How to Optimize Online Stores to Drive Organic Traffic?

How can online stores drive organic traffic?

A million-dollar question that may cross the minds of every entrepreneur selling online!

Organic traffic typically means getting traffic to your website through SEO, unpaid or organic search results. It is valuable for eCommerce business growth.

It fills up the top of your sales funnel, builds brand awareness, offers long-term benefits, generates leads, improves conversions, and thereby ROI.

While Search Engine Optimization leads to a higher ROI, many online stores overlook its importance.

SEO for online stores requires upfront effort. This means that after you succeed in ranking your website, your sales will increase automatically without any recurring expenses.

Related: Best ecommerce SEO Tools to Optimize Online Stores

Here are the best eCommerce SEO practices that empower online stores to drive organic traffic and improve conversions.

Conduct Keyword Research

Before you optimize your website for a search or write content, do keyword research using tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, or Moz.

Identify two types of keywords:

• Keywords that attract links from high authority websites like The New York Times or Forbes. Google considers this a vote of confidence.

• Keywords with high purchase intent. It means high commercial intent keywords that are the most promising and most valuable keywords for conversion. For example, buy a raincoat in LA.

Invest in good-quality web Content

Good content educates readers and creates brand awareness without forcing a sales message. It helps attract and engage the right audience. Users who find the content valuable are more likely to share it.

Also, search engines prioritize pages that usually present the best answers to a certain query. So, answer your audience’s questions about your service or product.

Create compelling content that’s fun, interesting, and informative for your niche. Most importantly, make sure there are no typos. Ingredients of high-quality content include:

• Original Content, No Duplicate
• Strong Headlines
• Actionable
• Sets of answers to people’s queries
• Presented with links, pictures, and videos
• Engaging and Thought-Provoking
• Short and Pointed Content

Create Landing Pages

Landing pages are a key element to fill up the top sales funnel. These are links between when a customer sees your marketing campaigns and when they go to your online store. So, increase the number of landing pages.

Elements of effective landing pages include the main headline and a supporting headline, a unique selling proposition, benefits of your offering, images or video showing the context of use, social proof, and a call to action.

Optimize your landing pages by improving each element. Simplify them by eliminating visual clutter.

Dropbox is one example that communicates volumes without too many words.

• There are only five main elements
• Three of them are very small and easily fit in a navigation bar space
• The fourth one provides a pleasurable but subtle visual
• The last one focuses on the CTA

 Optimize Your Site

To optimize your Website for SEO, analyze all of your website data, do thorough keyword research, produce long and value-rich content, optimize for on-page & off-page SEO, get quality backlinks and use high-quality product images.

• SEO plan for an eCommerce website includes optimizing online store websites. Add clear CTAs and create an uncomplicated structure to ensure shoppers can easily navigate your site and find what they want.

Add a prominent “Start Shopping” or “Shop Now” button that leads customers to your product catalog on the homepage. Clearly mention what services you offer.

• Use Long-Tail Keywords: There can be billions of blue bags on the market. But there can only be a few blue bags with a golden chain in the market. Long-tail keywords reduce the competition and create a niche for itself.
• Website Navigation: A great on-page SEO is another factor in driving organic traffic to online stores and generating leads. Ensure the site structure is well-designed and has an easy journey for users.
• Page Speed: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Test My Site to check your current page loading speed. If the speed is slow, increase it to improve your ranking. The tools will help you find solutions to improve the page loading speed.
• Optimize for Mobiles: Make your website responsive, improve loading speed on mobiles and make it as lightweight as possible. Thus, your site will provide a great browsing experience, regardless of the size of the screen.

Detailed Product Descriptions

Include detailed product descriptions to organically boost traffic flow. Ensure every description contains the right keywords, benefits, and features of the products. The description should be compelling to influence human buyers instead of search engine bots.

What else? Check the description length based on the buyer’s awareness and the product’s features. For instance, detailed content is required if your product has various features but low buyer awareness.

Local SEO

Any business with a physical location or one that serves a geographic area can benefit from local SEO services to improve visibility and attract nearby customers. You need to optimize your site for local SEO.

This is certainly a smart move for a retail store that wants to attract huge traffic, a restaurant that delivers food within 20-mile radius, or an online store that sells products for people who live in San Jose.

Measure your stores against your local competitors. Through their SEO strategies, and get inspired. Local SEO strategies for online stores include:

• Claiming Google My Business listings
• Doing location-based keyword research
• Generating authority with local backlinks
• Creating content with a local focus
• Collecting customer feedback and reviews
• Using structured data
• Creating listings on major local directories

Popular directories are Bing Places, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Apple Maps, HomeAdvisor, WeddingWire, and Angie’s List. Choose ones based on your audience, products, and industry.

Clean up Broken Links

Broken links are bad for your website’s reputation and SEO. They harm your credibility as an authority, affect your website conversion, and hurt your SEO and page rankings.

Find and remove broken links.  Experts at eCommerce SEO Agency use the best SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to fix broken link issues. If you have missed some broken links, you can use an optimized 404 page to navigate users to other website pages.

Conclusion

SEO is the most important driver for organic traffic to your eCommerce website. There are many important SEO factors that you need to consider to drive huge traffic to your online store. Getting SEO services from an SEO service company can also be a good choice to optimize and increase ROI. Use long-tail keywords in the content to separate your product from your competitors. Scan all the products you deal with. Make sure they are quality items. Cross-check product descriptions to make sure they accurately characterize your product. Besides, focus on:

• Optimizing the images for SEO
• Optimizing meta descriptions and titles
• Creating landing pages
• Structure data to make it understandable for search engines
• Using the right keywords at the correct density

Also Read:

Unlock eCommerce SEO Strategies for Organic Growth With AI