Drive traffic to your Shopify site in these 3 steps

How do I drive traffic to my eCommerce site?

Posted 3 years ago by Aleksandra Cugalj

This is one of the most common questions every online retailer asks. 

No matter if you’ve just launched your online store or you want to attract your 50,000^th customer, generating traffic to your site is a key part of growing your business. This is where everything starts. Your goal is to attract relevant audiences, engage them, and turn them into leads.

Here are a few simple tactics that will boost your Shopify site’s traffic. 

1. Maximize Reach with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a powerful method of increasing industry credibility. Influencers are reputable people in your niche that have poured their hearts and souls into building a solid online reputation. By reviewing or promoting your products on their blogs or social channels, they’re vouching for you as a quality brand. 92% of customers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from other product users over advertising. This is how many online customers make shopping decisions. Above all, by collaborating with an influencer, you will reach their wide audiences and entice them to visit your website. 

When it comes to building an influencer marketing strategy, you should focus on finding the right influencers – ones that target the same audiences and share your goals and values. 

• Use content discovery tools like BuzzSumo, Topsy, or BuzzFeed to find the hottest content in your niche. Then, see who is sharing it – this is where tools like Bit.ly or Klout can help. 
• Monitor relevant hashtags. You can do this research manually or use tools like Hashtagify that will identify the most relevant hashtags related to your keyword and even tell you who’s sharing them.
• Find bloggers in your niche. According to the Link Building Guide in Fashion and Beauty Industries, you can conduct a simple Google search or use automated link prospecting tools to find influential blogs in your niche. This is where simple Google search parameters like inurl: category/fashion OR inurl:/category/lifestyle AND intext: blog can help.

There are many ways to use influencer marketing to boost traffic. For example, you could start by leaving meaningful comments on blogs or influencers’ social profiles to boost visibility. Then, you could send them your products and hope they will like them and review them. Finally, you can identify authoritative industry blogs, reach out to them, and ask to contribute to their website with a piece of quality content.

2. Boost Industry Credibility with Quality Content

Content marketing goes beyond running a blog and publishing a few mediocre posts monthly. By creating helpful, engaging, and fresh content, you will position yourself as a reliable source of information.

People who read your posts will understand their quality and start sharing them across their online channels. This way, they’re increasing your reach and attracting new traffic to your eCommerce website. Moreover, once your eCommerce blog becomes famous for its quality, it will grab the attention of many industry leaders, who will promote it on their network and link back to it.

Content marketing goes far beyond traditional articles. How-to videos, ebooks, podcasts, ultimate guides, and infographics are magnetic content types that will grab people’s attention and inspire them to visit your blog content. Interactive and highly targeted content types may also serve as an immense traffic booster.

For example, you could create a quiz on your Shopify website, where your customers would answer the questions about their needs, preferences, and problems and then get personalized product recommendations. Customers can then be encouraged to share their results on social, which is a great way to drive new visitors to your site.

You can even take your content creation strategy to the next level by repurposing your content. For example, you can turn articles into videos or podcast episodes, ultimate guides into a series of informative newsletters, case studies into SlideShare presentations, in-house research into infographics, etc. This way, you will cater to wider audience groups.

Some other tactics to use to improve your content strategy:

• Write catchy and intriguing headlines. Keep them short and clear and focus on inserting power words, ones that boost traffic and convert like crazy, such as astounding, tempting, brilliant, daring, hottest, etc.
• Optimize your content for the right keywords. Try to understand the search intent behind each keyword – is it commercial or informative? Based on that, link the right content pieces with the right keywords. Add keywords organically to your meta descriptions, title tags, URLs, and the body of the article, making sure they make sense for your audiences.
• Make your content user-friendly. Use legible fonts, insert engaging animations, leave lots of white space, use subheadings and bulletins, and break the text up into smaller sections.
• Keep your site responsive. Ensure it looks and feels amazing on all the devices and browsers your customers use.
• Maximize the discoverability of your content. For example, if you write a how-to guide or make a DIY video, you could make a list of the products from your site used in your project and link to your product pages.

3. Increase Excitement with Contests

Creating massive contests and social media giveaways can benefit your business on so many levels. First, this is a great opportunity to incentivize your loyal customers and keep them satisfied. Second, it will boost your brand’s exposure. To win the reward, people will share your contest-related posts, like them, and use your branded hashtags. Finally, contests will attract new buyers to your Shopify store.

To create a spotless social media contest, you should first choose the right rewards. Start with some smaller rewards that finally lead up to a greater one, such as giving away your premium products for free. You can always collect your customers’ feedback to see what kind of rewards they like and focus on that.

Next, choose the contest type:

• Sweepstakes – a customer provides their name, location, and email addresses to enter the contest, while the winner is chosen randomly.
• Photo/video contest – customers create unique photos/videos of your products, along with your dedicated hashtag. This is an amazing way to boost the visibility of your brand, attract new website visitors, and engage your audience.
• Comment-based contests – a customer answers your question and you choose a winner randomly.
• Voting contests – you provide multiple products and ask customers to ask for one.

Once you create a contest, you need to promote it widely. There are many free and paid online marketing tactics you could use.

For example, you could partner with an influencer in your industry to promote your social media contests. Use branded hashtags to boost the visibility of your contest, publish contest on giveaway websites, and cross-promote content on social networks.

You can always use paid social ads to gain a greater reach. Finally, you could send newsletters to your customers or create dedicated content to enhance customer engagement.

The Final Say on Driving Traffic

Having a gorgeous website is purposeless if you don’t start generating steady traffic early on. The above steps are how you increase brand visibility and generate your first leads and consumers. Remember that boosting traffic is just half the job done. The other half is providing exceptional user experiences to encourage sales and repeated visits.

This is a guest contribution by Keith Coppersmith. Keith is a business and marketing expert who has experienced both the rise and fall of many businesses. As a regular contributor at BizzmarkBlog, he enjoys writing and providing insight into the marketing industry based on both practice and theory.