How can I increase traffic to my new online store?

Store Feedback

Topic summary

A new store owner is struggling to generate traffic and seeks advice on SEO, advertising, and overall strategy. Currently, they’re posting on Facebook and Instagram using reels and running paid campaigns through Meta.

Key recommendations provided:

SEO fundamentals:

  • Conduct keyword research targeting long-tail keywords using tools like Semrush or UberSuggest
  • Optimize site structure, title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs
  • Compress and add alt text to images
  • Submit XML sitemap to Google Search Console
  • Fix broken links and improve page speed
  • Implement structured data markup (product snippets, FAQs, ratings)

Additional strategies:

  • Use Google Analytics to track performance and make data-driven decisions
  • Build backlinks through guest posting, collaborations, and creating shareable content
  • Enhance social media engagement and encourage customer testimonials
  • Conduct SEO audits to identify optimization opportunities

Technical feedback:

  • Add more text/copy relevant to the niche
  • Improve UI organization
  • Optimize product pages before investing heavily in ads

The discussion emphasizes that SEO takes time but delivers long-lasting results, suggesting the owner focus on foundational improvements before scaling paid advertising.

Summarized with AI on November 16. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
6

Hello Tracey232,

Thanks for reaching out to the community!

Well SEO, unlike other digital marketing techniques, takes some time to show the results but has long-lasting impacts. Here are some suggestions for optimizing your store to attract more traffic to the store:

  1. Keyword Research: Keyword research is the core of SEO, and if done right can help the website to rank better for that keyword on the search engine results page (SERP). Some suggestions to optimize the process include:
    • Aim at understanding the intent of the searchers or your target audience
    • Use Google trends and Google predictions
    • Use keyword research tools, like Semrush, UberSuggest, Moz, Linkdex, and Wordtracker, to ascertain the competitiveness and effectiveness of the keywords.
    • Target long-tail keywords, which are highly descriptive and specific and help in targeting the right set of audiences.
  2. Optimize Site Structure: Site structure is the way content is organized on the web page. Optimizing site structure can make the content of the website more readable and help enhance the user experience on the website. Some suggestions to optimize it, include:
    • Ensure consistency of font format of heading tags
    • Systematically divide the content under different headings and subheadings
    • Add visuals to the website, like images, videos, and carousels
  3. Optimize Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and URLs: Title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs form the website snippet, and optimizing these elements can help in attracting organic traffic, and also is favored by Google’s ranking algorithm. Suggestions to optimize these elements include:
    • Add a keyword to all three
    • Limit the length of the title tag to 40-60 characters, meta descriptions to 120-160 characters, and URLs to 48 characters, as these meta tags longer than suggested characters end with ellipses and create ambiguity among the viewers.
  4. Carry Out SEO Audit: An SEO audit can help you ascertain the SEO-related errors on the website, which can be fixed and optimized to help the website improve its rank.
  5. Optimize Images: Optimized images rank better on SERP and help websites with improved visibility on the search engines. Suggestions to optimize images are:
    • Compress the file size of the images to reduce their loading time
    • Add alt text to explain its context to the search engine crawlers (as they cannot see the image), and users (if the image takes too long to load)
    • Add a keyword to the file name and alt text of the images
  6. Enable Rich Snippets: Rich snippets helps in optimizing the website snippet by helping it to stand out on the results page, which improves the click-through rate of the website and organic traffic on the website. You can add:
    • Product Markup Snippet (Product names, descriptions, availability, count, SKU, URL, etc.),
    • FAQs Snippet,
    • Homepage Snippet,
    • Review and Rating Snippet, etc.
  7. Optimize Page Speed: Good page speed improves user experience and optimizes the crawling process of search engine crawlers, which can improve the ranking of the website on SERP. You can optimize page speed by:
    • Compressing the images
    • Removing unused and unnecessary JavaScript and CSS
    • Using a light-weight Shopify theme
    • Implementing AMP for reducing website’s loading time on mobile devices
    • Implementing lazy loading for advertisements
    • Reducing the number of redirects
    • Using GZIP to compress JavaScript and CSS
    • Enabling Browser Caching
  8. Fix Broken Links: Broken links hamper user experience and also hinder crawling, which negatively impacts the ranking of the website. Thus, identify all the broken links on the website and fix them by redirecting the traffic to the right location.
  9. Submit XML Sitemap: XML sitemap shall be submitted to the Google Search Console, which makes it easy for search engine crawlers to easily crawl and index all the pages on the website.
  10. Use Google Analytics: Google Analytics allows the users to calculate necessary metrics related to the website, which can help the users make effective data-driven decisions. Benefits of using Google Analytics include:
    • Measure the performance of the website
    • Understand the audience, their demographics, and interests
    • Determine the target audience
    • Get new ideas and determine areas of improvement in the website.
  11. Link Building: Link building is an important SEO process, which helps the website to improve its credibility and visibility on search engines. Some suggestions to get backlinks include:
    • Creating high-quality content that people wish to share
    • Guest posting on blog posting website
    • Approach the business associations to request backlinks
    • Collaborate with suppliers/distributors/partners
    • Encourage your customers to post testimonials on different digital platforms
    • Use social media for backlinking
  12. Enhance Social Media Engagement: Enhancing social media engagement may help you to create a personal and trustful relationship with your target audience, which can help you to attract them to your website and purchase the products.

Hope it helps!

Leesha

SEOKart

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