How to increase organic traffic for your e-commerce website 

In this blog, we’ll look at what organic traffic is and the actionable strategies you can employ to enhance your e-commerce website’s visibility and attractiveness to search engines. From mastering the basics of SEO to leveraging sophisticated content marketing techniques, we’ll explore how you can boost your site’s organic reach and why these efforts are crucial for your long-term success.

Organic traffic: The basics 

Organic traffic is the traffic you drive to your website through methods you don’t pay for. This is usually through the search engine results on search engines such as Google and is driven by optimising your SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy. 

Research shows that around 33% of overall traffic to e-commerce sites is organic. Organic traffic often provides higher conversion rates than traffic from paid ads or social media. This is because users who find your website through organic search are usually looking for something specific, which means they are further along inthe buying cycle and more likely to purchase. 

So, investing in SEO (search engine optimisation) to enhance organic search results is not just about improving visibility; it’s a strategic way to increase both the quantity and quality of your site’s traffic, leading to better customer engagement and higher sales conversions. 

The importance of SEO for e-commerce 

SEO provides a wide range of benefits for your e-commerce business and is the key driver of organic traffic to your website. It’s a long-term strategy that requires time and resources to hit the top positions in the search rankings but, once you get to those top spots, you’ll continue to drive traffic for months to come. This is unlike paid advertising such as Google Ads or Social Media advertising where the traffic stops as soon as you stop paying. 

SEO is particularly critical for e-commerce websites due to the highly competitive nature of online retail and the direct link between search visibility and sales. For an e-commerce business, your website isn’t just a digital presence; it’s the primary sales channel and often the first point of contact with potential customers. 

An effective SEO strategy ensures that your products appears prominently in the search results when potential customers are actively searching for the products you sell. This visibility is crucial because higher rankings usually translate into more traffic and, as a result, more sales. 

Let’s have a closer look at how you can ensure an effective SEO strategy for your e-commerce business…

Keyword optimisation 

Keyword research underpins your whole e-commerce SEO strategy. You need to know which keywords your potential customers are using in the search engines so you can optimise your website accordingly and ensure that it’s found by the right people. 

Use keyword research tools such as SEMrush, Google’s Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to find the keywords being used in relation to your business along with the monthly search volumes and competition. 

Once you have this data, you can map the right keywords to relevant pages on your website and optimise them. 

For more information on keyword research for e-commerce, read our blog: How to perform keyword research for e-commerce. 

Technical SEO and optimising your website structure 

Technical SEO for e-commerce refers to the work you do to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your website effectively. 

This involves: 

• Optimising your website’s architecture - a well-organised and logical site structure helps users and search engines to understand and navigate your website easily. This helps users to convert easily and helps search engines to rank your site. 
• Optimising your website for mobile - a huge number of searches are performed on mobile devices along with purchases so ensuring that your website is easy to use on a mobile device is essential. This is a crucial ranking factor so should definitely be included in your strategy. 
• Checking site speed - again, this is another huge ranking factor so making sure your website loads quickly is essential. 
• Ensuring site security - when you’re processing online payments, ensuring that your website is secure and using SSL certificates will help to build trust with your customers and is, again, something that Google has acknowledged as a key ranking factor. 
• Implementing schema markup - schema markup provides search engines with crucial information about your website to improve the visibility and attractiveness of your website when your users find you in the search results. 
• Checking for duplicate content and updating canonical tags - duplicate content can have an impact on your rankings in the search engines so auditing your site and removing duplicate content or implementing canonical tags to tell Google which pages you want them to crawl can help to solve this problem. 

For more information on technical SEO for your e-commerce website, read our blog: Technical SEO for e-commerce: What you need to know. 

On-page SEO techniques 

On-page SEO is essential for making your e-commerce site both user-friendly and search engine-friendly. Let’s have a look at the basics of on-page optimisation for SEO. 

Optimise title tags and meta descriptions 

These play a critical role in search engine rankings and click through rates. Each of your product pages should have it’s own unique title tag and meta description that includes relevant keywords. Your meta description should offer a compelling reason to click through, providing a brief summary of what your product offers and a call to action. 

Content optimisation 

Having high quality content on your product pages not only helps with SEO but also improves conversion rates. Each product description should be unique, informative, and include keywords that potnetual customers might use when searching for that product.

In addition, regular blog posts or articles related to your products can provide further SEO benefits by targeitng additional keywords and engaging users. 

Optimise product images and videos

Images and videos are incredibly powerful but they’re often neglected when it comes to SEO. Make sure all your images have descriptive, keyword-rich file names and alt tags. This helps search engines understand and rank the content of the images, which can drive traffic via image search results. For videos, consider hosting them on your own domain to build more site authority, and provide detailed meta-data that includes keywords related to the product. 

For more information, take a look at our blog: A Guide To On-page SEO for E-commerce: How To Ensure Your Site Ranks Highly.

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Leverage content marketing 

Content marketing provides another key way to increase organic traffic, enhance customer engagement, and improve SEO performance. 

It increases organic traffic by providing valuable information that meets the needs and interests of your target audience but also encourages them to share links and return to your site. 

Start by understanding your customer’s journey and the questions they might have at each stage of the process. Then, develop content that addresses these questions, solves their problems, or enriches their understanding of a topic related to your products. Utilising keywords strategically within this content can help improve your site’s SEO and drive more organic search traffic. 

By integrating content marketing with your SEO strategy, you can not only drive more organic traffic to your website but also build lasting relationships with customers, fostering both immediate sales and long-term loyalty. 

Find out more in our blog: E-Commerce Content Marketing: A Complete Guide.

Utilise social media to boost organic traffic 

Social media platforms provide you with a great opportunity to enhance your SEO efforts and drive substantial organic traffic to your website. While it doesn’t directly affect SEO rankings, its power to amplify your content and brand visibility can lead to significant SEO benefits. 

Here are a few ways you can utilise social media: 

• Share content regularly: Regularly post content that’s valuable and relevant to your audience. This increases the likelihood of shares and interactions, which can indirectly boost your SEO efforts by generating backlinks as more people discover and reference your content. 
• Engage with followers: Actively engage with users who comment on your posts or mention your brand. Responsive interactions can build community and encourage users to visit your website for more information, boosting your site’s traffic. 
• Use hashtags strategically: utilise relevant hashtags to increase the reach of your posts. This can get your content in front of a broader audience, including those who may not yet follow you but are interested in your products or industry. 

Effectively harnessing the power of social media to enhance your SEO efforts and drive more organic traffic to your website can not only boost direct traffic but also contributes to higher search engine rankings over time by enhancing brand visibility and user engagement. 

Key takeaways 

With huge numbers of e-commerce stores competing for the attention of the same customers, gaining any advantage is essential, especially through avenues such as organic traffic. Organic traffic doesn’t just bring visitors to your website; it attracts potential customers who are already interested in products like yours and are more likely to convert into sales. 

SEO plays a key role in driving organic traffic. By optimising your website for relevant keywords, taking care of technical SEO, and on-page optimisation, you’re not only improving visibility but also enhancing user experience, making your site more favourable to search engines and shoppers alike. 

In addition, integrating content marketing and social media strategies can help you to build a communicat around your brand and establish long-term relationships with your audience, turning first-time visitors into loyal customers. 

By investing in smart, strategic SEO practices, you’re not just aiming to increase visibilty; you’re setting up your e-commerce business for sustainable growth and success. If you want to know more about driving organic traffic to your website, book a free 30-minute consultation call with one of our experts.