[Revealed] 9 Must-Have Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store

If you’re looking for more ways on how you can drive traffic to your Shopify Store, we’ve got you covered! Online traffic is the lifeblood of an eCommerce business – the difference between having a booming business or failing miserably at generating sales.

The key to traffic-driving success, though, is in driving quality traffic to your store, targeted traffic that is more likely to convert. Therefore, if you increase targeted traffic, you increase sales. So how do you drive more targeted traffic to your store to increase sales?

Well, we’ve got nine ways to do just that. In this post, we will give you our must-have winning strategies to help you drive the right traffic to your Shopify Store.

Let’s get started!

1. Create a Winning DIY SEO Strategy

The first step in ensuring you can successfully drive traffic to your online store long term is with SEO. A winning SEO strategy means you are not only building a steady flow of organic traffic over time – using PPC to boost traffic instantly – but also means you are building, by default, a shopping-friendly store. Why? Because a lot of eCommerce SEO best practices will also ensure your site is optimized for shoppers. Win, win!

Your SEO strategy is designed to help you increase your store’s discoverability and should include a sound keyword plan, optimized pages with good metadata such as alt tags, product deductions and product titles, good website copy and easy-to-find info pages such as FAQs.

Navigating the science of SEO can be tricky, even to the most experienced online sellers. Here are seven steps to help you build a winning DIY SEO strategy:

Do a full analysis of your current traffic metrics to see where you stand
Study your current customers and define your target shoppers
Complete a full competitor analysis of your closest competitors
Review your keywords and revamp key phrases based on the first three steps
Make sure you are following one-page optimization for all pages on your website
Establish a content marketing strategy around your key topics
Use free tools like Benchmark Hero to determine if your website is technically sound

You can find this full eCommerce DIY SEO step-by-step strategy here.

2. Build a Sales-Driving eCommerce PPC Strategy

There is no denying that PPC is the number one way Shopify entrepreneurs can drive more targeted traffic to their stores. The secret to their success is building a multi-channel strategy, one that works for you at every level of your sales funnel by ensuring your campaign platforms work together to bring you a steady stream of potential customers.

At bare minimum, your PPC strategy should include a variety of Google, Facebook and Instagram campaigns and ad types that you tweak and optimize until you have a good flow of traffic at every level of contact. Here’s a breakdown of each PPC platform and the basic campaign types every Shopify store should be using to drive traffic:

Google Ads

Facebook and Instagram Ads

To build this strategy from the ground up, we suggest you visit our Full PPC Management Guide for eCommerce [+Optimization Tips & Strategies] post, but here are the 5 most important steps to get you started:

Use your eCommerce KPIs and metrics to define your goals
Choose the PPC platform and campaign types you want to start with
Set yourself up for quality data tracking for better optimization
Commit to constant measuring, tweaking and optimizing to boost results
Automate your eCommerce PPC management with tools such as Traffic Booster

3. Use Content Marketing to Attract Potential Shoppers

Shopify store content doesn’t just play a role in your SEO growth, but is key to a sound content marketing strategy designed to bring traffic to your store.

This means that if you haven’t invested time and energy into your eCommerce blog yet, you’re missing out on a vital traffic stream for your eCommerce business. Having a good blog and content marketing strategy will:

Provide high-value content for your PPC campaigns that will bring in new potential shoppers
Help you build a solid eCommerce brand
Enable you to display credibility and therefore build trust
Establish you as an expert in your niche
Boost organic traffic through SEO

But your content marketing shouldn’t stop there!

From social media posts, downloadable eBooks, podcasts and video content, the possibilities are endless. The key is to find content that appeals most to your potential shoppers and is popular in your specific niche (i.e., create content for platforms your potential shoppers hang out on) in a format that they prefer. No matter which direction you go in, you want to make sure your content is original and packed with value.

If you’re getting started with an eCommerce content marketing strategy to drive traffic to your Shopify store, start with our 5 Best Ways to Increase eCommerce Traffic post for a step-by-step guide in creating converting content. For those of you who have a strategy you wish to scale or revamp for better results, these two guides will help you do just that!

4. Boost Your Shopify Store Traffic with Email Marketing

If you’re not looking at your email marketing as part of your strategy to constantly drive traffic to your Shopify store, you’re lagging behind. We all know just how important email marketing is. Not only does it give you a captive audience – users who are all yours – but it enables you to personalize your marketing to drive high-converting traffic to your store.

It’s important that you don’t just look at your email lists as a stream to your promotional products. Instead, it’s a phenomenal tool you can use to build brand trust for new potential shoppers while bringing previous customers back to your store.

To take advantage of the traffic-driving power of email marketing, you first need to start with a good subscriber list strategy. The best way to grow your lists quickly is to offer a good incentive for them to join – you can use apps like Coupon Pop to have a pop up installed in minutes. Also, you want to be sure you tell them what they will be getting when they sign up for your emails.

Once you start growing your lists, you will want to segment your lists as much as possible to ensure you can tailor your message and product specifically to them – improving your chances of getting them back onto your store – and even better, shopping! Here are some guides to help you formulate a winning email marketing strategy that drives steady traffic to your online store.

Pro Tip: It’s not just email lists you should be growing. For long-term strategies to generate traffic streams, you want to build lists in a variety of platforms besides email, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

5. Harness the Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Another powerful tool in your traffic-driving arsenal is a reliable word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) strategy. By harnessing the power of your loyal customers and brand ambassadors, you can bring new potential shoppers to your store quite cost-effectively.

An effective WOMM strategy will build trust, loyalty and hype around your brand and products, all working together to not only get new shoppers to your store, but increase the chances of them converting. Here are six tips from our full How to Use Word-of-Mouth Marketing to Boost eCommerce Sales guide to get you started:

Strategically use UGC (user-generated content) in marketing and on your Shopify store
Make sure your brand stands out and sounds human
Reward high LTV customers to encourage brand sharing
Include WOMM incentives in social and email marketing to encourage online engagement and sharing
Create unique loyalty and reward programs that are share-worthy
Have a solid review collecting strategy

Bonus Content: 5 Tools to Increase UGC, Pronto!

6. Become a Leading Expert for Your Niche

We’ve written about how you can use your blog to establish your eCommerce brand as an authority in your niche. However, that’s not the only place you should be showing off your knowledge. Creating and submitting guest posts will not only show off your expert knowledge, but help spread the word of your brand (AKA, new traffic) and help with organic traffic in terms of backlinks. The more links you have on other top SEO-rated sites, the better your rankings will be.

However, it’s important to note here that these need to be quality links, with relevant quality content. Here are five steps on how to find and submit guest posts for your eCommerce brand:

Look for online publication and business blogs that target the specific audience you want to reach – i.e., ones that your potential shopper is reading or following
Use tools like SimilarWeb to make sure the site has as much, or more, traffic than your store
Engage, comment and share relevant content through your content channels
Research the blog or site to find the names of content managers and editors to personalize your pitch
Opt for genuine and human over cut-and-paste marketing pitches

Another way you can expand your reach is by writing features for market influencers, which brings us to the next winning strategy to drive traffic to your Shopify store!

7. Extend Your Brand Reach with Influencer Marketing

Another way you can push more people to your store who are interested in what you’re selling is with influencer marketing. The trick here is to find influencers that not only have a good number of followers, but get engagement; think quality over quantity. To be really effective, you should be concentrating on those with highly segmented audiences, often referred to as niche influencers.

To find influencers that suit your eCommerce brand and set up a successful influencer marketing strategy, follow these six steps:

Define your goals for influencer marketing.
Choose one influencer platform channel to start with before casting too wide a net.
Narrow down your niche on each platform to find influencers in line with what you are selling.
Strongly evaluate their engagement.
Approach influencers and brainstorm content ideas together for your brand.
Test your influencer shortlist with a post before making long-term or multi-post commitments.

To get a full rundown of each step, visit our How to Find the Best Influencers for Your eCommerce Brand post.

Bonus Content: Beginner’s Guide to Instagram Influencer Marketing for Online Store Owners

8. Use Content, Giveaways and Promotions to Drive Excitement (and Traffic)

Another tried-and-tested way you can bring heaps of traffic to your store is with contests, giveaways and/or promotions. This is something that you should add to your traffic-driving strategies once the previous fundamentals mentioned in this post have been laid. You also need to make sure that you find a way to make your promotions stand out and that you don’t run them too often, as this will take the ‘exclusivity’ out of it.

To run a successful promotion, you should:

First, clearly outline your promotion goals and budget
Make sure you push your promotion through all your platforms (social, email, PPC, etc.) and on your Shopify store
Plan and schedule your content marketing strategy
Make sure you have prepped your backend for the additional interest and sales
Go the extra mile by personalizing each promotion as much as possible

Are you a new Shopify store owner? Here are 6 eCommerce Sales Promotions that Convert Like No One’s Business to get you started!

9. Extend Your Selling Channels (Bonus Hack)

The last, and by no means least, tool in your bag of traffic-driving tricks is extending your sales channels. By adding new selling channels you can increase your brand visibility to new markets while increasing your revenue chances and expanding traffic streams.

Before you include marketplaces like Amazon and eBay, you will want to do your research first. Find marketplaces with more shoppers similar to your customers and make sure you add only one channel at a time. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to Successfully Sell Across Multiple eCommerce Channels.

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There you have it, 9 winning ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store! You can find more value-packed guides to boost your eCommerce traffic here.

Have more traffic questions? Post them in the comments below!

Nicole Blanckenberg

Nicole is a content writer at StoreYa with over sixteen years experience and flair for storytelling. She runs on a healthy dose of caffeine and enthusiasm. When she's not researching the next content trend or creating informative small business content, she's an avid beachgoer, coffee shop junkie and hangs out on LinkedIn.

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9 Must-Have Strategies to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store

1. Create a Winning DIY SEO Strategy