One of the key goals for any online company is to drive organic traffic. After all, more than 50% of all website traffic and 40% of online sales come from organic searches. What is most exciting and interesting is that organic traffic may be produced for less money than paid searches. Let’s examine what organic traffic is and how online retailers may boost it.
Table of Contents
- What Is Organic Traffic?
- How Does Good Search Engine Optimization Boost Organic Traffic
- How Can You Measure Organic Traffic
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Here’s a Quick Recap
What Is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic refers to visitors who arrive at your website via natural or unpaid search results. It is the complete opposite of traffic from paid sources, like Google’s search engine marketing.
Visitors from organic traffic see your website in the list of websites that Google or Bing suggests when they search for particular keywords. Research shows that for certain keywords, 30% of organic traffic goes to the top-ranked website. The organic traffic for the second-ranked page is 17%, and for the third-ranked page, it is 12%. It goes without saying that every online retailer wants to be more visible in audiences’ keyword searches.
Hence, brands and businesses must work hard to stay ahead of the competition because everyone wants to improve their organic traffic.
How Does Good Search Engine Optimization Boost Organic Traffic
SEO is a way to use search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to bring organic traffic to your website.
With an average market share of approximately 90%, Google is undoubtedly the most well-known and popular one so far. In fact, the average person is known to Google search something about 3-4 times a day.
The ultimate goal for an online store should be to rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP), and establishing solid SEO practices is the way to go about it. According to Backlinko’s analysis of 5 million Google search results, the top result has a CTR (Click Through Rate) of at least 31.7% on average and is 10X more likely to be clicked than a website page that is featured on the tenth page.
There are several determinants that can help you ascertain the rank of your website on a SERP. For instance, the quality of your content, the appropriate use of key phrases, the speed of your website, backlinks, and a plethora of other criteria all play a part in how high or low your website will appear in search engine results. But you can start with basic SEO settings configuration.
Although this process will take maybe weeks or even a few months to produce results, devising a strong SEO strategy is a very effective method for boosting organic traffic and can be highly beneficial for your business. Investing in SEO has the potential to improve your marketing performance and increase traffic and sales.
Let’s now take a closer look at the many different ways that you can attract organic traffic to your website.
Quality content
Creating high-quality content that is engaging, unique, and consistent for your target audience is a great driver of organic traffic. According to a recent study by Semrush, 97% of respondents rated content marketing as a key component of their overall marketing strategy.
You need to have a complete and comprehensive approach if you want to succeed in content. This will eventually enable you to draw in and keep the attention of a highly targeted audience, ultimately leading to advantageous client behavior and organic traffic.
So here are some great ways to succeed in content creation:
- Ensure that your intent behind your content is right as it is critical to know what your audience expects from your brand and business. Context is crucial.
- Understand your topic and conduct thorough keyword research. Why? Because Google’s algorithms look for more than simply specific terms on the web. Instead, Google gives greater search ranks to content that is worthwhile, relevant, and useful.
- To improve readability, outline your content and format your main points so focus on keywords and stay on topic.
- Your content should be original when it is presented to clients or readers. Make sure it revolves around your product and includes information about it.
- A web page’s visitors may only stay for 20 seconds or less. For each second that they are using your products or services, be sure to remind them of even the smallest details.
If you can delight your clients or readers, you will naturally please search engines. This will aid in turning readers into consumers, completing the objective at hand.
Social media
With the widespread usage of smartphones and other mobile devices today, social media is the most effective means to spread information quickly. The marketing plans of businesses in virtually every industry and of all sizes heavily incorporate social media. The tools to allow you to engage with your audience when and how you like are provided through platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many more.
However, social media is more than just a simple way to interact with your followers; according to a Statista poll of marketers globally, social media is the top benefit for increasing website traffic for 78% of respondents. Your social media pages become a treasure trove for organic traffic as they expand and amass an increasing number of followers. Additionally, since it’s free to use, making it a very cost-efficient choice.
Another key point to note here is that in order to make it simple for users, it helps to add share buttons to your website. It is also advised to post frequently on your social media sites. Posting regularly will raise your followers’ awareness of you, thereby making it simpler for them to recall your brand name. Additionally, it is also important to also engage with your audience by responding to them
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most economical ways to advertise goods and services, keep customers updated about what’s happening with your company, share news, administer surveys, reduce cart abandonment rates, and most importantly, increase organic website traffic.
As per a CMI report, 72% of marketers believe email marketing to be the most successful marketing method for increasing website visitors. Furthermore, another study by Statista indicated that there were more than 3.9 billion email subscribers worldwide in 2019; this number is projected to rise to 4.36 billion by 2026.
Another way to leverage email marketing is creating an email newsletter to capture the attention of your audience and keep them well-informed. Brands can send out an interesting and visually aesthetic newsletter on a weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly basis by using ESPs (Email Service Provider) with higher email deliverability.
Internal linking
Internal linking of the products, categories, and pages on your website is a great way to pass on “link juice” and garther traffic organically for your website.
- Connect your product pages to related accessories and related product pages on your website.
- One of the simple ways to increase traffic to your website is through blog postings. Once the blog entries are receiving attention, you may make use of the opportunity to drive more people to your product sites. Link blog posts to product pages, develop CTAs with incentives and monitor your sales KPI to gauge your success.
- The next stage is to connect blog postings to the website’s category pages. Category pages are crucial for the expansion of your online store, even if they are sometimes disregarded. By leading users to these pages on your eCommerce store, you may boost user engagement.
Furthermore, internal linking can be extremely advantageous for the following reasons:
- Helps search engines.
Internal linking is important as it helps search engines understand the structure of your website. Also, it helps Google rank your website higher on the SERPs, thus automatically increasing organic traffic on your site.
- Help users navigate your site.
It is one of the easiest ways to help users navigate your site. Through this, your users will get to know about various products and categories that you have on your eCommerce store.
- Increases page views.
Internal linking increases page views and help increase the time that user spends on each web page, thereby boosting organic traffic.
Detailed product descriptions
To rank higher on the SERPs and drive more traffic to your eCommerce website, it’s important to focus on providing in-depth product page descriptions.
For eCommerce stores, ranking product pages is obviously important. 50% of shoppers return a purchased product because it doesn’t match the product description.
When building product pages for your website, bear the following key considerations in mind:
- Featured image.
A compelling visual such as a powerful image can compel your customer to buy the product. Hence it is important to pay attention to it or it might make the reader scroll past the product to look for other interesting products with more attractive featured images.
- Product overview.
This section should include the product title, price, features, and customization options. Moreover, you should also focus on the uniqueness of the product overview. The title of your product should be crisp and it should provide adequate information about the product.
- Reviews and ratings.
A customer may be interested in what you’re selling but will only buy it if they find your brand and website trustworthy. This credibility is built with reviews and ratings.
- Keywords.
To rank your product pages higher in SERPs and generate more traffic, you should add focus keywords to the following places:
- URL;
- page or post title;
- at the start, middle, and end of the content;
- image alt text;
- meta description.
Site security
To ensure a good user experience, it’s important for a site to secure via HTTPS. TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption is used with HTTPS. It is safer and more secure. The below points describe the importance of HTTPS connection:
- HTTPS is trusted more due to security reasons.
- In terms of privacy and safety, HTTPS is more secure not only for the users but also for the online store owners on eCommerce platforms who aim to be protected from being hacked and payment fraud.
- All or most browsers mark HTTP as “not secure” therefore, it’s always recommended to shift to HTTPS.
- HTTPS is authentication for any site as it ensures an encrypted connection.
A more secure network will encourage more site visitors to browse the website, thereby increasing organic traffic toward your online store.
Site architecture and design
In eCommerce SEO, site architecture is important. In order to guarantee access to your most pertinent material, site architecture requires setting up the appropriate navigation. Getting relevant material to you with fewer clicks is one example of enhancing site architecture.
A website page should typically be accessible in no more than three clicks. This makes sure that pages for products and categories receive “link juice,” or the high authority of the home page. Links to all important category sites and even some of the greatest product pages should be included on the main page.
Moreover, your site architecture and design keep your online eCommerce store or website organized and allow easy navigation. However, there are two things to be noted in building architecture for any site:
- Make the best content visible to your target customers.
- Minimize the number of clicks required to reach the content.
94% of customers demand websites to be easy to navigate. Site navigation is often the first thing any user notices about your site. Users are more likely to leave a site with poor navigation.
You should try to build a site with a clean and simple navigation bar. A site with good navigation has the least top-level menu options, uses drop-down menus, and always has a link to the homepage in the top menu bar.
URL structure
If you are looking to organize your site structure, organizing your URL structure should be made a topmost priority. Use permalinks to make them look in order. A good page URL is always less than 140 characters and should include the target keyword.
Use category pages
eCommerce stores usually have category pages on their websites. These act as a bridge that fills the gap between the homepage and product pages of the site.
The category pages also play a great role in making your site organized. It also helps customers find all products in one place, thus enhancing their overall shopping experience. A perfectly built category page includes category names, product images, product information, featured items, and category price range.
Some additional factors to keep in mind while building your site architecture include:
- page speed;
- internal linking;
- redirects;
- mobile friendly;
- sitemap.
Link-building strategy
Backlinks are considered to have a big impact on search engine rankings. This is an off-page SEO technique of another website linking your website in its content. However, it is important to consider the following to execute a successful link-building strategy:
- Original content
Readers are more likely to backlink a post that they might have used for reference or research. Working on delivering original content can be a step ahead in increasing backlinks to your website.
- Influencers and competitors.
Partner with influencers and leaders in your industry. You can request that influencers backlink to your website, as this type of influencer marketing can also indirectly increase traffic to your site.
Additionally, you must keep track of your competitors’ eCommerce stores/sites. Analyze their sites, notice where the backlinks are coming from, and then further utilize the data and information to your benefit.
- Guest posting.
This is one of the most effective and easy tactics that can be included in your link-building strategy. Guest posting can drive as much as a 75% increase in direct sales. You just need to reach out to websites that allow guest posting. Share some of your writing samples and describe how a guest post from you can benefit them.
These are some of the best link-building techniques every eCommerce website can use to drive more traffic to their sites. Some other strategies that will help you in this process include resource page link-building, broken link-building, and link exchanges.
Collaborations
In particular for small businesses, as these are typically non-competitive brands that operate in the same niche or provide a complementary product or service to the same audience, partnerships and affiliate marketing are key components of organic traffic. Consider them your company’s brand ambassadors who assist in promoting your company to the appropriate audience.
These kinds of mutually beneficial strategic business ties can play a significant role in the expansion of your company. Build trust and commitment with your collaborators in order to create connections that last longer than a single project. Although it can take some time to see results, there is a chance that it will draw potential clients to your front door.
Forums
Online discussion forums and social networking sites are other interesting sources of organic traffic. Many of these, including Quora and Reddit, offer a forum where people can ask questions freely about practically any (legal) topic you can imagine.
These are really sizable groups with a sizable number of engaged members who are happy to share their expertise.
Your time and effort will be well worth it because, in addition to the visibility that your responses receive on these platforms, including relevant keywords will also increase their likelihood of appearing in Google search results. While advertising your items while on the go, try providing your own material or responding to people’s questions.
How Can You Measure Organic Traffic
In order to measure organic traffic, there is no need for complicated computations to determine organic traffic. The analytics tools provided by Google help you gather the data. For instance, your blog material, social media posts, and keyword research can all be evaluated and inferred based on how highly ranked your organic search results, and organic traffic are displayed in the audience overview part of your Google Search Console.
The number of visitors to your website from the search engine results pages (SERPs) on Google or Bing, for instance, is a metric tracked by Google Analytics called organic traffic. This indicator provides a clear indication of the effectiveness of your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
Since organic traffic makes up more than roughly 75% of all web traffic on the internet, this metric should account for a sizable portion of visits to your website. There isn’t a precise figure, though. Most people concentrate on organic search conversion numbers when rating a number since they provide a better indication of the click-through rate (CTR) and overall revenue.
Therefore, your overarching goal should be to produce the best content, website, and user experience possible in order to turn those visitors into devoted customers. Map out engagement measures, such as time on site and pages per session, conversion metrics, such as form submissions, and relevancy measurements, such as bounce rate and user geolocation, in order to achieve these objectives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Simply said, organic traffic refers to visitors that find your website through organic ranks in search results, whereas sponsored traffic originates from online adverts that are purchased. Cost is by far the biggest distinction between free and paid traffic sources. Since organic methods are the main focus of boosting organic traffic, it is free.
Numerous things, such as a decline in ranks, alterations to your website, shifting relevancy of your content, or Google updates, can result in an abrupt drop in organic traffic.
Overall, it usually requires 4-6 months to see organic traffic from SEO. Beginning with the first day of your campaign, that period is calculated. This might be frustrating for business owners at times since they don’t fully get how such a straightforward technique can take so long to provide results.
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are measures that marketing teams use to gauge and monitor the success of their content and SEO initiatives. They influence content and SEO strategy and can even give product marketers insights into brand recognition. There are also specific other types of KPIs, such as Sales KPIs or for customer success, etc.
Since you don’t have to pay for advertisements to bring every visitor to your site, organic traffic is essentially a cost-effective and long-term-focused digital marketing campaign plan. Paid traffic may have diminishing benefits over time.
Some of the most popular KPIs are: Conversion Rate, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Domain Authority (DA), Cost per Lead (CPL), Unique Visitors, Pageviews, and Bounce Rate.
Here’s a Quick Recap
This guide covers the importance and influence of organic traffic for your online store. It also explains the effectiveness of good Search Engine Optimization techniques that help contribute to increasing the visibility and strength of your online store.
Apart from SEO, the article also highlights various steps that you can take to achieve this, such as the following:
- Delivering quality content.
- Increasing the usage of social media.
- Using email marketing.
- Leveraging internal linking.
- Product descriptions.
- Site security.
- Collaborations.
- Site architecture.
- Link-building.
- Forums.
