How To Increase eCommerce Website Traffic During COVID-19

Have you noticed a drop in your website traffic since the start of COVID-19? Many businesses have seen that their website traffic has not only decreased but experiences times of surges and lows. Currently, website traffic is volatile and most of these changes have to do with the current climate. That doesn’t mean that these factors are uncontrollable but understanding why website traffic numbers are changing is the first step to building a better website view rate.

Reasons for Website Traffic Changes

Put simply, buyer’s needs have changed. Currently, most online shopping is conducted for essential items so this is where most buyers are spending their money. Buyer’s interests have also changed. At the moment there is more of a focus on activities that people can do at home including baking and health and fitness so, websites that publish recipes (particularly the ever popular banana bread) are experiencing an uptick.

Next we’ll look at how you can increase your efforts to gain more website traffic. Are you ready?

Tools You’ll Need:

SEO

SEO plays a huge role increasing how much traffic comes through your website so it makes sense to revise your SEO.

Email Marketing

You may need to scale your email marketing efforts during this time so ensuring you have the right tool for the job is key. Check out this great comparison guide by Piesync to find the best email marketing tool to support your business during COVID-19

Social Media

Social media is generally an important marketing tool for any eCommerce and during the pandemic these tools can boost your business. In this guide We’ll learn how you can maximise your social media marketing to gain more website traffic.

The Method

#01 Keyword Evaluation

The first thing anyone who is experiencing a decrease in traffic should do is keyword research. This means looking at the current top keywords used in searches, looking at your keywords and checking the keywords that your competitors use. In doing so this will give you a better chance of ranking higher in some of the current top Google searches.

#02 Social Listening

One of the most useful ways of increasing your website traffic is by knowing what customers are talking about and what they want. Social listening is one of the best ways to conduct this research, giving you insights into what people are talking about, what topics and trends are hot and what your competitors are talking about. This research can be applied to your SEO keywords and the language you use when targeting audiences with social media ads.

#03 Optimise your email marketing with rewards

Your contact list is a goldmine of potential. These are people who are ready to engage with your business and have opted to do so. While you might be sending out your usual email campaigns, you can attract more of your contacts by offering them something. This could be a coupon to apply when making a purchase or even a free download to something. The aim is to get contacts to your website so don’t forget to add links to your pages.

#04 Contact Your Loyal Customers

Similar to rewarding your contacts, this is where you solely target past customers. There is truth in the idea that customers that have had a positive shopping experience with a business are more likely to buy from them again. In fact, during the pandemic, a lot of buyers are shopping with businesses that are familiar to them. Retargeting marketing is the best way of doing this and can be done through email or social media, or both. This is where you might offer past customers free shipping, a percentage of their next purchase or even ask them to refer a friend to receive a discount. Or you could even drop them a simple message saying hello and let them know you’re still open for sales.

#05 Try a Lookalike Audience

You can reach people who have similar interests and online behaviour to your current subscribers by targeting them with ads. Facebook does this by taking your contact list and matching their social profiles with their emails to find other profiles that are similar to those contacts. This method will give you the opportunity to target new audiences that are more likely to interact with your businesses and hopefully give you those all-important website clicks.

#06 Shift Your Sell

While customers are less likely to buy non-essential items at the moment, they are still engaging with publications and are especially looking for things they can do at home. Blogs and video how-tos and tutorials or even workshop kits are a great way of engaging with your audience to encourage them to visit your website. For example, crafts is on the rise at the moment with people looking to take up new hobbies or keep their children entertained. A business that might usually sell handmade jewelry might produce a series of DIY blogs or videos for their people to do at home which will bring more people to their website where they might look at what the seller has to offer. The same business might produce DIY kits for customers to purchase, this gives the seller some revenue whilst providing the customer with an activity to do at home.

Top Tips for managing a traffic increase to your website

Make sure your website can handle heavier traffic 

Now you know how to increase your website traffic, you need to make sure that your website is ready to handle the surge of traffic. 70% of consumers say a website’s loading time affects their willingness to buy, websites that take longer to load will turn a customer off so it’s crucial to ensure that your website is fast enough to manage an increase. You can do this by using a speed checker such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights. If it’s slow you may need to upgrade your hosting package to gain extra bandwidth.

Get your website up to date 

More customers are coming to your website but your website isn’t as fresh as it could be. For example, if you sell popular essential items, these products should be at the forefront of your website, showcasing what you sell to encourage customers to purchase from your business.

Make it easier for customers to make a purchase 

Customers like to shop with ease, after all, what is internet shopping for if it isn’t easier? Make your customer’s buying experience smoother by adding a “Quick Buy” option to your products.

Stay Powered Up By Your Analytics 

Keeping track of your analytics is one of the best ways to measure your progress. Of course you will notice if your website has a surge of new visitors and hopefully purchases, however, analytics aren’t just useful for tracking page views. Analytics can provide you with an in-depth look at how your website visitors are interacting with your website. This includes, where they clicked onto your website (Google Search Results, Facebook etc,), how much time visitors are spending on your website and which pages they visit. This will help you gage where your most active visitors are coming from so you can look at how to improve your efforts in the channels that aren’t working as well.