Increasing organic traffic is one of the most important objectives for any online store. After all, organic search drives more than 50% of all website traffic and 40% of online revenue. The most exciting part is that you can generate organic traffic at a lower cost than paid search. Let us understand what is organic traffic and how online stores can increase it.
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 up 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 own 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.
Target long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords that are longer and more specific as compared to short keywords. An example of a long-tail keyword is “buy a red Captain America T-Shirt” instead of “buy a t-shirt.” If these keywords are appropriately integrated into the blog posts, they can increase organic traffic.
While the traffic generated through long-tail keywords may not be high, it will be of high quality. These are users looking for specific solutions, and if your site answers their query, there is a greater chance of a sale.
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.
Make the most of your social proof
Due to the increase in digitalization and internet usage around the world, the importance of showcasing social proof has never been this relevant. Through social proof, any online business can allow its customers to speak about its brand or product to a wider audience.
For marketing, social proof is one of the most important aspects that drives the purchase decision of customers. It revolves around the idea of a website seeking validation on the internet through the action of users.
Online shoppers feel more accustomed to websites that give them a sense of trust through things like customer reviews, shareable links, etc. This type of content on your website can lead to an increase in conversion rates and sales.
Since big e-commerce businesses have dedicated strategies that leverage social proof, you too should find out a blueprint to do the needful. In addition to this, the use of the right shipping strategy, along with a tool that reduces your return to origin costs will absolutely help scale your e-commerce business to a new level.
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