The biggest question most Shopify store owners have is how to drive traffic to the Shopify store. Whether it is a Shopify or WordPress-based store, the issue is always how to bring in more visitors to make more money. When you’ve built your site on Shopify there are some ways the platform will help you out with configuring your store to get more traffic.
There is only so much your platform can do, however, so you’ll need to be proactive in bringing that traffic. Many store wonders fail because they don’t understand that it takes effort on their part to bring in traffic.
And just bringing traffic is not enough. You’ll need people to convert once they are on your site so the right traffic that is properly targeted is essential. In this article, I will go over how to bring in the right traffic and more of it so you can make more money on your Shopify store.
Here are the top three ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store:
1- Focus On Organic SEO
Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of driving traffic is to set up your Shopify SEO in such a way that the search engines fall in love with your site and rank it high in the SERPs. This is free, organic traffic and when done correctly will bring in visitors that are ready to buy.
Related: Shopify SEO Guide
The reason that it’s a mystery to most is that we don’t really know what Google is looking for. That said, there are enough things we do know about the algorithm to make an informed strategy to rank pages.
Related: What is SEO? Complete Guide
Content is the most important aspect to drive traffic to your Shopify store. Have a solid understanding of the keywords that people are actively searching for that are relevant to your products. Then craft articles on a blog around those keywords in a way that will satisfy both Google and your readers. When done correctly, this content will bring in traffic for years to come.
Related: Ways to Improve Your SEO Fast
There is more to it than that, of course. Part of your SEO plan does need to be technical, as well. For instance, site speed is a very important ranking factor. You will have to configure your Shopify settings to make sure that the technical aspects on the back end are correct so the site doesn’t load slowly.
Start with compressing images and keeping your plugins to a minimum as they use Javascript that can take too long to load. If the page takes too long to load, users will hit the back button and this sends a signal to Google that your slow loading times are creating a bad user experience.
Dig deeper into the technical aspects of SEO and use your robots.txt file to give instructions to the crawlers on how to index your site. There is a real risk of duplicate content penalties if you allow the spiders to crawl and index every page and category. These instructions will ensure that only the relevant pages are indexed so you don’t have the wrong page rank for keywords that don’t help you.
2- Leverage Social Media
As great as organic search traffic that brings in targeted visitors is, it shouldn’t be the only way you drive traffic. You are leaving a lot of money on the table by having only one traffic source.
You’ll also need to focus on other sources like social and podcasts. This does a couple of things. First, it brings in more traffic as you will direct your followers to continue to your site to learn more or to make a purchase. So, your traffic will increase from this simple action alone. More importantly, however, is that Google will see that you are an authority on the topic based on the social proof. The more followers you have that end up visiting your site, the more Google can see that there is value for your visitors and will give you a boost in the rankings.
Related: Best Tools To Measure Social Media Engagement
This is called content marketing and is essential not only for traffic, but also to build a recognizable brand.
Related: B2B Content Marketing Ideas
Start with finding who your target audience is and then figure out where those people are hanging out online. There are a lot of social media platforms out there and if you try to use all of them you will spread yourself out thin. Focus on the ones that will bring a good ROI on your time. Build a following with helpful content and they will be more likely to visit your site.
In addition, you should focus on creating video content on Youtube or Tik Tok. Once again, content is king so make sure that you are creating videos with helpful and informative content. High production value is also helpful. You’ll want to avoid putting on a sales pitch for every video, however. This will drive people away when they are looking for information and are not in buying mode.
Related: Why Video Content Marketing Is So Powerful?
Lastly, you should be creating a podcast based on the topic on which your product is based. Don’t make the podcast about your product, but the issues around the product. For instance, if you have a product that is a cleaning product, then the podcast should be about housekeeping tips. Then once in a while, you can promote your own product as you will have built up some trust. This is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store.
3- Find An Influencer
There is surely somebody on social media or Youtube that is an influencer in the space belonging to your product. If this is the case, then reaching out to them and doing a collaboration will bring you a lot of brand awareness. This will turn into some short-term traffic from them that could turn into some quick sales. Their followers trust them so if they recommend your product then it will likely result in sales.
Related: What is Influencer Marketing?
Even better, however, is that you can bring in some new fans that will also want to share the posts that will increase your brand awareness. Then you will make a name for yourself and people will seek you out.
Hence, apply the above top three ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store and take your ecommerce revenue to the next level.