How To Increase E-Commerce Traffic and Sales
Driving Traffic to Your Online Store
To attract new customers, do you want to simultaneously increase your e-commerce store’s conversions and receive more visibility in search results?
If you hope to increase profits and grow your e-commerce business, the first thing you’ll need to do is attract more visitors to your site. Because, naturally, more visitors means more opportunities to convert visitors into customers.
You might have the best products, with top quality and an amazing e-commerce site with the most seamless shopping experience ever created. However, if you don’t get people to visit your site, you won’t make any sales.
Of course, the amount of traffic is not everything, quality matters. But the more people visit your website, the more likely you are to make a sale. Hence the importance of having a strategy that covers as many flanks as possible to drive traffic to your online store.
But how to bring customers to your online store? And more important, how can you convince them to make a purchase?
Let’s look at proven ways the leading online sellers increase conversion rates and search visibility by driving traffic to their e-commerce site – and how you can do the same.
3 Conversion Questions Online Retailers Must Answer
When it comes to conversion rate optimization for e-commerce stores, there are three questions you must answer if you want to remove uncertainty, create higher levels of trust, and converts more shoppers into buyers.
There are three questions visitors will ask themselves when they visit your site:
- Do I trust this website or the seller? Can consumers trust the merchant to deliver the product as described, in a reasonable timeframe, and provide customer service if needed?
- Do I trust this product? Can consumers trust the product quality, specs, features, functions, and results described?
- Do I trust this transaction? Can consumers trust that their personal information is safe during the checkout process? Will an online retailer protect their financial and personal data?
Your website must remove uncertainty – the friction that creates abandonment, by answering all three questions. In addition, providing these answers will generate higher levels of trust.
Common Ways E-Commerce Retailers Convert Visitors
E-commerce traffic statistics and analysis of product pages from major e-commerce retailers show how each uses similar trust-building features and user experience (UX) to convey that the website, product, and transaction are credible and trustworthy.
Trust And Q&A Improve Search Visibility & Traffic
Studies found that after answering a customer question with an answer that confirms the product is a good fit, online retailers generally see an order approximately 75% of the time.
Google has become a vast question-and-answer engine. However, searching optimized Q&A is more critical as an on-page conversion tool and an off-page traffic-driving strategy to serve the answers to search questions at the top of search results.
People typically trust and click on the top organic search results more than those at the bottom of the page. For example, a recent study found that:
- 80% of respondents said that if a website answered a question they had and showed up at the top of Google search results, that website would have more credibility.
- And 73% said they would be “highly likely” or “extremely likely” to visit that website.
Product Reviews Increase Conversion
Look under the product title on any Amazon listing. You will see the familiar links to the retailer’s product ratings and reviews, and product Q&A, in the same location for each product. This consistency creates a familiar and trusted user experience.
The reviews and ratings serve as social proof or confirmation that other people trust the product and the vendor selling it.
To better understand the consumer perception and value of this user experience, specifically these trust signals, Shopper Approved conducted a national survey of 600 U.S. adults. As a result, they discovered some interesting findings about the value of reviews and consumer behavior.
- 61% of consumers found product reviews essential during their product research phase.
- The number of product reviews highly or very highly influences 66% of consumers.
- The product’s average star rating highly or very highly influences 72% of consumers.
The Power of Q&A to Convert
Like customer reviews, questions posted by potential customers about the product fall into user-generated content. A searchable question and answer (Q&A) section allows potential customers to get answers that will remove uncertainty and influence their decision to purchase the product.
Here is how a Q&A section can help boost conversions:
- 94% of consumers are more likely to buy a product if a Q&A is present on the product page.
- 75% of consumers found it very or extremely important that a product page contains Q&A.
Visible Security Seals Increase Trust
In addition to social proof and user-generated content, Amazon places a secure transaction link beneath the Add to Cart button. When you click on this link, you get the trust and reassurance that your transaction will be safe.
In regards to website security, a survey found the following:
- 88% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a product page with a website security seal or secure transaction link by the Add to Cart button.
- 83% of consumers said a product page needed to display a website security seal or secure transaction link by the Add to Cart button.
More Impact When Used Together
Consumers prefer to see all three elements used together on the product page to create more trust and greater convenience.
91% of consumers surveyed said they were more likely to buy from a product page that displayed Product Reviews, Q&A, and a Secure Transaction seal over an identical product page that did not.
Although the major e-commerce brands use a very similar UX tested and proven successful by Amazon, any website can now use the same trust-building and high converting user experience preferred by 91% of consumers surveyed.
Regular Content Publishing
Publishing valuable content frequently and consistently is an effective way to increase e-commerce traffic. Posting information, news, and entertainment that’s relevant to your industry helps to establish your credibility as an industry expert and encourages people to visit your online store without the pressure of making a purchase decision.
It’s important to note that not all content needs to be new and original. There’s value in refurbishing old content, sharing external sources, and highlighting user-generated content (UGC).
To best meet the needs of your target audience, this content should vary in length and type. It may take the form of blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts. It should also be easily shareable to maximize reach potential, so make sure you have social sharing plugins on all of your content.
Optimizing Content for SEO
As you generate quality content, it’s important to think about how your target audience will find your content. This is where e-commerce SEO comes into play.
Improving how your online store ranks in search engines help to increase the number of potential leads that visit your site. The following SEO tactics highlight a few of the many ways to drive traffic to your e-commerce store.
- Improve site formatting on mobile devices
- Optimize for fast load times
- Incorporate a customer review system that supports UGC
- Ensure URLs and canonical tags are clean and simple
- Construct detailed meta titles and descriptions
- Include external links to relevant industry experts
- Develop a web of internal links
- Find a balance between integrating important long-tailed keywords and keyword stuffing
Optimize For Long-Tail Keywords in Search
Thin content is generally ineffective for SEO unless it’s optimized to answer a specific question and to appear in a Featured Snippet. When you have hundreds or thousands of these long-tail questions and answers with the appropriate schema markup, you can increase high purchase intent traffic to your site.
Online retailers can also optimize thin content in ratings and reviews for visibility in rich snippets for brand and product searches.
Improve Your E-A-T
The methods used by Amazon and other major retail brands mentioned above optimize your store for conversions and visibility in Google search results.
To explain how each portion of the Traffic & Conversion Stack fulfills E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, look no further than section 2.6 (Reputation of the Website or Creator of the Main Content) in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines.
In this portion of Google’s guidelines, the human search evaluators are instructed to look for the opinions of real people about the website or the person/organization behind the website. In addition, the evaluators shouldn’t base their decision solely on the information provided by the website but also look for trusted, external sources of reviews and ratings.
In this portion of Google’s guidelines, it states the following:
“Stores frequently have user ratings, which can help you understand a store’s reputation based on the reports of people who actually shop there. We consider a large number of positive user reviews as evidence of positive reputation.”
Building a trusted reputation is just one more reason to have verified reviews from real customers collected by a trusted external source. You can also use services that distribute your reviews to open review destinations online.
Sending a portion of your customers to leave reviews on open review platforms ensures that your brand appears in the top review networks like Google, Sitejabber, the Better Business Bureau, and ResellerRatings. Submitting reviews to third-party sites will also ensure that Google’s search quality evaluators find good reviews of your business.
In this portion of Google’s evaluator guidelines, Google discusses the use of user-generated content on forum and Q&A pages:
“In fact, some types of information are found almost exclusively on forums and discussions, where a community of experts can provide valuable perspectives on specific topics.”
This finding is another reason to add a Q&A section to your product pages. In addition to adding high-value long-tail keywords for SEO to your product content, this section can help establish your expertise on the topic.
Increasing E-Commerce Website Traffic
Suppose you want to increase your e-commerce store’s revenue. In that case, you must answer the three critical conversion questions of trust – can consumers trust you, your product, and the protection of their personal information?
In the end, it’s not the fastest, the most efficient, or the strongest retail site that wins — it’s the one that combines all three tactics.
Successful e-commerce sites have to drive traffic in droves, convert those visitors efficiently, and keep diligent track of their data.
By providing social proof, user-generated content, and proof of website security, you can ensure that consumers feel confident about their purchase. In addition, search engines like Google can feel confident about your website’s level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
Do You Need to Increase E-Commerce Traffic?
Do you want to improve your e-commerce user experience and increase website traffic free in 2022? Our team of professional designers will be happy to help you with this. But, first, look at our portfolio and read our case studies.
Then, if you believe we are a good fit for your e-commerce web design needs, let’s talk! We offer a full range of consulting and design solutions for businesses and product brands.
And if you are still not sure how to increase e-commerce traffic, let’s talk! We will listen to you, answer your questions, and determine the best e-commerce solutions for your company or product brand!
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By Gregor Saita
Co-Founder / CXO
@gregorsaita
