Drive organic traffic to an eCommerce site is essential for long-term growth and success in the cutthroat digital marketplace of today. Without using expensive advertising, organic traffic—free users who find a website through search engines—holds enormous potential to draw targeted and interested clients. Online retailers can successfully improve their exposure and positions on search engine results pages (SERPs) by employing strategic techniques and concentrating on search engine optimization (SEO). In this post, we’ll look at some important tactics that can help e-commerce enterprises grow their organic traffic and forge a solid online presence in the rapidly changing e-commerce landscape.
What is organic traffic?
Organic traffic is the traffic that comes to your website through organic or unpaid search results. It is the opposite of traffic generated through paid sources, such as search engine marketing on Google. Organic traffic visitors come by searching for specific keywords and finding your website in the list of sites suggested by Google or Bing for those keywords. According to research, the first-ranked page gets 30% of the organic traffic for those keywords.
The second-ranked page gets 17%, and the third-ranked page gets 12% of the organic traffic. Needless to say, every online store wants to rank higher on the keywords searched by their audiences.
As everybody wants to increase their organic traffic, brands need to put considerable effort into staying ahead of the competition.
How can online stores increase organic traffic?
Broadly, search engines care about two things: 1) Content and 2) Links. Let us look at how you can work on these aspects for your online store.
Strengthen your SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO is a crucial driver of organic traffic. Many things are involved in e-commerce SEO, including:
- The use of the right keywords at the correct density
- Optimizing images for SEO
- Structuring data to make it more understandable for search engines
- Optimizing titles and meta descriptions
- Invest in good-quality content
The primary aim of search engines is to provide useful information to users. Search engines prioritize those pages that they think give the best answer to a user’s query for every keyword. As an online store, you should try to answer as many of your audience’s questions as possible about your product/service.
The ideas for content can come from anywhere. For example, sites like Quora are good sources for questions. Besides, your internal customer service data can also be a good source of questions.
The in-depth content can help in getting the attention of search engines. The average content length of first page results on Google is 1,890 words.
Create Detailed Product Descriptions
Detailed product descriptions are a proven way of increasing organic traffic for your products. However, you should take care of certain essentials while incorporating product descriptions. For example, product descriptions should include the right keywords.
They should consist of all the features and benefits of the products compellingly. While having keywords can increase organic traffic, you should always write product descriptions for human buyers and not search engine bots. You can decide the length of product descriptions based on their features and buyer awareness.
Products with many features and low buyer awareness will require detailed content. High-quality and unique product descriptions can help get favorable rankings from search engine algorithms for those keywords/products.
Create a Unique Blog
If you do not have a blog, the first thing you need to do is create one. Based on statistics from HubSpot, companies that publish blogs 15 or more times in a month get 5 times more organic traffic than companies that do not post blogs. Companies that increase blogging from once or twice a month to 9 to 15 blogs a month get twice the leads.
Blogs are an excellent place for posting relevant content on an ongoing basis. The best part is, unlike social media content, blogs are hosted on your website and thus have a greater potential of driving organic traffic.
The number of website pages is an essential driver of organic traffic. A blog is an excellent way of increasing your web pages as every blog post becomes a new page. Through the blog, you should try and answer probable questions faced by your audience. Not only will a blog help in getting organic traffic, but it will also help in demonstrating your brand leadership in your product/service category. The blog can help you show how much you know about the audience’s problems and how you can solve them.
Increase the Number of Landing Pages
Increasing the number of landing pages is another way to increase the pages on the website. Companies that increase their number of landing pages to 15 (from 10) can see a 55% increase in leads.
Beyond the standard product pages, landing pages provide a unique opportunity to include more targeted content around a product or a category. You can also create landing pages for specific offers with clear calls to action.
Create a Great Site Architecture
Site architecture plays a significant role in e-commerce SEO.
Site architecture involves setting up the right navigation to ensure access to your most relevant content. An example of improving site architecture is to reduce the number of clicks needed to find relevant content.
As a rule, it should not take more than three clicks to go to any website page. This ensures product and category pages get “link juice” or high authority of the home page. The home page should include links to all significant category pages and even some of the best product pages.
Develop a link-building strategy
Backlinks from high-authority websites are a significant search engine ranking factor. However, Link building is not easy. 41% of large companies find link-building as the most difficult SEO tactic.
There are various ways to get backlinks. For example, you can partner with respected influencers from your industry and make them include a link to your site on their website. You can also learn from your competitor’s link-building strategy. Once you find out where they are getting their links from, you can get many ideas for your link-building strategy.
Based on data from diverse industries, 16% of organic traffic can convert to leads. For retail and e-commerce sites, that number is at 11%. Based on your sales targets, you can do the math and set organic traffic targets for your website.
While it takes time to build organic traffic, once you have achieved respectable rankings, they can do wonders for your online store.
Conclusion
Increasing organic traffic to an eCommerce store is essential for attracting potential customers without relying on paid sources. By focusing on SEO, creating high-quality content, optimizing product descriptions, maintaining a blog, increasing landing pages, improving site architecture, and implementing a solid link-building strategy, online stores can drive organic traffic effectively.
Organic traffic is the unpaid traffic that comes from search engines when users find a website through relevant keyword searches. Ranking higher in search results is vital for gaining more organic traffic, as the first-ranked page receives the majority of clicks.