6 Evergreen Strategies To Drive Traffic To Your Shopify Store

Launching a new ecommerce business on Shopify is an exciting accomplishment. Even with quality products, however, your sales may fall flat.

If that's the case, then you might want to take a look at your organic traffic. It may very well be that your website traffic is low.

After all, the fewer visitors that you have, the fewer sales you have.  

In fact, Smartinsights recently reported that the average visitor conversion rate of the 100 best online retailers is 2.8 percent. In other words, for every 100 visitors that these ecommerce companies had, fewer than three people made a purchase.

If this is true for the best performing online retailers, then small businesses on Shopify need to actively work to bring visitors to their store, as well.

The more traffic that you get, the more sales that you make because even if the low baseline conversion rate holds true, your sales will naturally increase with the traffic.

Don't worry, though. There are a few tried and true ways to drive organic website traffic and ultimately boost sales. (On top of, of course, using ReferralCandy, our Shopify referral app).

By the end of this article, you will have learned how to boost your Shopify traffic in six effective ways.

6 Ways to Boost Your Shopify Website Traffic

The key to bringing your potential customers to your Shopify store is to get your website in front of them. The more exposure that you can get for your website, whether it's through social media platforms or through search engines, will help boost your ecommerce site traffic.

Here are six ways to boost your organic traffic online and, more importantly, boost your sales.

1. Optimize Your Shopify Store for Search Engine Traffic

Before your potential customers know that your brand or shop exists, they will likely do a little bit of research on their favorite search engines. Google AdWords provides a popular and effective way to reach your targeted traffic because they allow you to place your website directly in front of the eyes of the people doing the searches.

But if you're not interested in pay-per-click advertising and you'd much prefer to get your website in front of your target audience without paying a dime, then you can do so with search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making your online shop more discoverable to search engines.

There are a lot of ways to do this, most of which begin with understanding what your target audience is searching for.

Keywords are the search terms that people use with the search engines and will be what guide you in your search engine optimization.

More importantly, if you understand what your audience is searching for, then you can create the perfect content to attract them to your online shop.

To understand what they are searching for, begin with in-depth keyword research.

If you'd like to learn how to do that, I've written a very detailed post on how to perform keyword research to increase brand visibility online.

Once you have gathered a list of valuable keywords that are relevant to both your product and your niche market, begin using them all throughout your website.

The best places to use keywords are:

• Product Titles
• Product Descriptions
• Alt Tags on Images
• Any Additional Content

Strategically using the keywords in these areas significantly increases the chances of your Shopify store being seen on the search engine results pages.

As for the 'additional content', read the next tip on content marketing to learn how to optimize the content on your website.

2. Attract Customers with Content Marketing

Just like your product descriptions will help attract visitors to your Shopify site, so will any other content on your website.

The content that you include doesn't need to be too in-depth, either. A simple paragraph at the bottom of each category page will do the trick.

Free People, a popular clothing company for women, uses this strategy on all of the major pages of their website.

If you take a closer look at the content at the bottom of the page, you can see that it is filled with a lot of keywords that are likely used on search engines.

To get an idea of which words and phrases are optimal for this valuable section on your category pages, you can enter your primary keyword into a tool like KWfinder. This will generate a list of phrases that are related to the keyword and also have a high search volume.

With a quick scan of the words and phrases at the top of the list, you can see that a lot of the suggestions are already being used on the Free People website. Not only that, but also notice that variations of the suggestions are being used throughout the content.

You will also notice the search volume of each of these terms, which tells us that there are enough people using this search term for it to be a valuable addition to your content.

To further demonstrate how often this strategy is used in ecommerce, I quickly searched Google for "laptop accessories", knowing that one of the listings would have a block of content on the bottom of the page.

Sure enough, at the bottom of the page is a block of content that is used to attract targeted traffic using keywords.

This particular ecommerce business used the opportunity to include various keywords all throughout the content, including the primary keyword 'laptop accessories.'

Ecommerce companies all over the internet are using this tactic to boost organic traffic to their stores and you could easily do the very same.

To implement the same strategy, determine what the primary keyword would be for each category page in your online shop. Enter each primary keyword into an online tool like KWfinder to generate a list of related words and phrases.

Then, add a content box at the bottom of your category page and write a fun and engaging paragraph or two that naturally includes the words and phrases from your list.

Once you have updated your website, head over to PingFarm and enter each URL that you just edited. Hit "Mass Ping!" to notify the search engines that you recently added new content to your website.

As the search engines begin to crawl your website, you will begin moving up the search engine rankings. When this happens, your website will start getting more traffic.

3. Write Guest Posts For Sites Within Your Niche

Another very important aspect of your SEO ecommerce marketing strategy that many shop owners forget about is that search engines favor websites that have a healthy backlink profile.

This means that the websites on the top of the search engine results pages likely have a lot of other websites linking to them.

The more links pointing to your website, the better.

As you gain more links to your website, your domain authority will increase. Your domain authority is basically a virtual scoring card that tells search engines like Google that other users on the internet recommend your website.

As you can imagine, the more 'recommendations' that you have through links, the higher your website will rank on the search engines. A robust link profile tells the search engines that your site is a trusted source of valuable information.

The higher that you rank, the more easily you can increase website traffic.

So how do you get a beloved link from other websites?

Rather than wait for other websites to direct traffic to you through a link, it is easiest to offer to write a guest post for other blogs within your niche.

You can begin by visiting your favorite blogs within your niche to see if they accept guest contributors. If they do, reach out and ask if you can write a guest blog post.

If you'd like a wider reach, then you can search for any blog within your niche that accepts guest writers. You can do this by using the site: operator for Google.

Using the site: operator helps you identify guest blog post opportunities. To use this function, simply type 'intitle: write for us + your niche'.

For example, if your Shopify store sells products within the wellness industry, then you will want to write guests posts for websites within that niche market.

To use the function in this example, type ‘intitle: write for us + wellness’ to generate a list of guest post opportunities within the wellness niche.

Reach out to as many blogs as you can manage and aim to publish a few guest blog posts each month. In your author bio, usually at the bottom of the blog post, include a link back to your Shopify store.

By doing this, you will slowly build your link profile and your organic traffic along with it.

4. Write Blog Post Features of Influencers in Your Market

Another way to get more links and increase traffic to your online shop is by writing a blog post that features influencers in your niche market.

Do a little bit of research and figure out who the major players are in your niche. These people, frequently called “influencers”, likely have the attention of your target audience and will provide a great source of referral traffic.

Once you have your list of influential blogs, write a short feature about each of them in an expert round-up style blog post.

(NOTE: Learn how you can combine influencer marketing with referral marketing to supercharge your growth!)

Once the post is published, share it on social media and tag each of the blogs. You could even reach out to the blog owners via email and let them know that you've just written a feature about them.

Though not all of them will respond or share your content, some of them will. Some will share the feature to their social media channels and some will link to the post on their own blogs.

For those who do link back to your feature, they will introduce their website visitors to your shop. Their link will also help you climb the search engine rankings and boost organic search traffic by building your domain authority.

You can see TruDog used this strategy for their ecommerce shop that sells dog products. They created a blog post round-up of 10 best doggie blogs for parents.

If the owners of the TruDog website were interested in earning backlinks and more website visitors, they could reach out to each of these blogs to share the feature with them.

This process certainly requires a little bit of time, but it is well worth it as it boosts both direct traffic as well as search traffic.

5. Use Influencer Marketing on Social Media

Just like the influential blogs in your niche market help you increase website traffic, so too can social media. The easiest way to get your product or shop in front of your target audience through social media is by starting an influencer marketing campaign.

A social media influencer is any account that has a high number of followers who are relatively engaged.

Not only does influencer marketing increase brand awareness and web traffic, but it also increases the average order value on Shopify. Collaborating with a social media influencer reaps major rewards and is well worth the investment.

To begin an influencer marketing campaign, you will first need to decide how it will fit into your overall marketing strategy. Depending on your primary objectives for the influencer campaign, you may first want to increase brand awareness with Facebook and Instagram ads.

From there, there are several ways to connect with influencers, ranging from cold outreach to a professional influencer marketing agency. However, the easiest approach is to search through influencer marketing platforms for the right influencer (or two) for your campaign.

One influencer marketing platform that helps connect brands with mid-level influencers (instead of mega stars like Kim Kardashian) is TRIBE.

TRIBE is an online marketplace that connects influencers with brands without the headache of first getting in touch with an influencer.

With TRIBE, you can create your campaign before you find your influencer. Set your price point and list the interests that your target audience shares. Once you publish your campaign, influencers on the platform can place a bid on the campaign.

Once you have secured your influencer(s), you're ready to launch your campaign.

And thanks to your Facebook and Instagram ads, your target audience will already be familiar with your brand. Once they see their favorite influencers recommending your shop, a large number of their followers will go check it out.

You might already notice influencers doing this on Instagram. The Instagram user @confessionsofavanwife has 27,100 followers and regularly posts ads on her Instagram account.

She balances her ads in a way that naturally fits into her current posting style so that her followers trust her recommendation.

Even on her posts with the least engagement, her average engagement rate is far higher than the average Instagram user. This makes her the perfect influencer to work with when trying to increase traffic to your website.

One way to incentivise your fans to share about you is by using a referral program. That's the idea behind the ReferralCandy shopify app, and you can read more examples of Shopify stores with referral programs here.

6. Integrate Social Media

Now that you've run your ads and influencer campaign, you need to be sure that you're ready to receive all of the new traffic on social media.

This is why it is essential that your preferred social media platforms are integrated with your Shopify store.

Instagram is especially valuable as it has the second highest order value of all other social media marketing strategies, behind Polyvore. Meaning, users spend more as a result of Instagram marketing than any other social media marketing type.

Shopify and Instagram recently partnered to make shopping from Instagram easier than ever. Instagram now offers "shoppable posts" so that users can tap the icon on the image to get product details.

If the user wants to make a purchase, they click on the product information to shop the product right in the Shopify store.

By connecting your Instagram account to your Shopify store, you are making the purchase process as easy as possible for your target audience.

Even though Instagram has the second highest order amount of all social media marketing, Facebook still holds steady as the platform with the majority of sales.

So it is a good idea to integrate your Facebook business page with your Shopify store, as well.

By converting your business page to a Facebook Store, you make it even easier for users to connect with your Shopify store without ever having to change their daily virtual habits.

You can see Emani Cosmetics, the brand from the example above, has also connected their Facebook Page to their Shopify store. By doing so, they have fully integrated into the daily virtual habits of their target audience, which makes it a lot easier to drive traffic to their online shop.

The easier you make it for potential customers to visit your store, the more traffic that you will get.

Increase Traffic and Increase Sales

This article has given you six effective ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store. By following through with each of these strategies, you will increase organic search traffic as well as boost social media traffic.

Remember that the more traffic that you have to your site, the more sales you will make.

Let us know in the comments if you’ve tried any of these tactics before and if they’ve worked out for you. 

Here are a few articles that we think might be useful for you: 

• How to Build a Referral Program That Works in 2022 (With 80+ Examples)
• How Influencer Marketing Can Help Your Referral Programs
• How to Amplify Word-of-Mouth By Leveraging Customer Reviews
• 9 Powerful ReferralCandy Features for Getting More Referrals and Customers
• How to Use Referral Marketing to Scale Your Organic Customer Acquisition