I often hear merchants stating that they have little to no traffic to their website, and little to no sales. While these are two very different topics, they also go hand-in-hand – before you can have sales, you need the traffic. And not just any traffic. You need high quality traffic that converts into sales.
Let’s end the “traffic detour” and talk about traffic, your audience, and optimizing for conversions.
Step 1 – Optimize for Conversions
Did you know that a typical conversion rate is around 2-3% of your website traffic? This means that only 2-3% of all people who make it to your website, will complete a purchase. Think about it this way – out of every 1,000 people who visit your website, only 20-30 of them will buy – the rest of them leave without making a purchase.
When a potential customer lands on your website, you have mere seconds to capture their attention and make them want to stay and look around. If they take that first quick look and are turned off by the overall look and feel of your website, those visitors leave your website immediately. Lost potential.
Let’s look at some of the most important things you can do right now to optimize your website in order to persuade potential customers to complete a purchase.
Overall Look and Layout
The look of your website plays a huge part in conversions. Your website needs to look professional and needs to be easy to navigate. Your logo should also be professional looking and easy to read. Overall, your website should entice a visitor to stay and look around for a while.
Thankfully the themes in the Shopify Theme Store are designed to create professional looking websites that are easy to navigate. But the way you customize your theme is something important to consider.
Color Scheme
The color scheme you choose can have a big impact on conversions. If the colors you select don’t look good together or make it hard to read the text on your website, your website won’t look professional and visitors aren’t going to have a sense of trust in your website. Choose your colors carefully! Consider the items you’re selling and determine if the color scheme you’re using is complimentary to your products. If the colors clash, the colors will draw more attention than your products.
Product Photos
Professional, clear, uncluttered photos can make or break your website. Photos alone can be a major factor in your conversion rate. If your photos look like they were taken in your garage with a huge pile of “junk” in the background, not only will it be difficult to tell exactly what’s for sale, those photos are also not going to look professional, nor will then compel a visitor to buy the item in the photo. Okay, maybe the junk pile in the background is an exaggeration (though I have seen it happen), but you get the idea.
Give serious consideration to your backgrounds to ensure the item you’re selling is what stands out – not your background.
For more information on professional photos, check out the article “How to Improve Your Ecommerce Sales By Improving Your Product Photos“.
Navigation
The way you set up your menus is another important factor in conversions. You need to make sure a customer can easily click through to your products in one or two clicks (never more than two clicks).
You also need to make sure you have all the important informational pages in your menus so you’re potential customers can find answers to their questions. For more information about the pages you need to include, check out the article “8 Information Pages Your Shopify Store Needs to Instill Trust“.
Titles and Descriptions
The titles you use and the descriptions you write also have an impact on conversions. If you describe your products using irrelevant keywords that don’t accurately describe your product, the visitor that lands on your website will see something other than what they expected, they’ll be disappointed, and will bounce from your website right away. You really need to use words that your customers use. These are not necessarily the words you, as a seller, would use. Make sure you do your keyword research!
For example, if you have a product called “Cat Bibs” that is a baby bib with a picture of a cat on it, a visitor searching for bibs for their cat (assuming a product like that even exists) would be disappointed when they land on your website and see baby bibs. This kind of traffic is low quality traffic because they landed on your website thinking they were going to a different kind of website. In this case, you should optimize that product title to “Baby Bibs with Cat Photos”. People searching for bibs for their pet cat won’t land on your website (which is is a good thing). Only people searching for that kind of item will land on your website, will be high quality traffic – you have what they are looking for, and that traffic converts into a sale.
For more information on crafting high-converting titles and descriptions, check out the articles “It’s All About the Titles” and “Time For a Content Audit“.
Use Analytics to Optimize Your Website
By using Google Analytics or the Analytics Reports in your Shopify Dashboard, you’ll be able to identify the pages of your website that have a high bounce rate, as well as pages where visitors don’t spend much time on. By looking closely at these pages, you’ll be able to optimize them to improve the length of time a visitor stays (and purchases).
All of these ideas are things you can do to optimize your website to increase conversions and attract high quality traffic.
The article “Increase Traffic to Your Website Using Google Analytics Acquisition Reports” can help you optimize your website.
Step 2 – Define Your Audience
Once you have your website optimized, you then need to think about who your audience is. Once you know your audience, you can then determine which actions for driving traffic are going to work best for each audience type.
Think of your audience in three general terms:
- Hot audience
- Warm audience
- Cold audience
Hot Audience
Here are people to consider as your hot audience:
- Your repeat customers.
- Customers and followers who interact with you on a regular basis on social media.
- Customers who respond to your email promotions.
- Customers who recommend your website to friends (word-of-mouth).
Warm Audience
Here are people to consider as your warm audience:
- Your one-time customers.
- Potential customers – people who have visited your website, but haven’t purchased from you.
- People who have signed up for your mailing list.
- People who interact with you occasionally on social media.
Cold Audience
Here are people to consider as your cold audience:
- People who have never heard of you and your website before.
- People who like the types of things you sell, but haven’t connected with you yet.
A Plan of Action
The actions you take to generate traffic should be based on the audience you want to target first.
For example, if you already have decent traffic and sales, targeting your “Hot” audience first might not be the best plan. They are already doing business with you, and if you take care of them right, hopefully they will continue to do business with you.
If you start with your “Cold” audience, it might take you awhile to see results. You WILL see results, but maybe not as quickly as you’d like.
If you start by targeting your “Warm” audience, you have a very good chance of driving more traffic. For example, this audience could be sent a special postcard in the mail to return to your shop to complete a second purchase. You could also create Facebook Retargeting Ads or Google Retargeting Ads to remind this audience to come back to your website. When they see your logo and your products randomly in their Facebook activity feed or randomly on the internet on various sites they visit, they are more likely to come back. If you send regular, interesting newsletters to your mailing list, you keep your shop name in front of these customers. And if you create something fun – a promotion, a contest, etc. on social media, they are likely to come back to your website and are also likely to share with their friends, which generates even more traffic as a Cold audience.
I’m not suggesting that you ignore your “Hot” audience or a “Cold” audience, I am merely saying KNOW your audience and then plan actions on how best to attract THAT audience. Each audience will be different.
If you’re trying to generate more traffic quickly, your “Warm” audience might be the best place to start.
Step 3 – Drive Traffic
Once you know who your audience is, and you’ve optimized your website for conversions, it’s time to use tactics to drive traffic.
There are many ways you can drive traffic to your store. This list is just a sample of things you can do.
Ideas to Increase Traffic:
- Send emails to existing customers.
- Write blog articles.
- Create and distribute business cards.
- Focus on being active on social media – Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are popular platforms for ecommerce.
- Grow an Instagram following and build brand awareness there.
- Tweet products on Twitter.
- Add new products to website.
- Focus on On Page SEO and Off Page SEO (link building).
- Use affiliate programs.
- Create ads to retarget visitors.
- Use the Google Shopping integration with Shopify.
- Work with blog influencers (send product in exchange for them writing about/promoting your item).
The article “How to Increase Traffic to Your New Shopify Store” will help.
More Information
For more information on optimizing your website, defining your audience, and driving traffic to your website, see our Resource Library on Pinterest. The Resource Library is filled with carefully selected articles that can help you with all aspects of your business.
What are your tips for optimizing your website for conversions?
What kinds of tools do you use to define your audience?
What tactics do you use to increase traffic to your website?
This is an excellent article. Very helpful information whether you are just starting out or trying to tweak your existing website. Thank you!