As successful as your store may be, you’ll never ship any items without visitors. Luckily, it’s possible to increase traffic without dedicating days upon days to this time-consuming task!
From SEO to gift cards, social networks to price comparison tools, we’ve pulled together nine quick tips to jumpstart visibility. They’ll help you make your products known and generate targeted traffic, whether you’re just getting started or you’re already up and running.
Let your customers bring you traffic
The cheapest and least time-consuming tip involves your current customers!
They are your best spokesmen and can spread the word to people with the same profile who will potentially be interested in your store’s products, without the slightest effort on your behalf.
- To do so, set up a referral system. This tried and true method lets referrers and their guests earn purchase coupons for your store, turning them into new customers.
- Another customer-approved solution is the gift card. As the number one gift given, these have grown by 20%!
For you, 1 gift card = 2 customers.
The first buys from your store, and the second creates an account, uses the gift card… and often, things don’t end there!
You can acquire new clients and increase sales without offering any discounts or spending money on advertising fees.
Improve search engine visibility
Your visibility on Google, Bing, Yandex, and other search engines is crucial to your store’s success.
To improve your ranking, the first step is to optimize natural SEO. This involves all e-commerces, and everyone knows how time-consuming it can be… but you have the entire PrestaShop community on your side, which has already come up with a few modules that take care of everything!
Here are a few tips to save time and increase visibility:
Natural SEO: Make it easy for search engines to find you!
Automatically generate tags with personalized content for all your store’s SEO-relevant fields (meta title, meta description, friendly URL, etc.) and make them visible on search engines. It’s great to prevent having to do this manually when your catalogue has started to fill out.
Optimize your site’s internal links so search engines can easily browse your site. Create links between pages on your site using keywords for which you’d like to improve your Google ranking.
Quickly generate sitemaps for your store. Generate one sitemap for your product page URLs, a second for your category page URLs, a third for your CMS e-commerce page URLs and resellers, and another for your manufacturer pages.
Offer a blog on your store to keep spreading content according to the trends and search terms you want to appear under. It’s the perfect way for personal goods, health, wellness, and decoration stores. There’s just one rule: update it regularly.
Paid SEO (SEA / SEM): maximum visibility
Create Adwords campaigns for the keywords most relevant to your store. These campaigns are pay per click, so take care to choose products that offer the greatest profit margin and be sure to set a limited bid amount that should not be surpassed.
Price comparison tools—a way to wow customers with product visuals
Synchronize your product catalogue with price comparison tools, starting with Google Shopping, the most popular. A Google query brings your product visuals directly to the Shopping tab. That way, any Google user (and there are quite a few!) will be able to see your products appear, then buy directly on your store. The system also works on a pay per click basis.
Bing offers the same concept on its search engine.
Take advantage of the most popular price comparison tools in your country!
Reach highly targeted traffic on social networks
To finish, here is a tip that’s become so hot it’s hard to live without: shopping on social networks.
With automatic, targeted advertising on Facebook, users with similar profiles to your current customers’ will see ads for your products.
Facebook screen real estate for your store lets you see your customers’ profiles and line them up with other Facebook users. It also offers highly precise targeting, since options range from age and sex to relationship status, geographical location, and interests. This strategy allows you to tap into another audience that could be interested in your products.
Good news never comes alone—despite offering highly powerful targeting options, Facebook ad campaigns usually cost less than Google ads.
Now you know everything you need to get the word out there about your store’s products!
Last but not least, to improve your store’s SEO, don’t forget to ensure your site is adapted for mobile and tablet navigation, since these criteria are now considered by search engine indexes.
Happy selling!
