Welcome to Part 2.5 of our Ultimate Ecommerce Reference Guide: Increasing Site Traffic. In Part 1, we discussed maximizing your store’s usability to provide a smooth and intuitive shopping experience; in Part 2, we went through some of the various ways in which you can make your online store more accessible by search engines.
As you may have noticed, we’ve broken our second post up into two MetaParts - Part 2.0 looked at making structural changes to increase traffic; Part 2.5 (this post) will look at the various marketing tactics and additional site features that can be employed to draw more visitors. All of the techniques covered in these two parts can help to generate site traffic - but that doesn’t mean you need to use them all. Doing your research and determining your targets should start you off in the right direction.
Search Engine Optimize
An SEO campaign is a great way to get visitors to your site, residually. While advertising campaigns only last as long as you can afford to pay for them, traffic generated from search engine optimizations can be much longer lasting.
Not to be confused with search engine friendliness - which is a set of methods used to make websites more accessible by search engines and users, search engine optimization is the process of increasing a sites search engine rankings for individually targeted keywords. The higher a site ranks for a given keyword, the more likely someone will find the site using a targeted term.
For a more detailed look at SEO and how it can benefit your site, check out out our SEO Services page or SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide - What is SEO?
Set up landing pages for targeted content
Landing pages are web pages created to target a specific keyword, topic or user group. These pages can be a very effective conversion tool in an ecommerce application because they allow you to focus the content of a page on a specific market or product. Once a visitor reaches the landing page, you have the ability to direct them to the section of your store that most closely suites their interests.
Anthropologie highlights their large assortment of jeans and their Denim Decoder.
For a more detailed overview of landing pages and their utility, check out SEOmoz’s article: Landing Pages for SEO
Personalize your brand with a blog
Create a blog and MAINTAIN it! An active blog can increase your site traffic and add countless inbound links to your website. Additionally, blogging can give your brand a personal voice and allow your visitors to more easily identify with you.
Of course, the next question is then - what exactly do you write about? Today, more and more businesses are approaching their blog as a way to offer greater transparency to their customers. People like to know whats going on behind the scene, so as a business with some sort of product, you could write about everything from product development details to events in your industry. You could also post job openings, case studies, or new reports and statistics. Ultimately, you should just try to produce a well thought out and relevant article.
Socialize with your customers
Take blogging one step further - if you’ve got a lot to talk about or would just like to enhance direct customer communication, social media sites are the perfect solution. A few of the more popular networks are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. While these are all very open networks, it’s likely that there are more specialized networks targeted more closely towards your industry.
Creating a dialogue with your customers is a great way to bring traffic to your site. As more and more people begin to follow the conversation, your brand becomes more reputable and people will become more interested in what you’ve got to offer.
For a few ideas on how to utilize sites like Twitter, you may want to check out 6 Twitter Marketing DOs and DON’Ts.
Gain credibility through syndicated articles
There are a ton of online websites that offer free articles available for syndication. Adding some of the more captivating articles to your site could help to establish your company as a thought leader in your industry. This credibility can lead to increased trust and higher conversion rates.
As you add interesting content to your site, you also increase the likelihood that people will naturally link to this information. Attaining these links can help your site appear closer to the top of search engine results. This is because a large portion of Google’s ranking algorithm is based on how many inbound links you have pointing to your site.
Build community with a forum
People love to socialize and it’s likely that they’d appreciate the opportunity to interact with others about your product. Adding a search engine friendly forum to your site adds user driven, unique content and provides a valuable service to your customers. And if you don’t yet have a lot of traffic, it’s generally okay to create a few ghost-conversations to get things moving.
If your product is in too small of a niche to generate a large community, consider starting a forum with a more generalized theme within your industry.
A good open source forum to check out is phpBB. If you decide to setup phpBB, you should also customize it to support search engine friendly URLs. Instructions can be found on phpBB’s website - SEO Modifications
Help customers understand product specifics with a glossary
Adding a dictionary or glossary to your store can be another value added service for your customers. If you have a complex product or service, it can help to define important terms that your visitors might encounter while browsing. It also adds additional content for the search engines. Each term added can then act as a gateway for people to find your store.
Home Depot features a great visual glossary for door and window terms.
Reach out to similar niche markets through Satellite Sites
Lastly, another way to drive traffic to your site is by creating smaller, niche websites that target markets related yours. We employed this strategy with one of our clients, an Amish furniture retailer, by creating an Amish recipes site. Since “Amish recipes” was a niche term, their Amish recipes website only took a few months of search engine optimization to reach the #1 spot in Google. The site now gets over 500 hits a day and sends a few dozen of those over to the main Amish furniture site. You can also monetize these satellite sites directly through Google advertisements.
Do your research! It’s the strategy that really matters
When putting together a good marketing plan, it’s important to remember that you can’t target everyone - it just doesn’t work to spread yourself so thin. That’s why you need to research your market, the competition, your users, and even current internet trends. To make it to the top, you’ve got to be one step ahead of your competition - so find out what they’re doing wrong and do it better! If your competitor spews sales ads to their Twitter followers, step it up by having ACTUAL conversations with yours.
So far we’ve helped you increase the usability of your shop, enhanced its search engine accessibility, and finally how to convert visitors to customers. In Part 3 we’ll look at how to incorporate these tips and techniques into a marketing strategy to increase sales from your new visitors and keep people coming back for more.
Check back soon or subscribe to our RSS Feed for the Part 3 conclusion!
