How to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store
Once you've created a Shopify store, you need traffic in order to make sales. But, with over 4 million Shopify stores on the web, it takes some strategic moves to be found—first of all—and then to encourage online shoppers to visit your store rather than someone else's.
When thinking about how to drive traffic (in terms of quantity) to your Shopify store, it's also important to focus on the quality and relevance of the traffic and the likelihood of that traffic converting into sales. Ideally, you want to find the people who are the most likely to be interested in your product offerings, help them to make an initial purchase, and ultimately motivate them to become loyal customers.
Strategy #1: Top-Quality Products & Website
Driving traffic to your online store long-term means that you need to minimize your bounce rate. To achieve this, your website, products, and customer service need to be top-notch from the very beginning so that people will stay on your website once they arrive, (eventually) make a purchase, and come back to purchase from you again.
According to data from Sixads, the number one source of revenue for Shopify stores is direct traffic, which means that people type your website address directly into the URL search bar. To set yourself up for this kind of traffic, you need to put in the work beforehand to give potential customers an experience they'll want to repeat.
Website Best-Practices to Minimize Bounce Rate
Make sure that your website loads quickly.
Make sure that your headings clearly and accurately reflect the contents of each page.
Make sure that your website is easy to navigate. Display the following clearly and in a prominent place:
Home page
Category and product pages
Contact details
About us
Blog
Shipping policy
Returns policy
Privacy, data, and cookies policies
Include clear calls to action (CTAs) on your home page and all of your commercial pages so that customers know what you want them to do and don't have to poke around to find out how to do it. For example:
Shop now
Buy it now
Sign up for your subscription
Go to checkout
Sign up for our e-newsletter
Become a member
Donate
Refer a friend
Contact us
Invest in professional product photography. High-quality images foster trust in your brand and motivate people to buy your products. Poor-quality product images will send potential customers running and the resulting bounce rate will hurt your ranking in Google.
Build trust with social proof and trust badges. People who visit your Shopify store will be more likely to stay and consider making a purchase if they can see evidence that your brand is legitimate and that your product is worth purchasing.
Feature third-party reviews and ratings prominently on the home page and commercial pages.
Feature press coverage, awards, and accreditations on the home page and in the footer.
Feature trust badges wherever relevant, including your SSL certificate (all Shopify stores have these), antivirus and firewall badges, and secure checkout badge(s).
Make the checkout easy and quick to use. Customers will often abandon their cart if the checkout process is too complicated or their credit or debit card is not supported. Make it easy for people to check out by allowing them to save their payment details for next time, offering an option to "checkout as guest," and using a payment processor that accepts international cards. Currently, Shopify Payments supports ecommerce merchants in 21 countries and retail merchants (POS) in 14 countries. However, there are over 100 third-party payment gateways you can connect to accept payments if you are based in a non-supported country.
Make sure your products are second to none. Once a few people try your product, they'll only come back (and bring their friends) if your product is top-quality and satisfies the need or desire that brought them to your store. Before you launch, do your homework with in-depth market research, product A/B testing, and website A/B testing to make sure your product and website are traffic-worthy.
Strategy #2: Invest in SEO & Content Marketing
The second top revenue source for Shopify stores (according to Sixads) is organic traffic. This refers to Shopify store traffic that comes from people's queries on search engines like Google and Bing.
In order to rank in search results and help potential customers find you through organic search, you need to:
Optimize your website and web pages for search engines.
Provide more potential points of connection with strategic content marketing.
Optimize Your Website and Web Pages for Search Engines
Google uses algorithms to index and rank Shopify websites, so you need to understand these algorithms and optimize your website to help Google read your site and rank it appropriately.
Shopify stores automatically come optimized for Google in the sense that they come with a sitemap and schema to help Google understand your site. However, to fully leverage Shopify's capabilities to help you generate organic traffic, you’ll need to implement the steps on our Shopify SEO checklist, including the following:
Use keyword-optimized title tags and meta descriptions that match the search intent of internet users. For example, people who are searching for the keyword "winter coat for dog" are most likely looking for a product page. Conversely, people who are searching for the phrase "why is my hair falling out" are most likely looking for an informative article rather than a product page.
Publish unique product descriptions. Each page should include unique and high-relevant written content that’s optimized with the relevant product and brand keywords. This will help Google and interested online shoppers understand, find, and enter your site.
Leverage internal linking strategies to show Google the relative importance of the pages on your site and how they relate to one another. For example, product pages should include a link back to the relevant umbrella category page. Blog articles should link to related blog articles, categories, and products.
If you don't have the technical know-how, consider engaging the help of a Shopify SEO agencyto help you optimize your Shopify store. This includes things like finding and fixing broken links, making sure the structure of your URLs is consistent, and adding metadata and links to your images to make it easier for customers to find your store (in image search) and make a purchase.
Strategic Content Marketing
Getting your commercial pages to come up in search results takes work, but if you really want to generate traffic, you absolutely must have an onsite blog. Highly relevant, useful, and well-researched blog content helps you establish yourself as the authority in your niche and—from an SEO perspective—helps you connect with potential customers who are at the research stage of the buying journey, generating more traffic.
To make your blog as effective as possible:
Identify your target audience. Who is most likely to be attracted to your products? Determine their age, gender, occupation, interests, geographical location, motivations, and pain points. Bringing the wrong people to your Shopify store will only increase your bounce rate, which, as we've mentioned, is something you want to avoid.
Identify blog topics that are highly relevant to your target audience. Create a content map to help you brainstorm ideas for articles to publish on your blog. At first, you'll want to focus tightly on your main niche and product offerings. Then, you can gradually branch out to topics that are complementary but not directly focused on your core offerings.
For example: You have a Shopify store that sells handmade Victorian-style men's and women's clothing. Your initial blog posts should focus on things like "Features of Victorian Clothing," "Types of Victorian Clothing," and "History of Victorian Clothing." Later on, you could branch out to topics relating to Victorian culture, lifestyle, home decor suggestions, and so on.
Identify relevant keywords. After selecting topics, you need to identify the exact (or near-match) phrases that people actually search for when they want to learn about the topics you plan to write about. There are some free tools you can use for this, including Google autosuggest, "people also ask," and keywordtool.io, as well as paid tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. In general, the best keywords to go for are the ones that have a low keyword difficulty (i.e. you have a chance of ranking for them) and sufficient search volume to make the search queries worth your time answering.
Ultimately, your aim is to rank on the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs) for as many queries as you can. This will help you to establish your authority in your niche and bring more traffic—people who are interested in your niche—to your Shopify store.
Google Ads
Aside from organic search, your Shopify store can appear in search results with Google Search Ads and Google Shopping Ads.
Google Search Ads. Google Search Ads, which are charged on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, raise your webpage listings above organic search results. You can use the Google Keyword Planner to help you find relevant, competitive keywords to use in your ads.
Google Shopping Ads. Google Shopping Ads give your products a chance to be featured in "Shopping" results. These ads are also charged on a PPC basis. To use this tool effectively, you'll need to optimize your data feed to make sure your product listings in Google Shopping are accurate and up-to-date.
Strategy #3: Leverage of Word-of-Mouth
While your reach as an ecommerce business is probably either national or global, your authority is highest with the people who already know and trust you. When—or even before—you open your doors for business, reach out to your immediate networks and tell them about your new Shopify store. Better still, give them an incentive to come and check it out!
Ideas for Driving Traffic with Word-of-Mouth and Referral Strategies
Casually post about your new Shopify store (once) on your personal social media pages.
Invite potentially interested contacts to like and follow your new business on social media.
Offer contests, prizes, giveaways, and promotional codes for liking, following, sharing, rating, reviewing, and/or tagging your business pages or website on social media.
Let your family know about your new Shopify store at a family gathering or via a family email list or WhatsApp group.
Important note: With all of these strategies, you are not asking your contacts to buy anything from your store. Your aim here is to build brand awareness, generate traffic, and start to build authority through social proof.
Strategy #4: Become Active on Social Media
This strategy is closely tied to strategy #3. If you're serious about driving traffic to your Shopify store, you must get active on social media. While it's not necessary to open an account on every social media platform that exists, you'll want to engage on at least two or three of the top social media platforms.
According to Statista, the social media platforms on which shoppers were most likely to make purchases in 2022 (in order) were:
Facebook
Instagram
TikTok
Messaging platforms (including WhatsApp)
Pinterest
Additionally, you might consider posting to:
YouTube
Twitter
Snapchat
LinkedIn
When choosing a platform, it's important to think about your target audience and where they're most likely to hang out.
If your target audience is mostly 20-year-olds, prioritize Facebook and TikTok.
If your target audience is mostly male, prioritize Facebook and YouTube.
If your target audience is mostly moms, prioritize Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
If your target audience is mostly professionals, prioritize Facebook and LinkedIn.
We've written previously about how to grow your ecommerce store using Facebook. However, the following tips are essential, no matter which platform you use:
Post regularly. Create profiles on your chosen platforms and post content regularly. It can help to create a content calendar for your social channels and schedule your posts to be published automatically at the times when your target audience is most likely to be online.
Optimize your posts for sharing and conversions. For social media, use high-quality eye-catching images and native videos that are optimized for each platform. Include a link to the relevant page on your website and a call to action, if appropriate. Make your content valuable, interesting, and share-worthy so that your followers will be motivated to share your posts.
Reply to comments and messages. When people post comments on your social media pages, reply quickly, helpfully, and politely. This shows your followers that you're genuinely interested, that you're responsive, and that you will be likely to help them if they have any issues with an order in the future.
Boost traffic with paid ads. Once your business pages are up and running, boost your business with paid social media ads, such as Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads, Pinterest Ads, etc. As with content marketing, your paid ads should be highly relevant to your target audience and have a clear call to action and link to the relevant target page (via a button) to make sure you get a good return on investment.
Fortunately, third-party apps are available in the Shopify Store—including Messenger Channel, Marsello, and Facebook & Instagram Shopping by CedCommerce—to help you manage your social media posts and social messaging from your Shopify account. Simply add the plugins you want to use, plan your strategy, and start posting!
Strategy #5: Reach Other Brands’ Audiences
For every niche, there are already people publishing on these topics who have a devoted following. To get some of that traffic—and hopefully some of that market share—it makes sense to get in front of their audiences and show them what you have to offer.
There are myriad ways to leverage third-party customer bases, but these are some of the most popular:
Guest posts. Contribute relevant blog articles to established blogs in exchange for a backlink to your Shopify site (placed contextually in the article or in the author bio). To find relevant blogs, search for "guest post guidelines [your niche]" in Google.
Press coverage. Let the press know what you're up to for a chance to be featured in the media. This could be in the context of a new, innovative product offering, a brand collaboration, an award, or even a charity event sponsorship. You can also publish original market research for a chance to be featured on high-authority news sites like Forbes.
Influencer marketing. Collaborate with an influencer in your niche (someone who would be likely to use your product) to get your product in front of their audience. Smaller influencers can be a good choice because they're less likely to be inundated with requests from brands and tend to have smaller, highly devoted followings. Once you've found one or more appropriate influencers, there are several strategies you can use:
Offer them free product samples in exchange for featuring your product on their social media page.
Ask them for advice on something relevant to your niche, include their advice in an onsite blog post, and send them the link to the post in the hope that they'll share it with their followers.
Invite them to take over your social media account for a day and post regular updates throughout the day.
Invite them to become a brand ambassador.
Sponsored podcasts. Approach the host of a podcast in your niche to request a sponsored podcast. The host will typically interview you about your area of expertise and your Shopify store will be featured in an ad during the show.
Unboxing and product review videos. To drive traffic to your Shopify store from YouTube, approach a YouTuber who publishes unboxing or review videos, and offer them a free product in exchange for a video. Provide a link to your Shopify store to be included in the video description or on a button on the video itself.
Brand collaborations. Collaborating with related brands is a great way to increase your mutual exposure and drive traffic to your Shopify store. For example, you could get one of your products included in another brand's subscription box or launch a product or product line in partnership with another brand. If you try either of these strategies, make sure to start out with a clear written agreement about how you’ll divide the revenue.
Gift guides. Being included in a third-party gift guide can help to drive traffic to your store. These kinds of guides can be competitive, so start with website owners with whom you already have a good relationship.
Affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing, you pay a small commission to other people to market your products for you. This is a low-effort and cost-effective way to increase traffic to your Shopify store.
Markets, conferences, and trade shows. This is an oldy but a goody. Set up a stall at relevant markets, conferences, and trade shows to network and connect with interested customers and contacts. While this strategy is probably more localized than your Shopify store's reach, the people who discover you at the event could potentially promote your brand through their social media networks which, as we know, are global.
Strategy #6: Stay in Touch with Customers
Once people have visited your website once, you want to keep them coming back! Returning visitors will make up the bulk of your Shopify store traffic and are more likely to buy something than first-time visitors because they are already familiar with your brand.
Push Notifications
Push notifications send alerts to people who have previously visited your site. These alerts can include reminders to complete an abandoned purchase, notifications about discount offers, notifications about new blog posts or videos, and brand updates. There are numerous apps you can use to implement push notifications in your Shopify store, including PushEngage, PushAlert, and Firepush.
Text Marketing
Text marketing can help you increase your traffic significantly. In SimpleTexting’s 2022 survey, 55% of the businesses surveyed said that they text their customers, 70% of the customers surveyed said that they opt to receive text messages from businesses, and the majority of businesses reported text-message click-through rates of 20 to 35%.
To build a contact list for texts, offer first-time website visitors the chance to enter a draw or receive a discount code when they sign up for text newsletters. Once they’ve signed up, it’s important to give customers the opportunity to unsubscribe at any time and enable them to reply to your texts. In the survey cited above, 61% of the customers surveyed said that they wanted the ability to text a business back.
Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns had a 93% return on investment in 2021 (according to data from the Association of National Advertisers), making this an important channel for increasing traffic. According to aggregated 2016-2023 data from Barilliance, the email type with the highest conversion rate is Email My Cart, followed by Browse Abandonment emails and Shopping Cart Abandonment emails. However, in addition to these kinds of reminder emails, marketing emails can help you grow traffic long-term by creating and maintaining relationships with interested customers.
For best results, email newsletters should include helpful, valuable information for people who are interested in your products, brand updates, special offers and discounts, and links to the relevant pages on your site. For the greatest impact, use an app that allows you to personalize your email campaigns for individual customers and customer segments. If you use Shopify Email, you can create and send personalized marketing emails directly from your Shopify account.
How to Build Your Email List
You can build your email list by offering a free product (such as a white paper or e-book) or a discount code in exchange for a potential customer’s email address. To make sure you don't erode potential customers' trust, make it easy to subscribe or unsubscribe at any time—without having to sign in to their customer account in order to do so—and assure them of this fact at the moment they sign up. It's also helpful to be upfront about the frequency of emails and allow subscribers to opt in or out of things like daily digests and weekly roundups.
Customer Loyalty Programs
In addition to staying in touch with your current customers, offering loyalty rewards points can motivate them to visit your store and make a purchase when they might not otherwise have been planning to do so.
Make it as easy as possible for customers to sign in to their accounts, redeem points, and make a purchase. If you’re using Shopify Email, you can embed a checkout button within the email for hassle-free product purchases.
Generating the Right Traffic Is an Investment, But One that Pays Off in Time
Generating traffic to your Shopify store takes time, effort, and (almost always) money. However, according to internal data from Ernst & Young, strategically invested marketing dollars can generate four and even five-fold returns.
When you choose a strategy to implement and execute, use data tools like Google Analytics and Shopify Analytics to measure the effectiveness of each strategy in boosting traffic (and sales) over time. Using a few different strategies—and identifying which campaigns are performing the best—will help you to boost your traffic and ultimately your bottom line.
