How to Drive Traffic to your Shopify Store

How to Drive Traffic to your Shopify Store
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Driving traffic to your Shopify store means increasing brand visibility, customer base and sales.

Who doesn’t want that?

When people think about traffic, most often they refer to organic search or paid media. Yet there is much more to Shopify traffic growth.

We want to make sure your online store has all bases covered.

Our selected strategies will help you drive traffic to your Shopify store no matter the size. We will discuss driving traffic for free, provide tips and explain how you should think about a traffic growth strategy designed specifically for your online store.

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Reasons for low Shopify website traffic

Your Shopify store has been around for a while yet your traffic numbers aren’t what you’d hope them to be? Let’s do some troubleshooting.

Here are the main culprits of low Shopify store traffic:

  • Flawed marketing strategies. If you’re investing your entire marketing effort and budget into a single channel, chances are you’re missing out on a lot of potential.
  • Wrong keywords. The success of both paid and organic traffic growth depends largely on what keywords you target. If you choose poorly, your pages won’t rank and your ads won’t bring in visitors.
  • Poor website SEO. Without proper technical and on-site SEO you can’t rank on search engines and bring in valuable visitors.
  • No content and website authority. A Shopify store without a blog will have a hard time establishing itself as an authority in the niche. In such a case, ranking and attracting organic website traffic will be a tough task.

Tip:  If you’re not getting any traffic at all, technical SEO issues related to indexing could be responsible. Talk to an SEO expert who will do some troubleshooting for you, such as look over your robots.txt file.

How do Shopify stores drive traffic?

Research shows that three main traffic channels for established Shopify stores are organic, direct and social media ads

Appropriate strategies can unlock these as well as smaller yet profitable traffic sources, such as email lists and referrals. Data analysis and correct audience segmentation is key if you want to invest your time into traffic that converts.

In our article, we’ll cover time-tested ways to bring in valuable traffic for any type of Shopify store.

Tip: If you don’t have enough data or resources for segmented target audience analysis, prioritize traffic channels that generally convert well. Best converting channel for Shopify traffic[2] is email, followed by organic search, direct and social traffic. Organize your effort with that in mind.

How to get traffic to your Shopify store

Now it’s time to take a look at the actual strategies that will help increase Shopify store traffic.

Here is a rundown of how to get customers on Shopify:

  1. Improve rankings with proper SEO
  2. Optimize your listing for clicks
  3. Unlock image search
  4. Get active on social media
  5. Organize contests, giveaways and promotions
  6. Leverage content marketing to the fullest
  7. Write guest posts for popular accounts
  8. Run paid social media and search engine ads
  9. Collaborate with influencers and create referral programs
  10. Exchange promotions with other stores
  11. Go multilingual
  12. Sponsor events and podcasts
  13. Stay in touch with your shoppers

If you already know where your audience is the most active, pick and choose your preferred tips from this list. Alternatively, if you’re just starting out, read over everything and put together a Shopify traffic growth strategy that will help you skyrocket.

1. Improve rankings with proper SEO

  • Advantages: large amounts of free traffic, interested audience, improved brand awareness, easy to track
  • Challenges: takes long to establish, ROI takes a while to show, hard to stay competitive, requires constant time investment and staying up to date with changes in algorithms and trends

By far the most long-lasting way to get a good number of potential clients to your store is to conquer Google and other search engine rankings. Since the first three positions divide up around 60% of clicks[3] for most queries, it’s not enough to appear somewhere, you have to rank well.

Good Shopify store SEO performance will help you:

  • Drive traffic for free. SEO is a sure way to reach wide audiences without having to invest into paid aids.
  • Drive traffic that converts well. People who come through organic search have stronger conversion potential than those who find your store on social media.

To get there, you need a top-notch Shopify SEO strategy that covers all bases and we will look at a few most important aspects here.

Page headings

Headings optimized for SEO are descriptive, provide a clear structure for the page and contain keywords.

Heading hierarchy is important for both Google and your website visitors. Every page must have H1 and it should be the title. Any major section on your page should have an H2 heading. H3 and all smaller headings are recommended for pages with many elements or long blog articles but not mandatory.

Meta title

Meta titles directly contribute to how well your pages rank on Google. They’re also the main thing people see when looking at your page listing on Google:

Google SERP listing of watches for men with highlighted meta title

For SEO purposes, meta titles of your store pages should be:

  • under 60 characters
  • descriptive
  • contain focus keywords as early as possible. 

Product descriptions

Informative, unique and convincing product descriptions will help your product pages outrank the competitors and drive high-converting traffic.

There are two main aspects to quality Shopify product descriptions:

  • Information. Whoever is writing your product descriptions must understand the product well enough to highlight its unique features and value. All of that should be presented in plain, clear language. Instead of empty adjectives, like “amazing” or “practical” explain what actually makes the product that way.
  • Keywords. Ideally, every product page has a dedicated keyword you are aiming for. Make sure that the focus and secondary keywords end up in headings, description text and image alt texts.

Workflow tip: First write down everything you want your potential buyers to know about your product. Then pick out the most distinct features and craft a coherent description. Finally, optimize all on-page text with target keywords.

Store speed

A slow Shopify store is a sure way to never have good SEO results. Plus, no one ever returns to a store that takes forever to load and that’s a hit to direct traffic growth.

If you want your Shopify store to load fast, do the following:

  • Optimize images. Compress and resize images to perfection, choose the right format and you will lift a lot of weight off your website.
  • Choose Shopify apps efficiently and utilize script control. Shopify apps make your life easier but your store speed should not suffer for it.

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2. Optimize your listings for clicks

Advantages: increased value coming from good Google rankings

Challenges: A/B testing can be time consuming

If your store pages are ranking well on Google yet the incoming traffic is less than impressive, click-through rate (CTR) optimization might be your key to success.

Begin by checking your store's Google Search Console report. It’s worth understanding what good CTR means for individual cases. But as a rule - if your average CTR is lower than 3%, you have some work to do.

Structured data

Do you know those informative search result listings that show product reviews, product prices and other valuable information? It’s all structured data markup.

Search result for Dr. Dre headphones with rich snippet displaying price and reviews

Adding data markup to your product pages will help you capture valuable space in SERPs, bring in audience that is more informed about the product from the start and feature product information that makes you stand out.

It’s one of the most effective ways to improve your click-through rates and most SEO apps for Shopify can implement structured data for you.

Tip: If you have good product images, you should be even more interested in structured data markup. It adds a “Product” badge to your product images ensuring more clicks from potential buyers browsing through image search.

Headline

The headline of your page is the exact same thing as your meta title mentioned above. The SEO requirements are clear by now, but what about your potential customers?

Thinking about your meta title as a headline that must raise interest and A/B testing it is how you land one that is both SEO optimized and encourages people to click on it.

Meta description

While not a direct ranking factor, meta descriptions serve your click-through rates immensely. 

Google search result for men's watches with a highlighted meta description
Think of them as your opportunity to build on the interest you raised with your headline and turn it into a click. Include unique product characteristics or other selling points in them and use action verbs.

Landing the perfect meta description is not an easy nut to crack. Google reserves the right to pick any part of your text and display it as a meta description. Their goal is to show descriptions as relevant to the query as possible.

Also note that meta descriptions should contain no more than 145, otherwise Google will cut them short. 

  • Advantages: brings in Image Search users, improved overall search engine rankings, highly converting traffic, can be automated, not expensive
  • Challenges: potential image quality loss, small traffic potential

You’d be surprised how many shoppers browse through image search to get an understanding of the product they are looking for.

In fact, image search has the potential to bring in anywhere between 20-60% of organic traffic[4]. These numbers might seem outrageously big, but it’s very probable, especially if your products are highly based on visual qualities.

Optimizing product images for image search is beneficial from two angles. First, your store speed will undeniably improve. Also, optimized images will bring in shoppers browsing image search that already like the visual aspects of your product. And interested shoppers equal good conversion rates.

If you have a Google Analytics account set up, you can check your current traffic from image search. But whatever results you see, you can do better if you optimize your product images.

Here is an overview of how you do Shopify image optimization on your product pages:

  • Create unique images. If you have the product(s) at hand, you can even create outstanding images with your smartphone.
  • Use search engine friendly image file format. Luckily, Shopify already serves your images as WebP files whenever end browsers support it. They are a more optimized JPG and PNG alternative proven to have a positive impact on rankings.
  • Compress and resize your images. If you don’t optimize image size, they will not rank well and instead will definitely slow down your store.
  • Name images well. Relevant titles and product photo alt text will help images appear in targeted image search results.
  • Implement structured data. As mentioned above, it will add a “Product” badge and improve image click-through rate.

Image search results for query pretty mugs with product badge highlighted

Tip: Use decorative images sparingly. Surprisingly, for mobile audiences, pages with fewer but meaningful on-page images convert better if compared to bigger amounts of visuals[5]. So while you want your shoppers to see the product from every angle, make sure that every image on your product page serves a purpose (shows details, usage ideas, product in movement).

4. Get active on social media

  • Advantages: low initial investment and overall costs, wide reach, improved brand presence and awareness, improved relationships with customers, alternative for customer support
  • Challenges: time consuming, average conversion potential, can bring in a lot of “empty” traffic, requires constant monitoring and activity

Take your products to where your audience is the most active throughout the day, social media. Share your brand’s story, product images, short videos and more in the form of social media posts to drive traffic to your store.

The question with social media is not whether you should use it to bring in traffic, but rather how.

Tip: Always check your messages on every social media platform you curate. If you don’t get back to people who follow you and are reaching out to you directly, you will never see them converting to customers. If your store has scaled to the point where you get many messages per day, hire a social media or community manager.

Which social media platforms to choose?

Sure, you can’t do any harm to your brand by being active on every single social media platform. It’s your time that matters. Based on the demographics of your target audience and your product type you should pick specific ones to invest your effort in.

Our research on the best 100 Shopify stores shows that Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are at the forefront of their effort. However, understand the purpose of each social media platform very well to know which ones will contribute to your store traffic the most.

  • Facebook. This pioneer of social media platforms is the one true giant where you will find every possible shopper. As the perfect place to build networks and keep in touch, Facebook is irreplaceable for building a strong brand presence, relationship with your customers, or giving updates about your company or products. Most businesses should have a Facebook page.
  • Instagram. In terms of user demographics, Instagram holds the middle ground. While the audience is primarily young, it’s a very curious one and has conversion potential. Post behind-the-scenes videos, product sneak peeks and previews. That together with a visually-appealing feed and a good set of hashtags will get you some quality reach.
  • Pinterest. Highly overlooked by Shopify store owners, Pinterest is a platform that will grant you surprising reach and bring in people who are ready to make purchases. After all, what conversion strategy can work better than suggesting someone home decor or clothing ideas they were looking for?
  • Twitter. Twitter is where all the news is. While overall not the most susceptible platform for direct product promotions, it can be a cool way to stay in touch with your audience through short creative posts. Plus, if your product is at all influenced by trends or real-time events, you should be on Twitter to take advantage of that.
  • TikTok and YouTube. TikTok is evolving so fast that it’s setting new standards for social media content. Every product has potential for creative storytelling and the short TikTok video format is perfect for that. YouTube is and will stay the giant of video content for the foreseeable future though. Any kind of more lengthy product videos or how-to tutorials about your product will find their audience there.

Tip: Remember to make the most out of the native content formats that each social media platform offers. For instance, if you’re on Instagram, leverage Reels to share short product videos or sneak peeks.

Participating in online forums

Online forums, such as Reddit and Quora, have potential to bring in valuable traffic. If you have time to consistently participate and solve people’s problems on online forum sites, you’ll find yourself some very loyal and very grateful customers.

However, the task can become wildly time consuming, so weigh your benefits before you take it on.

The importance of convenient social sharing

The key to successful social media presence isn’t just creating content yourself, but also enabling your Shopify website visitors.

Implement social sharing buttons with recognizable social media icons on your eCommerce blog articles and product pages. It’s a simple addition, but it will allow happy customers to share content or product they found interesting very quickly.

5. Organize contests, giveaways and promotions

  • Advantages: high engagement rates, encourages social sharing, improves customer loyalty, easy way to capture emails
  • Challenges: can be costly, can leave customers frustrated, possible brand and product devaluation

Handing out free stuff during contests, giveaways and promotions is a win-win situation for both brands and their fans.

You give a few products away. In return, you increase your client base, create some traction for your company’s growth, get free publicity and traffic through social shares and surprise a few lucky shoppers.

You can choose to run these promotional campaigns on your online store. In this case, we recommend using a specialised Shopify app for giveaways. Alternatively, and most often more successfully, take your campaigns to the social networks. With a couple of good posts, a video sneak peak and a convincing offer you can drive incredible amounts of traffic to your store.

Do keep in mind that excessive promotions and giveaways will tear down the brand's value you worked hard to build. If people can constantly get your products with massive discounts or for free, your products will lose all exclusivity and uniqueness. Plus, customers who participate frequently but never win can switch to a different store in disappointment.

Tip: Haven’t tapped into the power of email marketing just yet? Contests and giveaways are the perfect way to start off with a huge email list. Set up a sign up form and ask shoppers to leave their emails if they want to participate. Next thing you know, you’ll have a huge potential client base you can reach directly.

6. Leverage content marketing

  • Advantages: Increased brand awareness and conversion rates, helps educate audience, builds trust, diversifies traffic sources
  • Challenges: difficult to master, big time and resource investment, hard to measure outcomes

Online shoppers are no longer just looking for discounts. They want to interact with brands that truly care about them, the environment and want to help them make an informed purchase. This is where content marketing comes in.

Creating articles, tutorial videos, infographics, social media posts and more that help a potential buyer get to know a product better is at the heart of effective content marketing. All of it should serve to help people visualize the product in their lives and how it brings value to them.

This is why you see the biggest of brands like IKEA, investing in creating how-to videos.

To know what type of content you should be creating , simply follow these points:

  • Go deeper into keyword research to identify queries around purchases
  • Take a look at what your target audience is talking about on social media and other online platforms
  • Understand the type of content that can help them make a better purchase
  • Identify content formats that you have the resources for to create
  • Make sure your content is not just highlighting your products, but also adding value to your audience in some way
  • Add a blog to your Shopify store
  • Get inspiration from successful Shopify blog examples

Once you start creating content, optimize it with the keywords you’re targeting. The search engine will start to drive organic traffic to your Shopify store. Plus, make sure you share that content across social media pages and online forums we discussed.

Tip: Do you have search functionality in your store? If so, use Google Analytics to see what shoppers who are already on your website search for. It can guide your efforts when creating informational content or expanding organic search growth.

Build a clear marketing model for your store

As much as it is great to invest effort into content marketing, that effort needs to have a very clear purpose. In general, everything comes down to improved conversion rates and sales.

Once you understand how your potential customers learn about your store, interact with your content and product pages and eventually make a purchase, you can start designing and optimizing their journey. In short, you should build a marketing and sales model.

There are two main marketing models out there - the regular sales funnel and the innovative marketing flywheel.

The idea of a sales funnel:

  • Linear model
  • Has four main stages: awareness, interest, decision, action
  • Centered around turning prospects into buyers
  • Does not put emphasis on educating, supporting and retaining customers

The idea of marketing flywheel:

  • Loop model
  • Has four main parts: attract, engage, delight, all three designed to support growth
  • Emphasis on turning customers into brand advocates
  • Emphasis on customer retention through a wholesome experience
  • Encourages innovation and new business models

After a brief look at these rundowns we can easily notice that a flywheel is a lot more forward-looking, oriented at retention and fundamentally is the future of marketing.

All that being said, your marketing model is best decided by you with consideration of your product type, average purchase value and other metrics indicating how you should think about your audience.

7. Guest post content on popular accounts

  • Advantages: alternative source of traffic, improved B2B relationships and brand awareness, improved authority on search engines
  • Challenges: very hard to get established brands or websites to collaborate, no guarantee the content will stay up for a long time, time consuming

Whether you’re going with paid strategies or organic ones, building your own audience can take a while. Fast forward this process by collaborating with websites and accounts that have a similar target audience as yours.

If you set up an effective strategy, you will reap massive benefits from guest posting:

  • Search engines reward websites that get quality backlinks with better rankings and overall website authority 
  • You get occasional referral traffic
  • Your brand awareness increases

But it’s not an easy route. Established brands and websites get hundreds of such requests every day. Convincing them they truly need a post from you is an art.

Tip: Watch out for sites that ask you to pay for publishing your guest post. Many exist with the sole purpose of selling backlinks. Such websites do not have a reliable reader base and send out too many backlinks for them to still have value. You can recognize them by lack of real authors, extreme topical variety and high post frequency (for instance, four articles per day), lack of About Us page and questionable design practices.

8. Run paid ads on social media and search engines

  • Advantages: quick and easily-measurable results, easy way to segment and target specific audience, minimal time investment
  • Challenges: devalue over time, can be very costly, you must track ROIs at all times, effective campaigns require a lot of skill

Driving traffic to your Shopify store organically can be a slow and overwhelming process. But you have a business to run!

If you have a budget to spare, tap into the power of paid ads. Use both search engines and social media advertisements to get in front of your potential customers’ search.

If you’re not sure where to begin, we recommend starting with the best-converting organic traffic channel. Then slowly work your way up to experiment with others, noting down which one brings more valuable traffic to your storefront.

The idea is to get valuable traffic to your Shopify store, so make sure your ads:

  • Target your ideal customers with as defined demographics as possible
  • Create ads that focus on your products and its benefits for the consumer
  • Combine your ads with a deal that is hard to turn down
  • Make sure your ad copy is crystal clear
  • Ensure you have remarketing and retargeting pixels set up on your store to bring back the traffic that does not convert

Tip: To make things simpler, there are a number of Shopify apps that you can use for running ads on social media and search engines. Explore them all here.

Let’s take a look at separate paid ad channels and how to benefit from them:

Google ads

Google ads have massive reach and are a great way to be seen by customers before any organic search results show up. But people will see that your listing is there as a paid advertisement, so create it to stand out and help people see your product value. 

To maximize your ROAS, you should definitely check the Performance Max campaigns which are the latest update of smart shopping campaigns.

Unless you’re Nike or equivalent in brand awareness, don’t use Google ads on queries where you would be competing with globally-recognized brands or those that aren’t 100% in your niche. Your click-through rates will be low and the audience won’t convert well, so you will only waste your budget.

Tip: Google ads tend to devalue greatly over time. If you run ads on the exact same query for a few years, the price per click will increase and your ROI will fall. When you start seeing this phenomenon, start searching for new queries to run ads on.

Facebook ads

Facebook ads offer segmentation opportunities beyond comparison. If you set up your campaigns well, you can see amazing click-through rates.

To run a successful Facebook ad campaign you should:

Remember that competition is fierce and people can leave comments on your Facebook ads, so create them thoughtfully.

Instagram ads

Instagram ads appear directly in the user's feed, stories and Explore features. It’s one of the more intrusive approaches to paid ads out there and has shown some questionable targeting accuracy.

That being said, if your products are based on visual qualities and you can design Instagram ads that tell a story through a single image, go for it. Always keep in mind that with Instagram, you’re designing your ads mobile-first.

Tip: Don’t know where to start? The most common way to run paid ads on Instagram includes promoting your posts inside the app.

Pinterest ads

Pinterest excels at their paid ad approach. They are among very few social media platforms that practice an additive approach to paid ads, meaning ad campaigns are volatile and designed to add to the user journey instead of interrupting it.

They can be proud of highly efficient cost per conversion and higher ROI than other social media platforms, so if your product is at all susceptible to visual presentation and storytelling, don’t miss out.

9. Collaborate with influencers and create referral programs

  • Advantages: one of the best way to build brand trust and awareness, possible long term partnerships, brings in high-converting traffic
  • Challenges: hard to estimate the revenue and engagement outcomes, set up process is time consuming, you have to research the influencers rigorously

Many of us follow people we take cooking, house decor or lifestyle advice from. Same applies to our audience; they have their favorite influencers and trust them.

Naturally, marketing your store through influencers will bring in well-converting traffic. In fact, 90% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is effective no matter the size of your business[6].

Use various influencer marketing platforms and tools to seek out influencers in your industry that have a known voice amongst your target market. From celebrities to those who have a few thousand followers, look for those who can create authentic content to promote your brand’s products. You want brand advocates who can help get your audience engaged and interested in what you offer.

Tip: Research your chosen influencers extensively. If you see any questionable past collaborations, negative reviews about their promoted programs or products, questionable social practices or affiliations with extremist views it’s better to skip out on that collaboration. Having one wrong person promoting your products can cause long-term harm to your brand image.

Referral programs are built around a similar concept, but can be applied to an even broader scope. Have people signing up and driving traffic and sales to your Shopify store for some kind of commission and your store traffic will grow at impressive rates.

Make sure that you have a concrete way to measure the impact of your influencer and referral marketing campaigns. Be it the number of followers you generate, traffic, comments or how much it boosts brand awareness, document it all.

Tip: Referral, influencer and affiliate marketing program launch can be streamlined by picking one of the best Shopify apps for referrals. Apps like UpPromote have onboarding programs, revenue and performance tracking systems and convenient, consolidated process management, which will make handling any program a breeze.

10. Exchange ads with fellow merchants

  • Advantages: improved B2B partnerships, interested target audience, increased value for shoppers
  • Challenges: can lose some customers, need to research stores a lot, not very wide reach

Similar to guest posts, exchanging ads means placing promotional content on someone else’s website. In this case, it is similar to an ad campaign you’re running on social media and the search engines.

All you need to do is identify stores and websites that have a similar target audience and quality product but aren’t your direct competitors. Then, you reach out to them with a collaboration offer and set up your ad campaigns.

It can, however, turn out to be a disadvantage for you. How? You will send out some of your audience to your partner stores. But they might not have that wide of a reach or a loyal customer base that trusts their recommendations, so you might not see the same benefits.

All that being said, it’s worth a shot and you don’t even have to do this all manually. There are Shopify apps like Automizely Traffic & Ads that can help you out.

11. Go multilingual

Advantages: better chances to rank in international SERPs, better UX and conversion rates of international customers

Challenges: implementing and maintaining a multilingual store can be time consuming

Everyone loves accessing information in their native language. If your target audience is highly international, translating your store to multiple languages is worth considering.

A multilingual Shopify store can not only boost your conversations, but also increase overall traffic.

How?

Simple - translated versions of your website will rank better for queries in the target language. Google determines which language the user prefers based on their location and past searches. When displaying results, it will prioritize those that are available in the user’s language. 

It sounds like a massive undertaking. In reality, website internalization can be handled rather easily with a dedicated Shopify translations app. They don’t just translate the text, but also offer localization features, such as currency switchers. 

Alternatively, you can create a full-blown international SEO strategy. You should begin by deciding how you’ll handle international Shopify domains and hiring localization experts to adapt your original website content, including images and cultural references, to target markets.

  • Advantages: possibility to get very highly converting traffic, increased positive sentiments towards your brand
  • Challenges: costly, hard to land on a target audience, average reach, difficult customer journey

Having your company logo displayed on event ads or your product benefits explained on a podcast sounds like a very alluring way to drive traffic to your Shopify store. And it can be!

To land a successful event or podcast partnership, you should:

  • Land 100% in your niche. We’ve all heard that mattress store ad in a podcast about paranormal stories. While some podcasts and events will promote about anything to get investments, it’s not worth it. Ending up on a completely unrelated promotion channel can cause people to be frustrated with your brand and have the opposite effect to what you initially wanted.
  • Design your promotion campaign. Explain your product benefits well and ask the promoter to pitch in with their authority and promote it not only as a good product, but as something they personally use and enjoy.

Remember that none of this is written media, meaning the customers will need to invest extra effort to go online and find your business. That’s why you need to be sure you’re targeting those that will be willing to do so.

13. Stay in touch with the audience you build

  • Advantages: Good customer retention rates, direct traffic increase, improved brand trust and awareness
  • Challenges: time consuming, takes skill to execute, no clear way to measure success

By being so focused on new customers, one thing many Shopify stores miss out on is keeping the audience they build engaged with their brand.

This is where you need to establish a multichannel strategy to continually stay in touch with your customers using all the above tactics, but most importantly email marketing.

Designing email marketing campaigns

Emails are the top converting traffic channel for Shopify stores. And it’s not surprising, considering that all the people receiving them are in some way familiar with your brand.

Capture emails with effective lead generation magnets, such as giveaways, discount codes and downloadables. Design a journey of several emails for each type of signup and make sure you regularly follow up with emails about new product releases, important company updates and anything else that would help your customers stay up-to-date and feel included.

Tip: With Shopify apps like Firepush, you will also be able to automate all this effort. Use this app to send out quality marketing messages that add value to your audience and eventually turn them into your customer.

Which traffic driving strategy to choose for your store?

We already discussed how to understand the most valuable types of traffic for your store specifically, now let’s take a look at how that translates into individual strategy development.

Factors to consider when choosing traffic growth strategy:

  • Starting budget. If you're starting off with a tight budget, work on your social media presence, basic SEO and a couple of keywords for paid ads. As you grow and can increase your investments, tap into eCommerce blog writing, more paid ads and sponsor events.
  • Store size and product type. If you have a tiny online store that sells homemade soaps and candles, your best shot is building a loyal customer base with a small-scale, value driven content marketing strategy. Communicate it on social media and email campaigns and collaborate with macro influencers. Alternatively, huge clothing retailers shouldn’t let higher initial investment stop them from exploring all traffic channels.
  • Website authority and content. When it comes to organic growth, your website authority is important. A fresh website without a blog will struggle to capture any place on the SERPs because Google simply won’t see it as an authority source. And while you grow your organic traffic base by writing a blog and optimizing on-page SEO, put calculated investments into paid ads, guest posts or sponsorships for more immediate benefits.
  • Product type. Very niche or sentimental products will benefit from referral and influencer marketing, email marketing campaigns and social networks a lot more than technology brands or established retail companies.
  • Different channel ROIs. If your store is active in targeting multiple Shopify traffic channels, compare your overall investments into that channel with its conversion rates and average purchase value of those shoppers. You will understand which types of traffic work best for your store specifically.

Compare strategies

Strategy Difficulty Estimated Costs Traffic Potential Conversion potential
SEO and organic growth Medium/High Low High Medium
Image optimization Low Low Low High
Social media Medium Low High Low
Contests and giveaways Low Medium High Medium
Guest posts High Medium Low/Medium Medium
Paid ads Medium High High High
Influencer and referral marketing High Low High High
Ad exchange Medium Low Low/Medium Medium
Podcast and event sponsorship High Medium/High Low High
Customer retention High Low Medium High
Content marketing effort High Medium High Medium

Why driving traffic is important for your online store?

Average eCommerce store conversion rate is less than 3%[1], so continuous growth of your Shopify store traffic is probably at the forefront of your business efforts (and if not, it should be).

Plus, as you grow, you will increase brand awareness and people will start searching for your brand name and brand terms directly. This is one of sure indicators that your traffic growth strategies are on point.

Constant Shopify traffic growth also helps to stay ahead of the competition, capture more and more of your target market, and get more Shopify sales.

Resources:

  1. https://www.invespcro.com/blog/the-average-website-conversion-rate-by-industry/
  2. https://popupsmart.com/blog/shopify-statistics#shopify-traffic-and-sales-stats
  3. https://linkgraph.io/click-through-rates-by-serp-position/
  4. https://moz.com/blog/potential-of-images-search-ways-to-track-traffic
  5. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-load-time/
  6. https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-statistics/

Frequently asked questions

Usually people find your Shopify store through Google search and paid Google or social media ads. However, do not underestimate the power of smaller scope but high-converting traffic channels, such as referrals.

The best way to drive traffic to your Shopify store is organic search and social media. However, other sources like paid ads and referrals can prove very valuable as well. The strategy choice depends on your budget, store size, product type and other factors.

SEO effort is a sure way to ensure continuous flow of free organic traffic. While SEO strategies are challenging to set up and take a while to start showing results, it’s a tried-and-tested long term approach for free Shopify traffic.

Shopify is known for 99.7% uptime and can handle over 100,000 products. We recommend constant optimization efforts to reduce load times. However, unless your store is about to hit the product limit, there is no need to worry about traffic surges causing downtime.

About the author
Vita Klimaite
Vita believes that every great product must be supported by an even better marketing strategy. Armed with SEO and Content Marketing experience, Vita is dedicated to helping website and eCommerce store owners unlock the power of search engines and scale their businesses. A big fan of remote work, she is always on the road, so you can also hear some exciting travel stories from her.