How To Drive Traffic To Shopify Stores: 14 Proven Strategies

How do I drive more traffic to my Shopify store? - something that every store owner wonders at least once a day.

And we get it. It's not easy by any means. All the tactics are out there, like 100s of ideas, and everyone's trying the same stuff.

But there are things that have a high success rate - stuff that is working well even as we talk :)

And this is what this post is about - 14 ideas that have a slightly better chance at working in 2024.

Let's go:

1. Spark online conversations

2. List your products on Google Shopping

3. Draw high-intent traffic through referrals

4. Hustle and get featured in popular lists/listicles

5. Push notifications to pull shoppers back to your store

6. Loyalty programs never get old

7. Content marketing to bring new customers

8. Work on micro conversions

9. Run captivating social media campaigns

10. Make use of unconventional paid media

11. Get pinners to shop from you

12. Set your on-page SEO right

13. Let’s do a little technical SEO

14. Last pillar of SEO - Off-page

Methods to drive traffic to your Shopify website

1. Spark online conversations

The ‘thanks’ for the first sale of any eCommerce website usually goes to their family, friends or close network.

And what’s to stop them from driving your 500th sale as well?

To drive traffic through your network:

✅ Tell your social media connections about your business - Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook followers etc.

✅ Share your business with groups you are a part of - friends, college network etc.

✅ Request your family members and friends to share your website with their connections

✅ Post your store to Reddit - forums and subforums

✅ Join online communities on Facebook and let the members know about your products

2. List your products on Google Shopping

Google has opened a whole new world of opportunities for eCommerce business owners with its free Google Shopping feature.

The shopping listings appear in the shopping tab, Google search, Google images and YouTube.

To optimize for the Google shopping ads:

✅ Use the keyword in the title

✅ Use a feed management tool to map the images correctly to the query

✅ A/B test which images work for you - stock or lifestyle

✅ Add alt tags to the images

✅ Submit your entire inventory on the product data feed

✅ Make sure to populate the optional attributes as well such as color, size, shipping and return etc.

3. Draw high-intent traffic through referrals

While people give and take shopping recommendations all the time, a little incentive acts as a massive push for them to talk about your eCommerce store.

Moreover, a referral program is a win-win strategy, so why not?

Start by planning your program - offer something that makes sense to your customers.

For example, if you own a beauty store, offer a discount or a free item from a new line.

Some referral templates that you can take inspiration from are:

✅ Refer X number of friends, get Y product/s free

✅ Have X number of friends purchase, get Y discount/product free

✅ Earn X points on every referral/purchase through referral

✅ Give X, get X

To add it neatly to your website,

✅ Find space for your referral program on your homepage

✅ Create a referral landing page

✅ Write a clear headline (Could be as simple as: Get a free X for you and your friends!)

✅ Explain the program benefits and rules

✅ Include FAQs and T&Cs

✅ Don’t forget to mention a few testimonials

✅ Provide multiple sharing options for the referral message/link and code

Make sure to let your customers know about the program through emails, pop-ups, banners and other channels of communication.

Rothy’s has created a very simple yet effective referral program wherein all the user has to do is:

1. Create an account
2. Enter the email address of the friend
3. Share the link to the website with them

When the friend opens the link they can enter their email address and avail the discount.

4. Hustle and get featured in popular lists/listicles

You don’t always have to appear in the product search results; you can be present where shoppers are looking for inspiration - this is where gift guides come into the picture.

Shoppers search for gifting ideas during special occasions like - birthdays, holidays, anniversaries etc.

To catch their attention so that they choose your brand for gifts:

✅ Search for gift guides or any other relevant keyword on Google

✅ Look at the results and shortlist sites where your products can be a good addition

✅ Reach out to these publications asking them to consider your product (You can reach out to the editor or their customer support team)

5. Push notifications to pull shoppers back to your store

It is not practical that every website visitor will make a purchase - they might like your products, yet due to being new and hesitant - may leave.

It is also not practical to expect them to remember your website to come back and shop.

This is where push notifications play a very important role.

To make use of them:

✅ Create a pop-up asking shoppers to subscribe to notifications

✅ Keep notifying them about offers, discounts, new arrivals, or anything that might interest your shoppers.

Bonus tip: You can consider Firepush to enable this - it has a free plan and a 4.8-star rating on the Shopify App Store.

You may also like: Convert Organic Traffic Into Customers: 16 Ideas for eCommerce Stores

6. Loyalty programs never get old

Shoppers remember the perks and bonuses that come along with their purchases - this means direct repeat traffic for you.

Gamify the shopping experience for your users by adding rewards with purchases and referrals. These rewards can be in the form of:

✅ Points

✅ Achievement or tier system of benefits

✅ Free products or samples

Talk about your loyalty program on:

✅ Your homepage - above or below the navigation bar

✅ Footer

✅ Mobile apps, if you have (Also send push notifications)

✅ Email newsletters or promotional emails

✅ Social media channels

To make it easy for shoppers:

✅ Create a landing page for the loyalty program

✅ Make a short sign-up form—ask for only basic information like name and email

✅ Use an infographic to show the benefits

✅ Give easy-to-understand rules. Keep the number of rules to 2-4

✅ Personalize benefits for your shoppers - coupons, product recommendations etc.

Sephora brilliantly customizes offers and products based on past shopping history and purchase behaviors

7. Content marketing to bring new customers

In a world full of ads, insightful and non-AI organic content is a breath of fresh air.

Not only does it help in engaging new audiences, but it also helps create a relatively more loyal customer base.

How can you bring new traffic to your Shopify website through content?

✅ Create high-value blogs

✅ Guides

✅ Checklists

✅ Ebooks

Greats creates very helpful playbooks that draw new audiences to their online store.

8. Work on micro-conversions

Another great way to bring shoppers to your website and instill confidence in them to buy from you is to stay in touch.

Periodic newsletters will do the trick.

✅ Give the option to visitors to sign up for newsletters on all the pages in the fold above the footer

✅ Describe what can be expected from the newsletters

✅ Nurture the audience by sharing regular newsletters

✅ Include your blogs, latest trends, offers and discounts, UGC etc. in your newsletters

This is how MoMA Design Studio does it:

You might like reading: 11 brilliant ways to get More micro-conversions (Updated 2024)

9. Run captivating social media campaigns

While there are various formats and types of content that you can use for branding your store, let’s specifically talk about the ones that will drive hits on that link in your bio.

Campaigns that you can run are:

✅ Contests and giveaways

✅ New launches and early bird discounts

✅ Flash sales and other offers

✅ User-generated content

✅ Shoppable posts and stories (Lifestyle pictures with link to the product tagged)

✅ Seasonal or holiday campaigns

Pro tip: You can also go live and talk about your products, answer queries and show BTS to help your audience become more familiar with your brand and business.

MVMT creates a lot of super engaging content on its social media channels to get its audience excited about its products.

10. Make use of unconventional paid media

Running ads is obvious advice, but it works.

Though meta and Google ads are the most popular choices, there are some other platforms that really help Shopify users, like you, get the most out of their ads:

✅ Promoted tweets

✅ Tik-tok ads

✅ Pinterest ads

Promoted tweets:

To get maximum engagement:

✅ Keep the tweet length under 100 characters

✅ Use website cards

✅ Use rich media in your ad

✅ Reply to all the comments

Tik-tok ads:

Different kinds of ads that you can choose from are:

✅ Dynamic showcase ads: These ads show the synced catalog to interested users

✅ Collected ads: These combine video ads, product cards and a full-screen landing page to drive immediate purchases

✅ Spark ads: Shows your ad in organic Tiktok posts and features them in advertising

✅ Lead gen ads: Lets you collect leads through customizable forms

Promoted pins:

There are various kinds of ads that Pinterest offers:

✅ Shopping ads: Through these users can immediately make a purchase

✅ Collection ads: Ads appear as one large hero image with 3 smaller ones that can be expanded

✅ Carousel ads: You can add several images that can be swiped through

✅ Paid partnerships: Partner with creators on Pinterest to promote your products

✅ Video ads: These feature a video instead of a static image

✅ Buyable pins: These also enable users to make a purchase without leaving Pinterest

You can choose the one that fits your brand and products the best.

We recommend you read: Convert more paid traffic—9 strategies that always work (eCommerce)

11. Get pinners to shop from you

Pinners on Pinterest are super shoppers. If they like something, they buy and they buy at a premium. (64% of pinners say that they go to Pinterest only to shop)

Definitely worth investing in.

Most of the Pinterest tools that you might need are free, but it also gives the option to create paid shopping ads that can further boost your conversions, possibly up to 300%!

Pinterest pins look something like this:

Different formats of pins that you can try are:

✅ Rich pins: Help pinners discover the product and visit the website to shop for them

✅ Product pins: Let pinners make a purchase directly from Pinterest

✅ Try-on pins: Let pinners try on products virtually using AR

✅ Shop the look pins: Help businesses post multiple products in a single pin - to complete the look

✅ Promoted pins: These are basically Pinterest paid ads

12. Set your on-page SEO right

On-page SEO is a way of telling Google - what exactly are you offering on your website - so that it can show your website to those who are looking for the products you sell.

A few ways to get it right are:

✅ Find the right keywords

• Utilize platforms like SEMRush and Ahrefs to find the keywords people are looking for - related to your products
• Make sure that your keyword has transactional intent - only that’s when Google lists shopping links in the search results
• Transactional keywords include “buy,” “order,” “coupon,” “price,” and “discount”. Don’t miss them out

✅ Optimize meta titles

• Include the target keyword in the meta title - ideally in the beginning
• Make it unique for each page
• Ensure that your meta titles are less than 55 characters
• Do not forget to match the keyword with the search intent

✅ Double check your meta description

• Your meta description should summarize the contents of your page
• It should be 145 characters or less
• Create a unique description for each page
• Create sentence case and make it consistent across the site
• Remember to Include the target keyword

✅ Optimize the URLs

• Try including the keyword in the URL
• Make your URLs readable
• Always use hyphens and not underscores between words

✅ Add alt text to all the images

✅ Product schema

• Allows search engines to show product prices, availability, ratings, and sizes as rich results
• This can be added to your product page with custom code, through your theme or a third-party app

✅ Long tail keyword variation

• Use Google keyword tool or keyword.io to find long tail keywords
• You can also find them at the bottom of search results

• Use the long tail keyword in the first paragraph of the page (Keep readability and humanized content priority)

You may also like: eCommerce On-site Optimization: 26 Strategies To Boost Conversions

13. Let’s do a little technical SEO

Now that we have covered on-page SEO, let’s delve into some tactics to optimize your backend.

✅ The most important of technical SEO is mobile optimization which you don't have to worry about - Shopify does this for you.

✅ Work on boosting your site speed

• Use smaller and optimized images
• Remove any apps that you are not using
• Check for page speed insights and correct any issues that might show up

✅ Setup internal linking

• Find and submit your sitemaps
• Create breadcrumbs on your website for internal linking
• Identify pages with the most authority and page rank. (Free tools like Moz Toolbar for Chrome) and link them to different pages
• Incorporate the link naturally on the authority page using anchor text with the keyword you’d like the target page to rank for

14. Last pillar of SEO - Off-page

Off-page SEO basically tells Google how valuable your website is.

We will talk about some of the easiest off-page SEO strategies:

✅ Brand mentions

• Brand names on your website are implied links
• This shows a relationship between the mentioned brand and your brand
• Mention the names of brands of complementary products (not competitors)

✅ Local SEO

• This works when you have a physical store alongside your website
• This can easily be done by using Google My Business

✅ Link back from Q&A sites

• Go to sites like Quora and Stack Overflow
• Find relevant queries
• Answer mindfully and insert the link to your website

Final thoughts

One thing to remember is that traffic is just part of your overall marketing plan. So, put together a basic marketing plan and funnel so you can make the most of the traffic you get.

For example: One path might look like Instagram > email list > conversion > cross-sell/upsell > referral. Another might be SEO > website > conversion > email list > cross-sell/upsell > referral, etc.

Another important segment to consider after you get relevant traffic to your website is - how to convert them. That’s our ultimate goal, right?

This requires conversion rate optimization on your website – to drive maximum sales.

And Convertcart does exactly that.

We help eCommerce brands optimize their websites to boost their conversions.

We've helped 500+ eCommerce stores (in the US) improve user experience—and 2X their conversion rate.

Our conversion experts can audit your site—identify UX issues, and suggest changes to turn more of your visitors into customers.