4 Ideas to Increase Organic and Referral Traffic for E-Commerce Websites

referral traffic for e-commerce websites

There was a time when businesses competed in the conventional markets, but the cyberspace was still very much untapped. In the early days of the internet, the companies that embraced E-commerce had an open field to play. Many businesses were still very reluctant about E-Commerce, and therefore those who took the leap earned the rewards. However, over time as internet accessibility became easier, businesses realized that E-commerce is the way to go in near future.

As a result, a mass transition began. By the 21st century, the competition in the businesses competing in the cyberspace became much more intense, and companies struggled to attract more traffic.

If you are operating in a conventional setting, your greatest struggle would be to pull customers away from the competitor and attract them towards your business. The same theory applies to an E-Commerce business. In the cyber world, companies struggle to attract traffic and retain it. Unlike the conventional system, drawing traffic to your website and maintaining it is tricky.

Although paid traffic options are now readily available, it is only meaningful if a user spends time on your website and makes a buying a decision. That is referred to as organic traffic. Many small businesses struggle to attract decent traffic. Organic and referral traffic is crucial for any E-commerce website to generate revenues. Here are four tips that will help you attract greater organic traffic on your E-commerce site.

  1. Content is King

The most critical source of bringing traffic to your site is the content on your website. The way content is prepared and placed on your site plays a huge role in how your website will show up in search engines. Look out for Search Engine Optimization so that your content is in line with Google and other search engines. An SEO friendly content ensures that your website appears among the top results if a user does a relevant search. The user will ignore anything that is dug deep inside the search results.

It is recommended to take help from Google Adwords when picking up keywords for your SEO content. This will also help you design geographically relevant keywords, and users from specific regions will get particular search results. Generously use infographic and corresponding images. Google searches are one of the best ways to attract traffic to your website, but the key lies in effective content strategy.

2.  Search Engine Friendly Product Reviews

Product reviews from your customers are an excellent way to add value to your site. Moreover, it is inexpensive to do so. A significant chunk of customers makes purchases from websites that have customer reviews and personal recommendations. To improve your website’s ranking on the search engine, it is essential that the search engine gets to read the product reviews.

Useful product reviews that have a rich content help in triggering your site ranking and there is a higher chance that your website will appear at a higher rank in Google searches. For example, a phrase such as “A high-end eye palette under $50” is likely to generate great leads. However, it will only be useful if your product review software allows search bots to read the product reviews on your website.

Unfortunately, in most cases, product reviews are placed on the site via Javascript, and therefore they do not exist in the original HTML coding. Unfortunately, Google still finds it difficult to interpret complex codes other than HTML. Therefore, if you are designing a website, go for a review platform that allows reviews to embed into the website’s HTML source code directly; or you could even outsource web development altogether. As a result, both search engines and the users will be able to read the reviews which will improve the website ranking significantly.

3. Effective Meta Descriptions

When a user does an organic search for a product, a short description appears on the search engine directly below the page title. These descriptions are known as Meta descriptions. Since there are many search results, users pay particular attention to these descriptions to decide if the website is worth looking at. If your website’s Meta description is not effective and engaging enough, you are more likely to lose your customer to your competitor.

If you have a huge product base with many categories and subcategories, it could be tough to write unique descriptions for every page. Moreover, products continuously get updated on the page and therefore writing stories every time can be challenging. To deal with this problem, many large businesses now use a standard set of code known as “Concatenation Schemas,” which allows automating Meta descriptions for every page. If you have a set of rules written for every page, Meta descriptions will be updated automatically every time there is an update on the page.

4. Content Promotion

One of the most underrated and neglected yet effective methods of attracting organic traffic to promote the content that is on your website. The key is to focus more on informative content and less on promotional material. Write relevant educational content that can embed your product subtlely and then partner with other publishing websites that can post your content on their site to share it with their audience. Effective link building techniques can play a huge role in attracting more traffic towards your website.

There are a few things that you need to be careful about. First, your content needs to be engaging and should add value and information to the reader and the publishing partner. Second, your content should be written in compliance with the guidelines provided by your publishing partner. When writing the content, embed keywords subtlely and create useful backlinks. Many blogs have a considerable following, and they encourage guest blogs.

Guest blogging is also a very cost-effective way to promote your content to a broad audience and should be used more often. For example, if you have a baby product, you can write informative content about parenting and baby care and post it on a parenting blog.

Researcher and Content Writer at e-Syndicate Network. A constant learner. Learning and growing every day. Salman has over 5 years of experience in the fields of Digital Marketing, Content Writing, Brand and Business Development.