To drive ecommerce website traffic you must research your market. Not only know exactly what you are selling but who is your ideal customer that will buy it?
It is a process to identifying your ideal customer. You need to research how that customer would buy your products on the Internet. How do they look for your product? What keywords would they enter into the search engines? Maybe they don’t use the search engines at all. What if they only learn about your product through an industry specific publication?
Once you know who your ideal customer is and how they would search for and buy your products then you should make sure that each page of your website is completely optimized for the keywords that they would be looking for. Optimizing each page of your site includes writing a good page title, description, proper use of H1 tags and bold font, and relevant content.
If you ecommerce website is only selling a couple of products than doing this on-page search engine optimization will much easier. There are some very useful shopping cart scripts though that will help you insert keywords and descriptions into the Meta tags as you populate your website with products.
Now that you have each product page of your ecommerce website optimized for the search engines, decide on a traffic generation strategy. This will take you back to the answers you came up with regarding who your ideal customer is and how they will search for and buy your product.
If you have the budget, consider using Pay Per Click advertising. Make sure though that if you are doing it, you really know what you are doing. If you hire someone to manage the campaign, make sure they are competent. You must keep an eye on your return on your investment. PPC can get pretty expensive without much in return if not done correctly.
Very good ways to jump start some traffic and interest in your ecommerce website is to write a press release. It’s not free to submit a press release but it is a great way to generate qualified interest and traffic to your website.
If you can with your ecommerce website, try to offer free shipping coupons and discounts. A lot of people get extremely excited about free shipping for their products. Take Amazon for example, how many times have you tried to buy at least $25 worth of stuff just to get that free shipping option? Stating promotions of that sort in all of your traffic generating advertising is important.
The fact that you are building an eCommerce website and now working on driving traffic to it is a major step in the right direction. Before you go, go to this post and take a look at this really cool video I found on YouTube. It is a good motivator and I really like to share motivating things. Anyone trying to build a business must find their motivation and maintain it. This is how I do it.
