The more quality traffic you can get, the more sales you will make.
We’ve talked about various ways to significantly improve sales without having to increase traffic, using psychologically proven tactics, in previous articles but it’s important to also learn how to get more traffic; no matter how sophisticated your website and approach to closing sales is, you’ll at one point or the other have to increase traffic.
There are several ways to increase traffic and perhaps the most effective way to increase traffic on the long term is through SEO; increasing search engine traffic, on the long run, won’t be as expensive as using paid advertisements or buying traffic. With effective SEO in place, your traffic will only keep increasing without you having to increase your marketing spend.
Also, traffic from search engines is highly targeted and effective for e-commerce businesses; recent data from Moneytate’s Ecommerce Quarterly (EQ) has revealed that compared to 4.3% of visits from email and 1.9% from social media, 32% of e-commerce site visits come from the search engines. Furthermore, it was revealed that traffic from search engines isn’t just higher but search traffic converts better than other sources; “In Q4 of 2012, the average order value from search was $97.54, about 9% higher than from email ($89.64) and roughly 40% higher than from social ($69.46).”
Put simply, by focusing more on SEO SEO, not only will you get more traffic but you’ll also get better converting traffic.
Depending on who you are, SEO can either be simple or highly complicated; however, here are some basic changes you can make to your website that will have some major impact.
1. Optimize Your Website Speed
This is perhaps the most underestimated way you can increase search traffic to your business website, improve user experience and make more sales.
There are various studies that have proven how damaging a slow website can be to your bottom line, with data from a certain source revealing that a one second delay in your website speed could cost you 7% in conversions; however, having a slow website can also cost you search traffic.
Google has officially revealed that they use site speed as a search ranking factor; in other words, the slower your website is the slimmer your chances of having great search rankings. While it’s difficult to account for just how important a fast website can be, popular blogger Neil Patel recently revealed that some simple tweaks to his website to improve site speed resulted in an additional 2,000 visitors a day to his blog; for a blogger like Neil, this is definitely significant. For an e-commerce website getting much more traffic, the impact tweaking your site to improve site speed can have can be very significant.
Here are some tips to help you optimize your website to make it faster:
- Install a cache plugin to reduce server load
- Uninstall every unnecessary plugin or add-on as they’re taking more server resource
- Optimize each image used on your website to reduce their size without impacting quality; this is especially important if your e-commerce site is image heavy
- Configure your site to use a CDN like MaxCDN or Amazon Cloudfront
- Rebuild your site code from scratch; sometimes, this is really necessary if your site code isn’t built properly. Not only will it make your site faster by reducing unnecessary requests, it’ll also make it extremely easy for search engines to crawl and index your website, sending more traffic as a result
2. Start Blogging
Blogging can be a very powerful way to improve your search engine rankings and increase search traffic to your website; after numerous updates over the years, most search engines have designed their algorithm to favor content freshness and relevancy. In other words, your website doesn’t just have to be relevant to the keywords you want to rank for but it also has to be consistent with this.
One of the best ways to ensure your website is always relevant and fresh is by blogging; create a blog for your website that focuses on publishing quality articles consistent with the nature of your website and the keywords you want to rank for. These articles have to be relevant, consistent and of high quality; the more content you publish, the more content gets picked up and ranks for long-tail keywords, and the more relevant your main website appears which increases its authority and as a result impacts your search engine rankings.
Also, regular quality content will get you authoritative backlinks and social shares which will further improve your rankings.
For blogging to be effective for SEO purposes, it’s important to ensure that your blog isn’t just a “drive-by blog”; in other words, writing an article once or twice a month or whenever you feel like it won’t cut it.
Recent data from Hubspot has shown that businesses that blog gets more lead and enjoy better search engine rankings and the websites that publish the most content enjoying the best rankings; on average, a minimum of 3 – 5 articles weekly should have some major impact on your rankings.
3. Use Proper Descriptions
Without abusing the keywords you use, having proper, keyword-rich descriptions can have significant impact on overall search traffic to your website; if you own a website with just a few pages, the impact might not be that significant but it’ll be very significant for an e-commerce website with thousands of pages.
Better descriptions not only include the keywords you want to rank for, which can have some impact on your rankings, but they also make it clear what you have to offer, encouraging more people to actually click on your website in the search engine result pages.
4. Research and Target the Right Keywords
To better benefit from your SEO efforts, it’s important to know what your aim is; this means you also have to know the keywords you want to rank for before you get started.
Constantly research the best keywords you want to rank for and ensure they’re properly used on your website.
5. Build Strong Backlinks
The above tips are for optimizing the on-page elements of your site for better SEO; to really get results, you’ll also have to do some off-page work.
Make sure you build authoritative, contextual backlinks to relevant pages on your website so as to increase traffic; you can do this by guest blogging on other websites, getting interviewed on other websites or getting others to write about your website. The more quality links you can get, the more impact it can have on your search engine rankings.
