HELP NEEDED. How do I drive organic traffic to my store and convert into sales?

[Hercerlo]

Hello Everyone,

I need advise on how to get organic traffic to my store and convert them into sales in a saturated market.

A couple of years ago a friend and myself set up a clothing brand in an attempt to build a successful brand. In the beginning we worked really hard on the business, finding the correct supplier, identifying how we could market our brand in an attempt to get sales. At the time we thought paying influencers on Instagram would drive traffic to our site and hopefully get people to buy our products. We spent a large amount of our budget using this strategy and it didn't work. When that didn't work we then tried to engage with our audience on Instagram in a bid to get more organic traffic. Again, this was slow and never worked, myself and my friend became demotivated and it was hard to build momentum.

We recently have reflected on the decisions we made in the early days and realised why these strategies may not have worked. We still want to carry on with our business and are willing to work hard and smart in order to achieve what we initially set out to accomplish.

So we are here looking for any advice that the community has here that could help us on how we can market our business and start to receive organic traffic and generate sales. 

Our website can be found at hercerlo.com

Our Instagram page can be found at @Hercerlo

Any advice would be appreciated as well as any criticism.

Look forward to hearing your responses.

Kind Regards,

Dan  

[Neo_5678]

To get organic traffic, make sure your keyword research is done well and on-site is done accordingly.

And Backlinks will play important role in keywords ranking also Meta title & desc should be relevant to the page!

[sprinkdigi]

To get organic traffic, you need to focus on getting the quality of backlinks. You can get backlinks via guest posting on a high authorities site. You should also check your website is responsive or not on desktop and mobile. One more thing, you can also create a profile on the forum, Quora, and help visitors. It is the best way to get traffic.

[EcomGeeks]

Hey Dan (@Hercerlo),

If you want organic traffic there are two things that are going to help.

1. Social media. Create content that isn't "salesy", you want creative marketing that gives a people to come back for more. Take advantage of Instagram Reels. I'd recommend checking out other creators in the clothing niche and see what content is working for them and get inspiration from them. This guy is not in your niche but just as an example of the kind of reels he puts out. Do the same for TikTok. There are trends surrounding small business ie. ''small business check''. Same idea as reels, create creative content.

Another resource I'd recommend for standing out online is the YouTube channel Think Marketing. They have a podcast as well if you prefer to listen that way.

These things will create brand awareness and help generate organic traffic. 

The next thing you can do is..

2. SEO. By default, Shopify will pull your product titles and descriptions and use that as your SEO (that is what is happening in your case). You don't want to leave your SEO to default, you want to be intentional about the words you use so that you are reaching your intended audience. We see it a lot, store owners get plenty of traffic but no sales and they are left discouraged and frustrated. Definitely don't want that for you so please do watch this video:

We hope our response was helpful, if it was, let us know by giving us a thumbs up!

Best of luck!

PS: If you need some last minute graphics for your store for Black Friday, we released a free pack. They look like this:

They come in 4 different colors and have percentage variations ranging from 20%-80% off. You can download them for free when you sign up for our email list.

Enjoy!

[PageFly-Victor]

Hi there @Hercerlo, 

Statistically speaking, 90% of online businesses fail within the first 03 months (Forbes) - so shout out to you for keep going on. 

There are two parts to your question and I'll address them individually - first: Organic traffic 

1. Organic Traffic 

The most common way of growing your organic traffic is to focus on creating high-quality and SEO-optimized content. Compared to other methods - i.e PPC, this approach is the most penny-pinching and economical, the impact will be most long-lasting - despite being slow to take up initially. Basically, the ideal approach is to create blog posts around your products - for example: style, fashion, streetwear review - then, link all these blog posts to relevant product pages. If you're not familiar with SEO, you can check out this guide (even though I'm not really into blatantly promoting your own products, we put lots of hard work into this guide) - Shopify SEO guide. 

2. Convert

Once you get visitors, you'd need to optimize your online store for conversion rates - that means optimizing how your store looks, how your store feels etc. 

For example: when I first land at your store, I did not know which products you're selling, what your Unique Selling points are, etc

I'd start with a more enticing Call To Action and headlines, a stronger CTA buttons for examples. For more CRO tactics, you can check out this expert's guide: https://moz.com/learn/seo/conversion-rate-optimization 

I hope my answer is of any help to you, if it is, let me know with a like 🙂 

[AiTrillion]

Hello @Hercerlo, I hope you are doing good! 

Some of the organic methods to drive traffic are:

• Blog regularly,
• Use long-tail keywords,
• Use internal links,
• Get your meta down,
• Create quality content regularly,
• Post engaging posts on social media regularly.

Hello @Hercerlo, I hope you are doing good! 

Some of the organic methods to drive traffic are:

• Blog regularly,
• Use long-tail keywords,
• Use internal links,
• Get your meta down,
• Create quality content regularly,
• Post engaging posts on social media regularly.

For getting more sales and revenue you need to focus more on customer engagement. You can give loyalty points to your customers on activities like visiting your store, signing up, follow or share on social media, allowing for push notifications, reviews, and many more. This will entice your customers and help you to get more email subscribers, push subscribers, collect more reviews. They will come again to your store to make a purchase in order to redeem those points which will double the sales and retention. You should start using the customer timeline feature to track customer journey right from the sign up till each and every activity like when the customer has last visited your store, Email opened, push received, products purchased, etc. This will help you to take action by knowing their behavior accordingly. You can add web push notifications, it will help in retargeting your customers in real-time even when they are not in your store.

If you would like to implement the above features/ customer engagement or marketing tools in your store. I would recommend you to install the all in one Shopify app AiTrillion. I am sure you will find it useful.

Hope this Helps! 

• For getting more sales and revenue you need to focus more on customer engagement. You can give loyalty points to your customers on activities like visiting your store, signing up, follow or share on social media, allowing for push notifications, reviews, and many more. This will entice your customers and help you to get more email subscribers, push subscribers, collect more reviews. They will come again to your store to make a purchase in order to redeem those points which will double the sales and retention. You should start using customer timeline feature to track customer journey right from the sign up till each and every activity like when the customer has last visited your store, Email opened, push received, products purchased, etc. This will help you to take action by knowing their behavior accordingly. You can add web push notifications, it will help in retargeting your customers in real-time.

[sophiawils59]

Hey @ Hercerlo, I have checked your website, First of all, do keyword research and optimize your title and meta description. without proper implementation of title and description, you will not get the proper result!!

[1WebAlex]

Hi Dan,

Hardcore SEO assessment here. You have 1 backlink to your store, and you will most likely need many thousands to rank organically in your market. Any SEO plan for a new domain without a massive backlink building strategy is doomed to fail. 

Your fastest way to traffic is going to be ads and the other techniques everyone has listed. The organic is going to take you a few years if you have the patience and budget to build it.

[Propelguru]

Set up your online presence with social media.

   Popular social media platforms include:

• Instagram,
• LinkedIn,
• Facebook,
• Pinterest,
• and Twitter 

Try to work on email marketing.

• Use a newsletter to spread the news about events.
• If you are working on blogs include your most recent posts.
• Announce upcoming promotions 
• Educate new customers about your offer and programs.
• Share high-performing content from your social networks.
• Automate abandoned cart notifications.

Utilize SEO resources.

• Your domain name
• Use a keyword research tool
• Analyze SEO performance on Google Analytics,

[Propelguru]

Organic traffic is mostly generated through SEO. Social media marketing and Influencer marketing wasn’t a bad idea, but if there are budget constraints, then SEO will help you out the most. Try improving on both on page and off page optimization. 

ON PAGE:

• Title tag

This is the title which appears as a clickable link whenever a person searches on google for the product you are offering. Your title tag should contain your main keyword. The ideal number of characteristics should be between 50-80.

• Meta description

This is the brief description which is shown below the title tag. Here again you must include your main keyword twice ideally. The characters should be between 150-170.

• URL

Your URL leading to the page/website should be simple and not complex. Do not insert any special characters and keep the length limited to 50-60 characters. Your main keyword should be used herein as well.

• Internal links

These are the links which connect you to another page of the same website. If there is any relevant content to the one being shown on the current page, adding its link will be beneficial.

• External links

These links are the one which jumps from one website to another. This is used when some other website has a relatable content to what you have on your page and you want people to go through that as well. Make sure that the other website is a credible one.

• Density of the keyword

This means the number of times the keyword is being used in a specific page, or in a given content. Make sure to use the keyword not more than 1-2% of the total content. You don't want to be doing keyword stuffing, which is not something good in the eyes of Google.

• Keyword proximity

This means the closeness between two or more keywords. The closer they are within a text, the better it is for your site.

• LSI

LSI, or Latent Semantic Index are the keywords that are related, or mean the same as the main keyword. Using these helps in recognizing the search engine deeply about your content, which further helps in better optimization of the page.

OFF PAGE:

Backlinks:

This is probably one the most important determining factors for higher ranking and optimizing your website. How do you get backlinks? Here are some good ways to get some in your kitty:

• Quora

It is one of the largest community platforms present currently. You can easily answer some of the relevant questions about your niche and add a link leading to your page or website. Do remember that quora has no follow backlinks.

• Medium

It is another site wherein you can write up on any topic you feel like within your niche. Here again you can leave a link to your webpage after writing up a post.

• Business Directories

It is a great way to reach out to a good number of people who are searching for services which you provide. Yellow pages and yelp are two of many directories.

• Guest Blogging

Herein you approach another company’s website and write content for them. It is also called guest posting. The content of the blog should be relevant to the webpage’s link that will be provided.

• Email outreach program

You reach out to the people with whom you want to promote your content and request for a backlink via email. 

[popsmash]

Hey Dan. You shared your Instagram profile, and you have a fairly active Instagram following, so I recommend working on getting your Instagram followers onto your email list.

With that, you can consistently reach your prospective customers via email marketing, where it's easier to track, nurture and convert sales without paying for social ads.

One of the easiest ways to turn your Instagram followers into email subscribers is to use Instagram giveaways as an incentive. There are Shopify apps to do it, or you could do it manually, but this tactic works well as long as you have an active Instagram following.

You still need a solid email marketing strategy to drive conversions, but as an e-commerce store you should have that anyway.