Sep 02 2024
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Why Is My Ecommerce Website Not Getting Traffic? A Guide for Store Owners
As an eCommerce business owner, you’ve invested time, money, and effort into creating an online store, but you’re not seeing the traffic you expected. This is frustrating and worrying, but you’re not alone.
Many eCommerce websites face traffic challenges, and there are solid strategies to overcome them. In this article, I’ll cover the most common reasons why your website might not be getting traffic and what you can do to fix it.
(One word of warning moving forward: Some unscrupulous individuals will try to tell you they will rank you on page 1 but not mention how they’ll do it nor tell you what keywords they’ll rank for. Don’t trust them unless you have personal recommendations. I prefer being in control of your own ranking destiny and choosing your own keyword clusters, learning along the way.)
1. Poor Keyword Optimisation
One of the most common reasons for low website traffic is poor keyword optimisation. If your website isn’t optimised for the right keywords, search engines like Google won’t know when to show your pages in search results.
How to Fix It:
- Conduct Keyword Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find relevant keywords that your target audience is searching for. Utilise the free keyword allowance on some premium tools rather than paying up front for expensive subscriptions.
- Optimise On-Page SEO: Ensure that your target keywords are naturally included in your page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and throughout your content. Google themselves have an article on their meta tag best practice
- Avoid Keyword Stuffing: While keywords are essential, overusing them can lead to penalties. Gone are the days when you could hide keywords at the bottom of your page in the same colour font as the background! Focus on creating content that provides value while strategically including your keywords.
2. Lack of Quality Content
You’ve probably all heard “content is king” but it has to be the right kind of content. If your website lacks high-quality, relevant, and engaging content, users and search engines alike will have little reason to visit your site.
How to Implement It:
- Create a Robust Content Strategy: Develop a plan for regularly publishing blog posts, size / fit guides, product descriptions, and other types of content that resonate with your audience. You will find that you attract customers that are interested in the how’s and why’s of a product, not just interested in the cheapest option.
- Focus on User Intent: Write content that answers the questions your target audience is asking. This approach not only attracts traffic but also improves your chances of ranking higher in search results.
- Diversify Content Formats: Consider including blog posts, videos, infographics, and even podcasts if it is suitable to your business, to appeal to different audience preferences.
3. Weak Backlink Profile
Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are so important for improving your site’s authority and driving traffic. If your online store has a weak backlink profile, search engines may not view it as credible, leading to lower rankings and reduced traffic.
Be careful with offers of backlinks from vague sources. They are probably spammy and could potentially do more damage in the long run. There are actually some ethical ways to get high quality free backlinks but you need to put the work in.
**Quick Tip: A link from a higher authority domain is worth so much more than numerous lower quality domains **
How to Do It:
- Build High-Quality Backlinks: Reach out to industry blogs, influencers, and online publications to get featured or linked back to your website. Send out Press Releases of any important announcements or products.
- Guest Posting: Write guest posts for reputable sites in your industry. Include a link back to your site to drive traffic whilst improving your backlink profile.
- Create Link-Worthy Content: Publish original research, case studies, or unique insights that others in your industry will want to link to.
4. Slow Website Speed
These next 2 options should be a no-brainer in this day and age.
A slow-loading website will deter visitors and negatively impact your search engine rankings. Studies show that users are likely to abandon a site if it takes more than a few seconds to load. Test it for yourself. Go onto a website and see if you start getting frustrated if it hasn’t loaded properly within the first 3-5 seconds. It doesn’t sound like much but in todays day and age of online shopping, it really does affect your shopping experience, and thus search engines will not reward you.
How to Fix It:
- Optimise Images and Media: Do some research into the negative effects of large images on page speed and you’ll understand why. Compress images and videos to reduce load times. Use tools like Tinypng for ease. Run your site through Google’s Pagespeed Insights tools and GTmetrix before / after and see what impact it makes. (tip for GTmetrix is to create an account which lets you change the server location for more accurate results.)
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDNs distribute your content across multiple servers worldwide, ensuring faster delivery to users.
- Minify CSS / JS Files: Although there are some plugins that can do this, it may pay to get a developer to take a look at this just to make sure it doesn’t get messy.
- Leverage Browser Caching: Enable browser caching to store files on users’ devices so they don’t have to download them every time they visit your site. You may find yourself needing to “flush the cache” if you then make any front-end changes for them to show up but it should just be a button click from a plugin.
5. Poor Mobile Optimisation
With more than half of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is a must. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile users, you could be losing a significant amount of traffic. Think of some times when you’ve found a website and you’ve had to pinch your device screen to zoom in to certain parts and zoom back out. That cannot be happening in 2024.
How to Fix It:
- Responsive Design: Ensure your website is fully responsive, meaning it adjusts to fit any screen size, from desktops to smartphones. A developer can help you with this.
- Mobile-Friendly Content: Keep content concise and easily scannable on mobile devices. Use larger buttons and easy-to-read fonts.
- Test on Multiple Devices: Regularly test your site on various devices to ensure it performs well on all of them.
- Keep Important Elements Above The Fold: Add to cart buttons, product names, prices should all be kept in the initial viewport of a page instead of having to scroll way down to find them.
6. Ineffective Use of Social Media
Social media can be a powerful driver of traffic, but if you’re not using it effectively, you might be missing out on potential visitors. Bear in mind, you do not have to be on every social media platform if it doesn’t suit your business. I am not on Instagram as I don’t feel like it fits my niche, whilst X and Linkedin are much more suited.
How to Fix It:
- Choose the Right Platforms: Focus on the social media platforms where your target audience is most active. If you sell clothing for example, visual platforms might be best.
- Engage with Your Audience: Regularly post content that encourages engagement, such as questions, polls, and interactive content. Try not to get drawn into competitions to gain likes as the falloff in engagement can be detrimental in the longer term.
- Utilise Paid Social Media Advertising: Consider running paid ads on social media to reach a broader audience and drive targeted traffic to your website.
7. Ignoring Analytics
Whilst it doesn’t directly bring in traffic, without tracking your page view performance and analysing, it’s difficult to understand where you’re going wrong and what needs improving.
How to Set It Up:
- Set Up Google Analytics (GA4): If you haven’t already, install Google Analytics on your website to track traffic, user behaviour, and other important metrics.
- Set Up Google Search Console: This can reveal what keywords users are typing in to find your site, whilst also revealing any technical issues with your site setup. Link this up to GA4 for enhanced results.
- Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review your analytics data to identify trends, strengths, and weaknesses. Use this information to make informed decisions about your SEO and content strategies.
- A/B Testing: Experiment with different elements on your site (like headlines, images, or calls to action) to see what drives the most traffic and conversions.
- Dead Pages: You need to find any 404 pages on your website and either fix or redirect them if possible. Not sure how to do this? Find your 404 links through a gig on Fiverr
In Review
Understanding why your website isn’t getting traffic is the first step toward improving it. By addressing the issues outlined above—poor keyword optimisation, lack of quality content, weak backlink profiles, slow site speed, poor mobile optimisation, ineffective social media use, and ignoring analytics—you can start driving more traffic to your ecommerce site and ultimately, increase your sales.
Remember, building traffic takes time and effort, but with a solid strategy in place, you can see significant improvements.
Maybe you have the opposite issue and already have website traffic but it’s not converting? I’ve recently wrote about that too.
If you need any help implementing your keyword strategy, I have over 13 years in the ecommerce industry and now offer ecommerce consultancy amongst other services.