ll also hear what the experts do to increase traffic on their websites. And we’ll throw in some website traffic checker tools for you to find out how much traffic you’re getting and from where.
What is Website Traffic?
Website traffic tells you how many users visit your website. Analytics tools will often tell you both the number of pageviews and the number of unique pageviews. Pageviews are the total number of times anyone has visited your site, while unique pageviews tell you how many people visited your site — some multiple times and some only once.
The idea is that the more website traffic you get, the more opportunities you have to convert users.
But 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, they might not all be highly qualified leads likely to purchase your product(s).
35 Ways to Increase Traffic to Your Website
Here are the top 35 ways to increase website traffic in 2021:
#1. Optimize your website for search
When you’re starting out, focus on finding keywords that represent your niche to base your blog content and store pages on. Typically, you’ll choose to focus on one or two main keywords per webpage.
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 trick to getting 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. Experiment with content freshness
Content freshness is an SEO hack people do to drive traffic to your website in a big way. Essentially, you’ll need to remove outdated content from your webpage and add new sections to keep your content relevant.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.
#3. 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.
#4. Build out your backlinks
Backlinks are another important component to SEO. When an external site links to your site, it’s signalling 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. Users on those sites may click through and explore yours — hopefully leading to a purchase.
#5. 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
When you create a website experience tailored to the searcher intent, you’re more likely to deliver the content that they’re looking for. This will help drive more organic search traffic to your site from a targeted group of users.
#6. Add new products or content to your website daily
Because one of Google’s ranking factors is how fresh the content is, it’s also a good idea to update your website content on a regular basis — daily if possible.
But this isn’t just a good move for SEO. It also gives users a reason to keep coming back to your site. If they know there’s something new to discover, they’re more likely to visit your site to find out what that is.
#7. Host exclusive content on your website
Start a blog, create a free course, develop Slideshare 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.
#8. Master YouTube marketing
You can increase traffic from YouTube by creating YouTube ads, adding links to your description, adding annotation links to your video, 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.
If you don’t have an audience yet, you can reach out to YouTubers with sizable audiences and ask them to become affiliates or pay their fee. This could work well in the short-term but it’s always a good idea to try to build out your own channels to lower your acquisition costs.
#9. Get involved with guest blogging
Guest posting works two ways: You can submit posts to other sites or you can accept posts from external contributors. (You can also do both!)
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. If you can’t find it by clicking around on site, do a site search via Google — something like guest post site:URL.com.
On the other side of things, invite niche bloggers and complementary brands to post on your blog. It’s a good idea to share what’s in it for them: Do you have a lot of blog traffic? A big email list? A huge social following?
#10. Drive website traffic with Facebook
While Facebook’s organic reach continues to decrease, as Facebook prioritizes posts from users’ friends and family members, that doesn’t make this platform less of a powerhouse. 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.
#11. Try Instagram marketing
As time passes, Instagram becomes a better marketing channel for online retailers because of its business-friendly features and large audience size.
#12. Engage in email marketing
With email marketing, you’ll be able to keep driving website traffic to your store as long as your customers stay subscribed. With social media sites continuously limiting your reach, email marketing is one of the only marketing channels you can have complete control over.
#13. Try influencer 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 as a “Hey, I wrote about you!” — people love free press and might be willing to share with their networks
#14. Get into Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups have become particularly popular as of late, and ecommerce brands are tapping into the opportunity to get involved in thriving online communities.
Search for groups relevant to your niche, sit on the sidelines, and join conversations when you have value to add. Just like with forums, it’s important to avoid being overly promotional. Relationships first, traffic second.
#15. Reach out to affiliates
Affiliate marketing works when companies pay affiliates to promote their products. Affiliates earn a percentage of the revenue from every sale they refer. Often, these sales come through website traffic. Maybe the affiliate is a blogger or social media influencer who posts a link with their referral or tracking code. Each time someone makes a purchase with that code, you pay the affiliate the agreed-upon fee.
#16. Advertise via ad networks
If you have a budget (it doesn’t have to be big), tap into the opportunity of ad networks. Create digital ads that promote your website, target ads towards your ideal customer, and watch the traffic roll in.
Some ad networks to check out:
#17. 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.
#18. Create retargeting ads to win back visitors
Only 2% of visitors will make a purchase the first time they come to your site. Retargeting ads are so effective because you’re marketing to a warm audience — you’re trying to get them to come back for a follow-up visit. Because of that, you have an easier time convincing them to convert.
In the case of retargeting ads, the conversion is the click through to your site. To drive more traffic to your site using retargeting ads, consider basing it on user behavior. Automations can trigger based on actions they’ve taken online, allowing you to create a personalized, more engaging experience
#19. Optimize your best traffic source
Take a peek at your analytics and find out what your best traffic source is. To determine the best sources, consider:
- Which sources send the highest volume of traffic
- Which sources send the highest-converting traffic
- Which sources send the most engaged traffic
From there, determine why those sources are so effective. Then double down on it. We call this optimization.
Summary
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 — and you’ll only learn through trial and error (plus a bit of optimization).