How To Grow An e-Commerce
( 0 to 24K Organic Traffic Monthly)
During the first worldwide lockdown in 2022, I decided to shift my business online. I decided that I should build myself an e-Commerce from scratch. But since I was already running my business in-store, I had no content to put online, no traffic for the store, and no social media accounts for marketing.
After two years, I’ve finally managed to gain 24k monthly organic traffic to my e-Commerce store, and I’m satisfied with the conversion rate as well.
The most important thing that became the reason for my e-commerce success came from learning SEO strategies from SEO industry experts and digital marketers.
Comprehending what my competitors were doing has helped me a lot in developing different strategies and techniques in order to grab the attention of potential customers.
Let me share with you the secret behind my success:
- How I made my first sale?
- How I got my first Backlink without paying?
- How I got my linkable assets?
- How I promoted my website?
- And much more stuff.
If you are planning on building an e-Commerce store from scratch or want to improve the organic reach of your existing online store, then you will for sure find these tips and techniques helpful. So, grab a cup of your favorite coffee or tea, and read on until the end of this article to get the most out of it.
Keep in mind that I went over and above to achieve my milestone for increasing the traffic of my website and gaining a high conversion rate over time. Success does not come overnight.
Write Unique Blogs
When I started my journey as an e-commerce store owner, I didn’t know the power of what blogs could do. As a layman, I didn’t know what I should write about as well. The only thing that I was aware of at that time was that the blog section of my website would speak about the nature of my store.
While searching the internet, I came across a lot of blog sites that have published blogs and articles similar to my store. So, I spent hours reading and learning about how to construct an informative blog.
I knew that whatever I was going to learn would help me construct a pitch-perfect blog.
My primary goal was to write something that made my store stand out among my competitors. For that, I had to write an article that was better than what was already available on the internet.
The nature and functionality of e-commerce stores are the same across the world, but I had to deliver something that made my business brand unique.
Writing blogs for e-Commerce is vital for marketing activity. Remember that writing a blog is different from writing a book, an essay, or a piece of news. The distinction? You will be writing for the people who might become your potential customers. This means that your articles ought to be engaging and informative, and their readability needs to be high.
Note: You should never be overwhelmed at the prospect of getting all of your ideas onto the screen.
1: Not All Blogs Should Be About Products
Who says that e-commerce blogs ought to be about products only? You need to first identify the purpose and then formulate the topics that complement your goals. To be honest, you will be talking to your potential customers via these blogs.
So, if you are constantly posting blogs about your products or services, then you need to know that your customers will think that they’re only focused on selling their products and not on providing information. This strategy will lead to losing your customer’s interest in your business.
Your blogs should be more about providing information to the customers or about simple life hacks that they can use in their daily routines. Such types of content are the most preferred and also read a lot.
2: Target The Customers With Relevant Titles
According to research, on average, a person spends only 37 – 40 seconds on a blog page. The first thing that any reader looks at is the title of the blog or article, which means that the title needs to be accurate to grab their attention.
Only this way can you let them know that this piece of content is meant for them. With an informative and unique title, you are enticing them to keep reading after the 40 seconds benchmark.
To find relevant titles that your target audience might be interested in, you will have to do research on what your competitors are doing, and you need to do the same.
3: Stay Clear Of The Passive Voice
As we’ve mentioned earlier that the blogs are just you talking to the potential customer. Instead of choosing passive voice, you need to opt for active voice. It really mimics the way you talk to anyone in your daily routine.
You’ll be wondering why voice matters, right? The simple answer is that using passive voice will result in overly wordy writing, and it will confuse the reader about the message you are trying to deliver.
4: Grammar Is Important
Most people do not regard this, but the key to creating a compelling blog is to keep grammar at the top of the priority list. You can expect people to trust you or your professional-looking website until the grammar is not right. That’s right; repeated grammatical mistakes can easily erode the credibility of your store over time.
With time, I was able to develop a unique style and voice that started to grab the attention of potential customers. The best way to keep your writing error-free is to use paid or free tools for correcting grammar mistakes and also to read your writing aloud. If anything sounds wrong, you need to change it right away.
For this, you can use different grammar-checking tools that are available online. But again, you need to proofread it yourself again because AI-based tools might correct the grammatical mistakes but might change the context of the content.
5: Keep The Sentences Short
No one likes to read long and lengthy paragraphs. The best thing you can do is to keep the sentences short and meaningful. This means that no more than 25% of the sentences in your blog should consist of over 20 words.
Because of social media, a lot of people scroll through their news feed quickly and forget what they’ve just viewed. This is why their attention span has decreased. So, writing short but meaningful sentences is what you should be focusing upon.
6: Use Headings And Sub-Headings
Making proper headings and sub-heading of your content helps not only the reader but also the search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo to scan the page and understand what it is about.
The best header will contain information about the following paragraph. So basically, the headings aid in improving the overall readability and quality of the content.
Getting Backlinks For Your Store
Once you’ve succeeded in constructing awesome content for your website, you now need to get in contact with renowned bloggers. At this time, you ought to identify various websites that mention the topics that are being covered by your blog and reach out to them to get links for your e-Commerce site.
We all know that credibility is the most important factor in the world of digital marketing. It is always a good idea to have someone vouch for you than to preach yourself credibility. When it comes to online marketing, getting backlinks from high-authority websites is the best way. Consider the backlinks as a vote of confidence.
Getting backlinks from high-authority websites is one of the top-ranking factors in SEO. It helps rank your website high in the SERP and also aids in getting steady traffic. To be honest, there are thousands of e-Commerce platforms similar to yours. How you rank your website on the first page of the search engine is dependent upon the number of backlinks.
How To Get Good Quality Backlinks
1: Publish Original Content
You will never be able to get backlinks from any website until your website does not contain content that is up to the mark. Most guest blogging websites have publishing criteria, and they only tend to publish your articles if they are written according to them.
2: Ask For Backlinks For Unlinked Mentions
Let’s suppose that your website has been live for a while, and there is a good chance that a lot of people would already be talking about your business brand. What you need to do is, reach out to them and ask the owner of the website to turn the mentions of your website into backlinks.
Don’t worry if you do not know how to find unlinked mentions. All you need to do is create a Google alert for your business brand name and search for it in the Google News section.
3: Publish Free Tools
Always remember the stronger the reason to link to your website, the easier it will be for you to get backlinks to your website. Trust me; the free tools are among the strongest reasons. It is simple, by linking to the tools, the website owners are achieving their own milestones. Tools such as maps, checklists, templates, and calculators are the most popular tools.
4: Use Your Business Traffic
One of the best ways is to examine your business network and see if there is any possible way for your contacts to give you a backlink to your website as I’ve mentioned before that a backlink is a vote of confidence.
You need to pay attention to the people who are social media influencers, well-known on the internet, or work for an educational institution.
You can always reach out to them and offer something in return for a backlink.
5: Get Your Products Reviews
Well, if you are getting backlinks for your online store, then keep in your mind that you have an advantage over non e-commerce websites; you can send the owner or the author your products for a review. This is probably one of the best and most popular ways to get a backlink and also for driving high-quality traffic to your website.
You can also ask social media influencers, guest bloggers, or vloggers to provide you with a backlink when doing a product review.
Get Hands-On Mentions
Many people take this process for granted. But in reality, the mentions are considered to be essential for the success of any website.
The more your brand is seen, the higher your chance of you getting backlinks for your website.
Nothing gets better than building linkable assets when it comes to grabbing high authority backlinks without paying.
Keep in mind that your potential customers will always want to link with the linkable assets, which means that you will not need to work hard in order to create them.
First of all, adding a blog section to your website is a good option until or unless you can retain good content that is not only informative but also unique.
Apart from the content, you can also invest some time in developing free and useful SEO-related tools. Just make sure that the tools you are providing the people on the internet are totally free of cost, offer great value, and are easy to use.
Doing this really helped me a lot in building a relationship with my potential audience. So, if you want to build a strong relationship with your audience, then you really need to invest in linkable assets and free tools.
Update Content With New Updates
What I’ve seen throughout the years of working is that search engines tend to update their ranking factors more than 300 times a year. This means that it is essential that you keep up with the updates and make changes to the content to maintain the SERP ranking. But search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo do not post the updates, which is why you need to figure out the changes on your own.
I opted for writing comprehensive content that was associated with the “first mover approach,” and it brought wonders. After a week, I started to promote my blogs and articles on different sites. To my surprise, my blogs were welcomed by the search engine. After successfully publishing the, my blog’s stat was:
- 4000 Views of my Blog
- 5000+ visitors on my site
- 15+ Backlinks
- 100 new subscribers
- 20 Mentions
- The ranking of my website increased on SERP
Everything happened in just a few weeks, and I was astonished to see the results.
Promote Content On Social Media
Let’s just think for a moment that you’ve written content on your website’s blog section. Do you think that it is enough to get backlinks from High authority websites? Well, the answer is no! Promoting your piece of content on different social media platforms is as important as writing it. Honestly, publishing content on your blog section of the website is just not enough sometimes.
In order to maximize your efforts, you need to consistently promote your content on various social media platforms. One of my first tactics was to seed content on renowned social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. During the initial stage of my website, I used to post a lot on Twitter and Facebook to build a strong network. Whereas after two years, my hard work paid off, and now I use these platforms to boost my content exposure.
Nowadays, the best platform for sharing content to get a good reach is Linkedin. Trust me, and this platform is the best when it comes to building a strong network. However, if you are in the initial stage of your online business and want to reach out to your potential customers, then it is highly recommended that you, too should, think about promoting your content on different social media platforms.
Don’t Forget The Quality
When it comes to writing articles for your e-commerce business website, you should always remember that its quality should be unmatched. People on the internet are looking for informative content that they can use in their daily life or look for useful tips and tricks. If you are not providing them with either one of them, then you can rest assured that no one would want to stay on your blog page for more time.
There is a reason why people say “quality over quantity.” You need to spend a lot of time when writing an article for your e-Commerce website because you will have to do research to understand the topic and then write it down in your own words.
Your aim should not be to write long-length content. You need to write detailed, holistic, and comprehensive content that people find useful. And yes, don’t think about the word count; think about the topic depth. More often, a good article can be written in just 800 words because nowadays, no one has the attention span to read something that is too long.
Also, think about it in this way the audience you are targeting has access to the internet. The internet is full of resources that they might get help from, so write something that they find useful.
Think about it this way, if you are getting everything from one place, will you think of going somewhere else? No, right? The same is the case when you are writing an article or a blog. You need to build trust with your target audience.
Building A Strong Brand Network
You will not be able to flourish your e-Commerce business with only backlinks or SEO. Building a strong brand network is important as well. All the things that I’ve done in the past two years have helped me grow my business and its network.
By sharing content on different social media platforms, you will be able to meet new people who will be interested in collaborating with your business brand. For example, if you are selling shirts and trousers on your platform, then a person who sells jackets or sweaters might be interested in working with you. This way, you both will be able to grow your business.
Keep in mind that if you want your online business to be a success, then you need to work with collaboration.
Don’t Be Afraid To Fail
The first thing that you need to know is that failure is a part of success. I’ve tried a lot of things during my journey, and most of them didn’t work as planned. But this doesn’t mean that I should quit. You never lose. You either win, or you learn. This is a mindset of a winner.
Your business will not start to gain profit just after one day. Business is like sowing a seed into the ground; you will have to water it daily and wait for a long time to reap its benefits.
To make your business run, you have to try different techniques, strategies, and tactics. Keep track of everything that you do and repeat what works. Building a brand from scratch needs a lot of patience and consistency. You will see the results over time.
Summary
This was my journey of building my website from scratch and reaching 24k monthly visitors on my e-Commerce website. There is no doubt about the fact that I wanted to quit selling online because of many hurdles, but I was clear in my head that I could achieve my goals, so I did not stop at any point. I kept on pushing myself when anything let me down. Now, when I look back on where I started, it makes me happy that I have achieved so much. I can confidently say that if you are consistent and have great focus, you can succeed in anything. The sky is the limit when it comes to making things happen.
