Grow your ecommerce traffic for free (without social media)

Social media is a fantastic way to build awareness of your brand and create meaningful connections with potential customers. However, it requires time, effort, great content and patience to build up followers and engagement... and your strategy needs to be tailored to each platform to be effective. 

Most social media platforms are not designed to actually send traffic off the platform, especially without brand owners paying for the privilege via social media advertising. 

In this article, we will specifically focus on methods to build your website traffic without using social media. 

These methods are all free... 

Local SEO

Investing time in local SEO helps your ecommerce business appear in Google's Local Pack, which appears above regular search results. This increases visibility, attracts more nearby customers, and drives higher traffic to your website.

Create a free Google Business profile

James Miller from Re:Signal agency has written a longer article about this topic that is UK-focused and offers advice on how to optimise your profile for the best results. 

Shopify also offers some great local SEO advice over on their blog which tends to be aimed at companies based in North America. 

Local SEO is not just an option for businesses who have a physical store or location. It works for online-only businesses too.

Get started with your free Google Business Profile.

Automatically sync the data to Bing

For those of us who are swept up in the worlds of Google search and Apple devices, it can be easy to forget the amount of effort Microsoft invested in their challenger search engine, Bing. 

The good thing is, a lot of your competitors won't have got around to creating their Bing Places listing or even have it on their to-do list. It's easier for your business to rank higher in search results on Bing. 

Note that your updates and your reviews won't sync over. 

Add your business to Bing. 

Google for Retail

Rather than sitting and waiting for your product detail pages (PDPs) to index and rank on Google, you can speed things along by sending a feed of products yourself. 

Start by creating a free Merchant Center account, then you need to check you have all of the required product data  before figuring out the best method to send your products across to Google. 

If you’re on one of these three ecommerce platforms, you should be able to automatically sync your products without using an app or plugin: Shopify, WooCommerce or PrestaShop.

BigCommerce also has a free app you can use called Ads and Listings on Google. 

Find out more about Google for Retail.

Visit Google Merchant Center. 

Create new content pages

Content creation is not a quick win, but it is a free opportunity to create content to drive  traffic to your website. The more pages Google indexes, the more traffic your website receives. 

One of the most effective ways to optimise your content efforts is to research and write articles that are naturally rich in keywords such as recipes or instruction guides. 

AlsoAsked is a free tool that gives you insights into what real people search for, which can help you quickly improve your content, answer user questions and help improve your search rankings.

Here's an example output from the search query: pet water bottle with bowl

Once you have published each page, don't forget to log into Google Search Console and check it has actually been indexed by Google. You may need to resubmit your sitemap manually to make this happen. 

Check out my resources page for more advice.

Or drop me an email if you'd like to chat: clare@branch9digital.com.