By mid-2022, the UK had an estimated 60 million online shoppers, which makes it the fourth-largest ecommerce market. So, you have a significant opportunity to make it big with an online store.

Right now, you’ve been in business for a while and still struggle to maximise traffic to your website. Market competition is high. As the number of online shoppers grows, so does the number of online sellers. 

Therefore, you must find a way to increase traffic on your ecommerce website and make sales. That leads back to the query that brought you here; “how to attract customers to your ecommerce store and get more traffic.” 

You’ll find helpful answers in the following paragraphs. Here’s everything you need to know about organic website traffic and how your online store can get loads of it.

Factors That Influence Ecommerce Website Traffic

You can take several approaches to boost traffic on your ecommerce website. However, none of them will be effective if you don’t account for the fundamentals that significantly influence your website traffic volume. 

Website Performance

Your website’s overall performance determines whether customers will visit it and stay long enough to purchase something. 

Most search engines, notably Google, have algorithms that measure a website’s overall performance based on certain metrics. The metrics and other considerations comprise the factors Google uses to rank websites in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). 

That’s why you won’t find any poor-performing website among the first five results in any random Google search. 

Say your website is not operating at the highest level performance-wise. In that case, it may affect your ranking in SERPs, leading to lower web visibility and traffic volume.

Secondly, many internet users nowadays won’t tolerate poorly performing websites. So, if a visitor gets on your ecommerce website and gets dissatisfied with the performance, they’ll likely go elsewhere. 

In that case, you may have gotten the traffic, but it doesn’t do anything to increase your ecommerce website conversion.  

The following elements influence your website performance. 

Page Speed

Page speed describes the average time a webpage takes to load. We can’t overstate the importance of having fast-loading pages on your website. 

Customers won’t wait too long to get what they want. Therefore, the faster they can get through your website, the better. A site that loads in a second has a 5x higher conversion rate than one that loads in 10 seconds.

Plus, Google has incorporated page speed into SEO considerations since 2010. Hence, Google and most search engines rank fast-loading pages higher. 

The UX-focused algorithm measures a page’s user-friendliness based on load time (speed), interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics influence Google’s organic ranking and determine whether you get organic visitors from searches.

Image and File Sizes

Images and files are the primary elements influencing a webpage’s speed. For example, if you have a standard functioning website without server issues, then large files may cause it to take more time to load.

Optimising the images and other files on your web pages is the first step to increase your website loading speed. Image optimisation involves using a plugin, script or photo editor to reduce the file size and let a web page load faster.

Image optimisation isn’t just swapping high-quality images for poorer ones. Instead, you use special software to reduce the high-resolution picture sizes without compromising quality.

A good rule of thumb is to use basic file formats appropriate for the images you want to upload — JPG for tangible items images and PNG for graphics, charts or tables.

Hosting

Your web hosting service provider can also significantly influence your website’s performance. A server is a storage where you keep all the information about your website. So, everything about your ecommerce website goes on a server somewhere.

That said, whenever someone tries to visit your website, the search engine fetches the necessary information from the server directory. And, of course, it’ll only display the content as fast as the server allows it. 

If your web hosting service provider performs poorly, it’ll affect your website too. But then, servers rarely experience such malfunctions. 

Instead, the problem may be that your website hosting needs surpass your server’s capacity. Here’s how: 

• Most small business owners use a shared hosting plan that lets multiple websites share one server. 
• The websites on this plan will share resources like CPU, disk space and memory.
• That means each website has limited resources for its use.

A shared hosting plan is fine if you typically get less than 1000 daily visits to your website. However, if you intend to increase your ecommerce website traffic beyond that significantly, you need more server space.

Code

Bad code and bugs can negatively impact your website performance.

This shouldn’t bother you if your online store is hosted on a SaaS platform like Shopify. Websites you develop with page builders are often immune too. That’s because they’re running on preset codes.

But if you built your website from scratch, you should watch out for bad code and bugs. Bad code can occur in many forms, from invalid HTML markup to Javascript errors. And all of these can cause dips in website performance.

Fortunately, you can hire a professional if you don’t have the technical knowledge to create well-structured code. So, your business won’t keep suffering due to mediocre code.

User Experience

Sometimes, your ecommerce store may be up to standard in terms of performance, but you may still not attract enough customers. It happens to many websites due to the visitor’s perception of your store. 

Below are some elements that may be responsible for that.

Navigational Ease

Your pages may load fast with well-optimised images and a good web hosting service. But it’s meaningless if the visitors can’t easily find their way around your website. 

You can’t increase your ecommerce website traffic and conversion if the customers can’t quickly find the products they want on it.

Customers won’t spend time combing through your website for an item when they can easily find it elsewhere. Instead, make it easy for them to locate whatever they’re looking for in your store.

• Add a search function on your website. So, those with a specific item in mind can quickly search and find it.
• Create collections and product categories. This addition will enable people looking for product alternatives to browse through the options you have in store.

Trust Signals

Most people visiting your online shop for the first time don’t trust you. 98% of consumers in a Trust Pilot survey have at least one trust signal that increases their likelihood of purchasing on ecommerce websites. 

The data shows that customers are less likely to do business where they don’t find trust signals.

You must improve the signals your ecommerce setup sends to visitors. Here’s how:

• Use professional web design. This helps customers feel comfortable while browsing through your website. 
• Include reviews from past customers.
• Use SSL Certificates and data protection features
• Add social media links to your website. 

6 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Website Traffic

Here’s how to get more traffic on your online store.

Optimise for Search Engine

It’s common knowledge that to increase your ecommerce website traffic, you must do everything to appear at the top of Google search rankings. 

One of the cheapest ways to do that is through search engine optimisation. SEO has become something of a buzzword in digital marketing lately. But that’s because it’s a very effective strategy for pushing publicity, increasing website traffic for free and improving conversions.

Search engine optimisation combines several techniques to improve a website’s position on search engine results. The main ingredient in SEO is the keyword strategy. 

It involves researching the common phrases people use to look for products online and incorporating them sufficiently in your website content.

• The first thing you must do for SEO is to research the most appropriate keywords for your online store.
• After you find the keywords, you must seamlessly incorporate them into the content on those pages. Adding the keywords to each content title and metadata is a good idea.
• Creating new content focusing on the keywords is also advisable. 
• Don’t sacrifice content relevance for SEO. Ensure the new information you’re putting up is still helpful to the audience.

Overall, SEO is an excellent way to increase your ecommerce website’s publicity and drive traffic to it for free. However, it’s not a day’s job; it requires consistency and patience to bring results.

Invest in Publicity with Paid Ads Campaigns

Publicity is directly proportional to traffic volume. The more people learn about your online store and value proposition, the more traffic you’re likely to get. 

Paid ads are excellent ways to drive publicity and traffic to your online store. Here, you pay different channels to display advertising banners and flyers to potential customers on the internet.

Primarily, paid ads are those sometimes annoying posters on free-to-access websites. They usually contain links to the services they’re promoting.

In the same way, you can take advantage of these ads. They’re sometimes annoying, but with the right approach, you can target them to the right audience. They’re only annoying to people who don’t need the products they’re promoting.

So, showing them to people who want or need the items in the ads can help increase traffic to your ecommerce website.  

Regardless of your ad channel, the appropriate copy and offer can help you attract traffic to your ecommerce store quickly.  But of course, you must pay for the ads.

• The easiest platform to use for paid ads is Google Ads. However, several people often compete for ad space and keywords. The positions usually go out to the highest bidders, and it may cost you a significant amount of money.

• Alternatively, you can go for social media ads. Those are cheaper and also better for targeting a specific group of people. 

Encourage Customer Referrals

The tactics we discussed above are some of the best ways to increase traffic on your ecommerce website. However, they all typically target strangers, and personalising them is often tricky. 

Direct word-of-mouth marketing is effective because it includes personalisation. Word-of-mouth marketing is conversing with others to convince them to try a product or service.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be the one doing the direct marketing; you can have your existing customers do it for you. It’s as simple as incentivising referrals for them. 

Excellent products and good customer service will typically get you comments. Some customers will often tell their friends about your store if they had a good experience. 

But you shouldn’t just settle for that. Instead, give customers more reasons to tell others about your business by running a referral program. Provide exciting rewards and incentives for every customer that brings a new shopper to your store.

This strategy helps you achieve two things. Firstly it enables you to lock down your existing customers, and secondly, it allows you to acquire new ones too. 

And it’s effective because most people often trust recommendations from people they know more than from ads.

Improve Brand Credibility with Influencers

Influencer and celebrity marketing is fast becoming a major strategy businesses use to drive publicity for their setups. It works so well that major brands are willing to pay celebrities millions to feature in an advertisement. 

While a celebrity may be outside your budget, smaller influencers can be effective too. Influencer marketing primarily involves partnering with individuals with significant online popularity to promote your products. 

Influencer marketing’s effectiveness relies on the influencer’s trust and reputation with their audience. Many social media followers will use products their favourite celebrities recommend. 

All these factors work positively for your credibility, which will often lead to increased traffic on your ecommerce website. And consequentially your profitability should also improve.

Most of your influencer marketing efforts will be towards building brand awareness and will take place on social media. But depending on how good your influencer is and the advert copy, it can significantly improve your conversion and sales too.

Nevertheless, ensure you partner with influencers who’re relevant to your industry. For most ecommerce businesses dealing in everyday items or fashion items, any influencer will do. However, find the right person in your industry if you trade in niche goods. 

Maximise Your Social Media Handles

You can’t neglect social media if you want to increase your ecommerce website traffic and get more conversions for your business. Instead, leverage social media to drive publicity and invite customers to your website. 

• Most social media platforms feature groups, pages and forums where you can target people with similar interests with enticing offers. You have an already curated audience waiting for you on social media platforms. All you need to do is target them with the right content. 
• Then again, you can use paid social media ads to reach more people. 
• Social media is also excellent for interacting with customers and prospects. You can quickly provide customer support, address enquiries and all other forms of engagement via social media. Your customers and prospects get easy support, and you improve your brand credibility.

There are almost 60 million active social media users in the UK. Now we’re not saying you can get all of them to visit your website. But imagine getting 3% of that number to visit your store in a day. Imagine how many will convert and become your customers.

Grow Your Ecommerce Store with Increased Traffic

Getting more people to visit your online store is crucial for your business’s growth. However, the most vital profitability metric is conversions. 

Ultimately, what you should be looking to increase isn’t just traffic to your ecommerce website but that the visitors turn into customers.

And we can help. Axis Switch is a highly experienced team looking to partner with underperforming ecommerce businesses in the UK. We’ll use our inside knowledge of the industry to turn your business into a profit powerhouse. 

Call 020 805 05795 to discuss the finer details of an investment partnership.