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In the cut-throat world of online selling, where competition in every industry is at its peak; simply owning a website is not even an option. No matter how good your website is, without the proper website maintenance, it is only a redundant liability for your business. There are various factors to look into when planning your online store maintenance for disruption. The most important of them all is improving the website traffic. Bringing traffic for your online business itself is a vast ocean, so in this blog, we will be discussing the top 8 effective ways to bring traffic to the online stores with best practices:
Keyword Research:
The first step of getting the most online store traffic is by proactively focusing on the best keywords. Website content will always open new doors for your business if you rank top in keyword research. This will make your online store visibility at the top. So always make sure to include relevant and audience-specific keywords to lead and gain your competitive advantage. It is a common myth to stuff keywords with higher search volumes, but that is not the case. Keywords should be used as naturally as possible to brush aside the noise and make sure to engage the users without diverting them from the message you’re trying to convey. It’s critically important that you should use keywords throughout the content, which includes the meta description or the page title, headers, footers, main URL, etc.
Paid Advertisements:
While organic traffic is very useful in building up a brand, it is always important to use paid methods at first to bring in the traffic. Search engine paid search display advertising, social media marketing, and so on are all ways of increasing online traffic and making your brand known to the public. But always have a strategy for your paid advertisements and make sure to incline them with your vision and goals. Every advertisement method has some pros and cons, and so do paid advertisements.
The pros of paid advertisements are:
- Paid advertisements will always give you instant results. It is very useful in the initial phases of a brand awareness program. But, that doesn’t mean that you can’t use it later.
- Since you are only targeting the right people in the paid advertisement, it will always help you in fostering a strong relationship to look out for that specific need in the life of your prospects.
- Lastly, it is always more cost-effective than the traditional ways in which the Ads are bombarded for the generalized audience, who has very little or no need of your product and services. Such types of triggers may irritate your prospects and sometimes lead to the dawn of the brand you always dreamed of.
While paid advertisements have their pros, their cons cannot be neglected too:
- It is not budget-friendly. Especially if you are a small startup or company, it is very much expensive for you since on a day-to-day basis it becomes very difficult to handle.
- Paid Ads are designed to show the targeted audience your offerings, but they are not designed to analyze if the users are getting frustrated or not. A lot of Ad bursts at your audience may lead to disregard against your brand.
Be Active in your Social Media Pages:
Let’s be honest, people basically trust a brand these days based on their social media presence. The more social media followings you have, the easier it becomes for people to trust your product and services. These days social media is not only just about brand enhancement but also a gateway to improving the traffic for your online store. People always spend hours these days on social media rather than on google search engines to search for what they need. Hence, one of the best bets on increasing traffic to your website is by investing in social media channels to promote your company by its brand.
Improve your On-Page SEO:
On-page SEO is an approach of making content keeping in mind how they will be ranked at the top in the search engines. As important as it is to get traffic for the website quickly, it is also important to build this traffic organically with slow and consistent efforts. After all, Ads will get your product and services sold quickly but not for the long term. Tailoring your content for search engines will help you achieve perfect brand positioning. Make sure to make the most of image alt text, create internal links to new content, and most importantly focus on meta tags, as they matter a lot when it comes to optimizing your on-page SEO.
Go After Referral:
Referral marketing is one of the best ways of getting legit traffic into your account. It is almost like word-of-mouth marketing but with the paid edition. People always tend to trust others while making a purchase decision in their life. Be it celebrities or their friends, referral marketing takes advantage of investing in someone who already has a brand presence. When these associations promote your product and services, people trust them and end up buying them.
Email Marketing:
Email marketing has been in the industry for a long time now. But just because it is old, doesn’t imply it to be redundant too. It might not be as effective as paid or on-page SEO, but still, it manages to bring in a huge amount of traffic. The only thing to be kept in mind is to make sure you don’t blast your target audience with non-stop emails about each and every single thing in your product and services.
Make Sure Your Site is Responsive:
Earlier people only used to visit a website via desktop, but long gone are the days when people use a laptop or a desktop to open a site. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices and tablets to search for outstanding offerings, the era of desktop/laptop browsing has gone. This demands from you to make your website visible to the general public on mobile as well as handy gadgets to make sure you don’t lose them for the business opportunities. Leaving your mobile website unresponsive leaves a very unprofessional touch, so please ensure you offer them the best user experience.
Website Performance:
In this fast-paced world, time is of the essence. People usually lose their patience when something takes too long. So make sure you don’t make people wait with your slow website load time. Some of the best practices to achieve this are:
- Make sure the JSS and CSS are minified
- Make sure the images are minified
- Make sure technology-wise it is updated to the latest version
- Make sure the site is being frequently monitored for bugs and fixes
Today building up an online store with best practices and consistency in user experience is critically important for each and every business across the globe. To ensure a seamless experience, online businesses must focus on website maintenance irrespective of the platform they are using. After all, the key to staying at the top is always to make sure you are constantly upgrading yourself from time to time.
In case you need a trusted online store maintenance partner for your website in 2022, take a look at our offerings here.
