Once upon a time, retail used to be simple.

You opened up shop at the right location, started selling something that had a substantial market, and relatively low competition, and you were in business, literally.

Now, it’s not so simple.

With the advent of e-commerce, the rules and practices of retail businesses have changed.

But some of the things haven’t changed and will not change for the foreseeable future.

In the old days, “foot traffic” decided how well the business was doing.

If a lot of people came to your store, it usually meant that you did a fair bit of business.

This aspect hasn’t been lost with e-commerce; it has just changed forms.

Instead of foot traffic determining your business activity, your e-commerce platform/website’s online traffic has become a major indicator of your business’s profitability.

There are other factors, of course, that determine how many people are visiting your website and how many are actually buying your product (conversion rate).

But the fact remains the same that if you can drastically increase the customer traffic on your website, you can increase your business activity substantially.

How to Improve Organic E-Commerce Traffic

Did you know that about 43% of all organic traffic towards e-commerce websites came from Google?

And upon 30% of shoppers were ready to buy products from social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

These stats show where you should be focused on to drive more organic traffic towards your platform and ensure e-commerce success.

Another important stat to know about is that when an e-commerce platform becomes famous enough (whether locally or globally), most of its traffic comes from people directly opening the website.

Two examples would be Amazon and Ali-baba.

Amazon has especially gotten famous enough that most people when they need something, go directly to Amazon.

Even if they don’t wish to buy from Amazon vendors, they visit the website and look up the product for rates, reviews, comparisons, and information.

To get your platform at that level, where most of your e-commerce profits are coming from loyal customers, you managed to retain; you have to work on some other aspects first.

1. Improve Your SEO

For e-commerce success, in fact, for any online platform’s success, improving SEO is painfully iterative advice.

That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or outdated.

Most organic traffic towards e-commerce platform originates from Google searches (or from another search engine), so to improve your visibility there and your ranking on SERPs, you have to work on your SEO.

The usual route starts with Keywords, which are even more important for an e-commerce website and its content than some other blog/website’s ranking.

For that, you have to research specific keywords surrounding your products extensively, and the more long-tail keywords you can embed in your content, the better.

Researching your most close competitor also pays off when improving your website’s SEO.

Other E-commerce SEO improvement steps may include:

Identify and rectify any issues with your website’s functionality and improve its speed.
Work on on-page optimization, isolate content snippets, link internally, and externally (only to credible sources).
Your website should be mobile friendly because that’s where most customer traffic is coming from nowadays.
Optimize product pictures for Google, and try to add videos (especially how-to videos). That can help drive a lot of customer traffic towards your website, even if people have bought the product somewhere else.

2. Leverage the Power of Social Media

Social media, especially Instagram, have been very popular when it comes to conversion rates.

You can start leveraging its power by creating an Instagram gallery of professionally shot images of your e-commerce website’s products.

If your Instagram account gets enough followers (that happens for a multitude of reasons: interesting pictures, nice stories, influencer marketing, and consistency of your uploads, etc.), you can drive a lot of your sales from there.

On Facebook, you can pinpoint your target audience and engage with them. By connecting your social media directly from your website (through plugins that directly update/post on your social media once you put something new on your website), you can stay relevant with your potential and current customers.

Loyal customer base is an important driver of e-commerce success, and you can do so by staying connected to your customers and relevant on social media.

3. Email marketing and PPC

Both PPC and email marketing seem a bit old school when it comes to generating e-commerce profits, but they aren’t dead yet. Email marketing, especially if you are using it to retain your old customers and promote referral programs, can be a very powerful tool.

And PPC, while not a stand-alone amazing strategy on its own, can be very useful when done the right way. A well-managed and efficiently run PPC campaign can induce the forced-visibility of your products and platform.

If you manage to drive even a little bit of traffic using PPC, then manage to retain those customers through good service/products or your prices, they will become a permanent traffic source.

4. Work on Your Reviews

That’s probably the trickiest and the most potent tool to enhance/manage your customer traffic.

When people are sifting through different e-commerce platforms for a product or comparing different vendors, reviews are some of the first things they see.

Even if you manage to draw a lot of customer traffic to your platform, it won’t equate to your e-commerce profit if you scare most of them away with bad reviews.

Ideally, your product and services shouldn’t warrant negative reviews.

But the internet is full of individuals who like to trash decent products for no apparent reason, so make sure you have an efficient system in place to deal with such reviews.

Also, a proactive approach to communicating and resolving the issues of customers who leave negative reviews can work in your favor.

Conclusion

E-commerce success and profits depend very heavily on the customer traffic you manage to draw.

But attracting more traffic doesn’t mean you don’t need to work in retention.

The more these two strategies and activities are in sync, the higher your e-commerce profits are likely to be.

If you don’t have the in-house talent to work on all fronts, you may consider outsourcing these tasks.

Whether you do it yourself or someone else does it for you, attracting more customer traffic is imperative for your e-commerce success.