More WooCommerce traffic: Proven long and short-term strategies

Is it possible to attract people to your WooCommerce store even with all the big corporate competition? Yes! Your online store can generate the kind of valuable traffic that will convert into paying customers, and there are numerous ways to do it. 

In this article, we’re going to walk you through a number of strategies to increase your WooCommerce traffic that will enable more people to find your WordPress site and buy what they’re looking for. 

Whether you’ve got the budget for paid campaigns or just the drive to embark on DIY search engine optimization (SEO), or get into affiliate marketing, there’s a method out there that can work for you. Let’s get you connected to it.

What matters most when looking to boost traffic to your website is to learn how to generate highly targeted traffic. You want the right traffic. 

You don’t want a million site visitors if none of them want what you sell. You want people who need and desire your products to find your WooCommerce store. You want buyers looking for what you provide. Attracting 10,000 potential customers from your target audience is far more valuable than attracting a million people who have no need for or interest in your products. 

So the quality of website traffic matters more than the quantity. But how do you identify what type of shopper represents a quality potential customer? What sort of person is likely to be interested enough in your products to respond to ads and search engine results to visit your site and make a purchase?

You must answer this question before implementing any of the strategies that follow, because all the other strategies rely on using marketing that will call out this audience. Potential website visitors must see themselves in your marketing.

For example, if you run a social media ad, what will it say that will speak to the type of customer you want to attract? If you use SEO, what language will you use in your meta titles that will catch the eyes of your ideal customers looking at dozens of results in search engines? 

You have to know who you’re trying to reach before you can create effective digital marketing that will attract them. 

Why broad language doesn’t work

Imagine searching online for new bath towels. You see online ads leading with language like “30% off bath towels” and “huge selection.” There are multiple companies all offering the same things. 

But then, a bit bored and uninspired, you scroll down a bit, and see an article about “Hand-woven eco-friendly bath towels.” Then, you keep going, and you see “Towels that will make your kids love taking baths.” Even further down, you see “Yes, even bath towels can be funny.”

You can see from these examples the types of shoppers each merchant is attempting to attract. Here’s a summary:

• “30% off bath towels” — bargain hunters and price shoppers
• “Huge selection” — shoppers unsure of what they want
• “Hand-woven eco-friendly” — shoppers looking for quality, for sustainability, or based on other motivations that justify spending more
• “Make your kids love taking baths” — families with young children
• “Bath towels can be funny” — people looking for gag gifts or buying for people with distinct personalities, creativity, or interests

When it comes to finding the right traffic, you can see how each of these towel merchants must first figure out who they’re selling to if they want to get the attention of those people. Then, they can create all the marketing assets that will enable them to attract potential customers. 

Simply using broad language like “bath towels for sale” isn’t going to attract much website traffic, and you’ll also be competing with the big national brands who tend to dominate for the broad search terms.

Finding the specific language that attracts your target audience

Who’s really looking for the types of products you sell? Can you define your target audience?

What language do they use regarding products they buy? What words might they search for or respond to if they saw them in an advertisement? What needs, problems, or interests do they have that your products are designed to meet? 

You need to know the answers to these questions if you want to attract an audience that will spend money in your online store.

And as you saw, demographics matter, too. They can include occupation, age, family structure, location, and more.

You also need to consider the economic habits of your ideal audience. Some people shop based on price. But that’s not the only motivator. 

The bath towel examples demonstrate this. If someone wants a towel with a periodic table on it, they’re not going to care as much about the price. They want that towel. Other people shop for service, reputation, exclusivity, status, and quality. 

Some people avoid big companies, wanting more personal connections with the companies they support. Some people shop for expertise. For certain products, they’ll pay more if the merchant can answer questions that only someone with deeper knowledge about the industry can answer. That assures them they’re getting the right item.

Figure out who finds your products most desirable, useful, and relevant, and call those people out in your online marketing. 

You have an online ecommerce store. You have products ready to sell. But you’re just not getting enough site visitors. And while you may know about some of the longer-term strategies that eventually lead to higher levels of organic traffic, you need some quick wins right now. 

So let’s begin by looking at a few ways to quickly increase WooCommerce traffic. We’ll get to the long-term traffic-generating strategies next.

Just keep in mind, while increasing website traffic quickly has some obvious benefits, there are also a few downsides to using the strategies discussed below.

The benefits of short-term strategies to increase ecommerce traffic

Instant revenue

The biggest benefit is obvious — more revenue in less time. With quick traffic surges, as long as your online store’s shopping experience and checkout processes are optimized, you should make more money.

A faster learning cycle 

If you want to test ads, marketing language, and your targeting, short-term strategies allow you to gather data quickly so you can make educated adjustments right away. This comes at a cost, but can help you get on track if your startup capital allows.

Momentum

Success begets success, and when your followers, employees, and financial backers see quick growth, they’ll remain more motivated to contribute. More followers on Instagram means others will assume you’re doing something great and follow along. Media opportunities will be easier to snag and promotional partnerships easier to secure. There are some definite benefits to building momentum quickly. 

The downsides of short-term strategies to increase ecommerce traffic

While fast growth is nice, there are a couple downsides to keep in mind if you choose to rely on quick wins:

More expensive

Most of these strategies cost more money up front. You have to pay to quickly increase traffic to your WooCommerce store. Even if it increases revenue, you’ll need to pay close attention to your profits. You may be growing sales but losing money. 

However, quick growth at a small loss can still be okay if you can use it for success in the long run, but you’ll want to at least get as close to breaking even (or better) as possible.

Harder to sustain

While quickly increasing traffic can lead to nice surges of revenue, what happens when you turn off the traffic-generating methods you’re paying for? 

The best way to avoid a big dropoff is to capture the information and attention of your new customers, and keep marketing to them using email, SMS, and other methods. By turning new customers into repeat customers, you can turn your quick wins into long-term wins, too. But — that takes some upfront planning. 

All this said, quick traffic has big benefits and can supercharge the growth of your online business.

Here are four ways to quickly increase web traffic to your store. And keep in mind, some of these also work as long-term strategies.

Ways to increase ecommerce traffic quickly

Paid search engine marketing

The major search engines, such as Google and Bing, offer paid advertising in several formats. When you use these platforms, your products and services will often be featured at the top of search results when people use certain relevant keywords for your business.

In terms of keywords, the concept of search engine marketing is comparable to search engine optimization (SEO). The difference is that SEO relies on the decisions of the search engine algorithms to place you near the top of results based on merit. 

With paid search engine marketing platforms such as Google Ads and Google Shopping, your listings shoot to the top of the search results page based, primarily, on how much you’re willing to pay for each click.

The most common search engine marketing is based on a pay-per-click (PPC) model. 

How does paid search marketing work?

Platforms like Google and Bing Ads are built around campaigns, groups, and ads. 

You begin with advertising campaigns built around broader goals. Then within each campaign, you can create a number of ad groups based on specific product categories or even individual product lines. And within each ad group, you can have an array of ads. 

The goal is to efficiently find the intersection of your target audience, the products and terms they’re searching for, and ads that appeal to them rather than to those who aren’t likely to convert into customers. 

When done right, your periodic table bath towel site should show up when someone who meets your targeting (located in an area you serve, for example) searches for, “bath towels for science teachers.” . 

Google Shopping is similar but not the same. It offers both free and paid listings. You’ve seen Google Shopping when you search for particular items, and actual product images and prices show up in the search results.

With paid Shopping ads, you’ll get even more attention. Woo offers a helpful extension called Google Listings & Ads that helps connect Google to your WooCommerce store and automatically generate listings.

Google also offers a service called Performance Max. In addition to search results, your ads will appear in Gmail, YouTube, and the Google Display Network, which places ads on a variety of websites.

And as mentioned earlier, all of this is dependent on knowing your target audience and the keywords and search terms they’re likely to use. 

Influencer marketing 

Imagine if you could get a megaphone that would be heard by thousands of people in your target audience all at once — but who otherwise would never know you exist. That’s close to what influencer marketing can achieve when you find the right person to work with. 

It can produce a surge in business in a very short time from potential customers who weren’t actively searching for your products. For these types of buyers, search ads and SEO won’t work, because they aren’t looking. They buy because someone they admire or respect told them about your products.

What is an influencer? 

An influencer is anyone with an audience that trusts their opinions and enjoys consuming the content they produce. Influencers are typically found on social media, where you can interact with them directly and see the size of their audience. 

Influencers can be national celebrities like singers and actors. Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey are examples of well-known influencers. When they promote a product, their followers go buy it. 

Influencers can also be people who are well-known only to a particular audience, such as a gardening expert with a large online following. You can also find influencers whose followings are largely driven by their personalities. If their followers are the type of ideal customer you’d like to engage with, that influencer could become a valuable marketing asset.

How does influencer marketing work?

With influencer marketing, the idea is to pair up with an influencer who has a natural affinity or alignment with your products, and pay them to promote your business. 

It works best when you create some supportive marketing content that makes it easier for the influencer to ‘sell’ your brand. This helps because the influencer might not know anything about marketing. You can take the pressure off by giving them some language to use and benefits to highlight. You might also send them product samples they can show to their audience and use in photos and video posts. 

Influencer marketing can also work as a long-term traffic generating strategy if you continue to partner with the same influencer over time. You’ll become very familiar to their audience, as opposed to relying on ROI from a short-term influencer marketing campaign. 

Both approaches can work well when properly planned. It begins with finding the right influencers and then reaching out to them. 

Social media advertising

Every social media channel offers paid advertising in some form. Each comes with their own requirements, limitations, strategies, and best practices, as well as pricing options. 

But all of them essentially rely on the PPC model (pay per click), where you pay when users click on your ads. 

There are a lot of social media platforms, such as:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• TikTok
• X (formerly Twitter)
• Pinterest

Which ones should you consider? This is yet another question that comes back to knowing your target audience. 

Are your products ideal for a business or professional audience, or people of that demographic? You’d want to advertise on LinkedIn, and possibly Facebook. Is your audience younger? Use TikTok or Instagram. While lots of people use various social platforms, people of certain demographics tend to gravitate toward and use particular platforms more than others. 

Like paid search ads, you can set your budget for how much you’ll spend on ads. The more you spend, the more traction your ads can get. 

WooCommerce has extensions to simplify the process for several platforms. Use these powerful tools to get started with Facebook marketing, TikTok marketing, and Pinterest marketing.

Multi-channel marketing

Another way to quickly ramp up traffic for your ecommerce site is to initiate multi-channel marketing. 

In other words, don’t just do search engine ads. Don’t just do Facebook ads. Don’t just do influencer marketing. Do them all! By showing up on a variety of platforms, you’ll drive traffic in greater amounts to your online store.

The key to making multi-channel marketing pay off is to make sure the landing pages on your site that connect to your external ads deliver a good customer experience. Remember — this is the first time many of these people have ever been to your store. It’s not easy to attract a first-time visitor and get them to buy. 

But if they keep seeing your ads for several weeks, you’re demonstrating value and social proof, and you’re offering something they need or want, they might click several times and then make a purchase.

Multi-channel marketing also offers the unique benefit of authority by volume. Your store is showing up everywhere. That makes you seem in-demand, popular, credible, well-known, and trustworthy. People buy from companies they know, like, and trust. 

Multi-channel marketing enables you to win fast on trust. Then, you just have to deliver the goods, and you’ll win new customers.

Multi-channel ecommerce 

In addition to marketing on multiple platforms, why not sell on multiple platforms, too? The multi-channel ecommerce capabilities of WooCommerce lets you set up stores on platforms with pre-existing audiences such as Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Walmart, and other top online marketplaces. You can look into ecommerce aggregators for even more visibility.

There are a few things to be careful about if you want to expand to new channels.

The main one is to not overextend yourself. Make sure you have the time and employee capacity to manage any new selling channels you want to use. Otherwise, it can actually do more harm than good. So, don’t add four new channels all at once. Add them on as your capacity allows.

More traditional marketing methods

The last way to get a  quick surge in web traffic is to consider all the non-digital marketing channels, many of which can still be used with great success. 

Traditional marketing channels offer some benefits over digital ones, and you can use these as part of a broader multi-channel ecommerce strategy. While every marketing channel must win the competition for eyeballs and get the attention of your audience, some have a tougher time doing it than others. 

Using channels such as television, radio, print, billboards, and other non-digital marketing strategies is often the best way to reach your audience. Plus, television includes streaming and radio includes online music services. These now offer more targeted, less costly ways to get in front of customers through “mass media.”

So, which shows does your target audience watch? What kind of music do they listen to? Just about every demographic watches and listens to something. This is a way to target your ideal customers and get them to your site. 

Then there’s print marketing. Direct mail goes straight to the homes of people you can target using pre-purchased mailing lists compiled based on a variety of demographics and behaviors.

Now you’re bypassing all the digital clutter and engaging them where they live. If you’re sending a relevant message to a carefully chosen audience, this can generate a healthy response and drive traffic to your ecommerce store.

Paid advertising campaigns are the quickest methods of driving traffic to your ecommerce store. Those strategies usually require a large upfront investment, but can quickly produce a lot of website traffic.

However, that’s only part of the story. You aren’t building a business just for quick wins. While revenue surges are great and sometimes essential to business success, they cannot, by themselves, sustain a business. 

While you may want to continue paying for traffic — if it’s working, there’s no reason to stop — there are many other ways to increase site traffic that either don’t require as much financial investment or simply provide a better long-term ROI if you’re willing to stick with them. 

With continuous effort and smart use of time and resources, you can steadily increase traffic to your WooCommerce store using a tried-and-true array of marketing strategies. Done individually, they can work well. Done together, the effect will multiply. Whichever approach you decide to use, if you commit to it, over time you will drive traffic and grow your online business.

Yes, these approaches take longer, but they also allow you to have more control over your business and the growth it achieves. Sudden surges of traffic and sales can cause a lot of stress if you aren’t ready for them. It’s very disheartening to sell out of your inventory and have to tell a bunch of waiting customers that they’ll have to wait even longer until your supplies replenish.

The benefits of long-term strategies to generate ecommerce traffic

A more loyal audience

With the greater level of control you’ll possess over long-term marketing processes, you’ll be able to build a more specific audience of satisfied customers at a pace that allows you to provide ultimate customer service. 

This will lead to greater customer loyalty, more enthusiastic brand supporters, and repeat purchasers. And this is key to maximizing the long-term ROI of your efforts.

Less financial investment

If you’re looking to minimize out-of-pocket expenses, long-term strategies often allow you to use your work ethic to replace your checkbook. 

Simply put, it doesn’t cost as much to use the strategies discussed next. Yes, there is still a cost — nothing is free — but you won’t be required to spend as much up front or over the long run.

So if your business is positioned well for a slow-but-steady increase in web traffic and paying customers, and you don’t need surges of revenue right now, you won’t need to take the bigger financial risk that comes with paid advertising.

The ability to repurpose your marketing

Another great advantage of long-term marketing strategies is that the marketing assets you’ll create will be, for the most part, yours. You own this stuff. You have control of it. And you can re-use it in a variety of ways. 

With a TV or streaming ad, or a bunch of PPC ads, once they’ve run, there isn’t much use for them unless you want to keep paying to run them again. But the marketing content you’ll produce with the strategies discussed next can be adjusted and adapted to a variety of contexts.

The downsides of long-term strategies to increase ecommerce strategy

A longer wait for results 

Just as the name implies, long-term marketing strategies take a while to come to fruition. This is where those with determination and a consistent, unwavering passion for their craft will eventually rise above the rest. 

Be prepared to invest your time, or your money, consistently for quite a while. Set realistic expectations and, eventually, you’ll be rewarded. 

Harder to pivot

Due to the nature of long-term marketing strategies, you have to build the program over a long period of time before you start to see results. The problem with this is that, after you’ve written a bunch of blog posts targeted towards an audience and realize it’s not quite the best fit, it’s harder to change directions. With paid, short-term ads you can simply hit pause and adjust the settings. 

When adjusting long-term strategies, you’re looking at major restructuring.

Ways to increase ecommerce traffic over the long run

Search engine optimization

SEO allows you to attract quality traffic to your online store without having to pay for the right to show up in search results. 

The flipside of that is, you have to create the content. So SEO — even if you do it yourself — isn’t free from a time standpoint. Someone has to do the work. But you can build an SEO-friendly ecommerce website over time at whatever pace works for you, and in the long run, traffic to your site will increase and you can convert that traffic into revenue. 

If you’re already familiar with SEO, check out these nine tips to boost your ecommerce SEO efforts. Otherwise, familiarize yourself with the basics below.

How SEO works

SEO is based on keywords. People search for things on platforms like Yahoo, Bing, and Google, and a list of results appears. Those results show up based, in part, on the content’s relevance to the search terms that were used. And while some people are tempted to presume that the big companies already have tons of high-quality content and will dominate the search results, that isn’t necessarily the case.

Lots of big companies actually don’t have extensive written content on their sites, and what’s there might be too broad or general to meet the needs of the niche audience you’re targeting. 

Plus, SEO is more than just having existing brand recognition. What matters is relevant content, website authority in your niche, and certain technical factors such as the speed of your site, which we’ll get to in a bit. 

The point is, you can do well in search engine rankings for terms relevant to your audience. Think back to the example earlier about bath towels. Do the big department stores sell — and market — bath towels designed to spread awareness about autism in children? 

That’s a more specific market, and a much smaller online store that specializes in that product can outrank the big companies.

If you can develop a massive library of content that’s helpful to parents of children with autism (even if it doesn’t directly relate to your bath towel product), you can demonstrate authority to the search engines and serve your customers with expertise. It’s an incredible way to build word-of-mouth brand loyalists while climbing the search rankings, growing your revenue, and helping others. 

SEO is a big topic. If you want to dig deeper, you should look at our beginner’s guide to SEO, learn more about optimizing product pages for SEO, and see the advantages to local SEO strategies for many ecommerce businesses. 

But if you just can’t wait, here’s a brief look at some of the most important aspects of SEO: 

Find keywords

SEO begins with keyword research, and there are many ways to acquire lists of keywords relevant to your audience. If you have a Google Ads account, you can use Google Keyword Planner. You can also use tools like Wordstream and Keyword Tool, as well as paid SEO keyword services like SEMrush and ahrefs.

If you’ve run paid search campaigns in the past, you’ll have an indication of which terms generated high-converting traffic and you can try to rank for those same terms naturally. 

You can also just reflect on your audience. 

What types of questions might your ideal customers type into search engines? What words might they use? What problems might they be trying to find answers for? In just ten minutes, you could probably brainstorm a pretty long list of keywords. 

With your initial list, the next stage of keyword research is to type those terms into search engines and see what comes up. Pay attention to the words that appear in search results for other ecommerce websites. Also, scroll down and look at the list of related terms. You’ll find many more great ideas there. 

You can also use some of the programs listed above to check the potential search volumes for each term to determine which will generate the most traffic. Just note that terms with a lot of traffic potential will often have greater competition, so you’ll want to balance relevancy, traffic volume, and competition when determining which keywords to target.

Produce content relevant to your audience and the search terms you’re targeting 

Any content that’s related to the topic of your store and the audience you’re targeting will help bolster your reputation in the eyes of the search engines. An article about spring activities for four year olds with sensory needs may not be about your autism awareness bath towels, but it’s helpful to your audience and helpful to your overall goal. 

Even better, though, are articles based more specifically on the target keywords you identified. Make the goal of your next year to create an article for each of the target keywords on your list. If you do this, even imperfectly, you’ll see a rise in your organic traffic. 

Then, you can take the next steps by learning how to optimize each of those posts for the keyword targets.

Input the right keywords in the right places

In the posts you write based on your keyword topics, you can do a few basic things to help your chances of ranking without learning how to fully optimize a post. 
For each post you create, make sure you include your target keyword in the following places:

• Meta titles: This is the blue text that shows up in search results.
• Meta descriptions: These help web searchers decide if your site content is what they’re looking for.
• Images: Alt text should accurately describe the images on your site so those using screen readers can properly interpret the content. If you can include keywords in this description without detracting from this purpose, it can benefit your SEO goals.
• Headlines: Include the focus keyword for that page in the main H1 headline.
• Subheadings: Insert keywords in some of your subheadings on each page.
• URL: Create URLs that feature the most relevant keyword for each page.

Note that you can also do this for existing pages on your site. If you already have a page that speaks to one of the keywords you identified, make sure you’ve included it in all of the places above and you may see a quick boost in rankings without having to write an entirely new post.

Get the technical details right

Search engines want to send their searchers to sites that have relevant content, authority over the subject as a whole, and that will provide a safe, strong user experience. 

By improving your WordPress website performance and securing the experience, you may see a boost in rankings on search engines.

This article on how to speed up your WooCommerce store serves as a great guide for getting started. You’ll also want to think about Core Web Vitals and optimizing your site according to those standards. 

Finally, this article on improving WordPress site security will help complete the essential elements of site performance and security. 

You can get much more detail about SEO in this beginner’s guide to ecommerce SEO.

Social media marketing

You saw earlier how you can use paid social ads to boost traffic to your ecommerce site or quickly grow a following. 

But you can also use social media for free, and expanding your audience takes nothing but time and effort when you choose the right platforms. 

You can post every day, even multiple times per day. You can post highly-edited videos or simple images. You can go live, stitch a trending video on TikTok, and more. You can share links to your latest blog articles or promote a webinar or Q&A session.

You can also embrace a multichannel ecommerce strategy and sell directly on TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram. And you can highlight products and link to sales pages on your WooCommerce store. 

When you first get started, it can be challenging to get attention for your social media presence. This is where it’s key to engage with others’ content (even commenting on a few Instagram posts or following relevant accounts each day can get you some views and a few new followers), reach out to micro-influencers or complementary brands to create partnerships, use the right hashtags regularly, and simply stay consistent. 

The key to an effective, free social media content strategy is authenticity. This isn’t the place for overly-polished, scripted content. You shouldn’t be sending your social posts for approval through six departments and seven supervisors, parsing over the best way to phrase a sentence, and arguing over punctuation. It shouldn’t take hours to create a post. It should take minutes. 

Social posts come and go. The idea here is volume. Keep showing up. Over and over. Become known. Become relevant. One individual post isn’t the point. You have to post regularly if you’re going to use this valuable strategy. At least once a day is ideal for most platforms.

One of the best ways to act on this type of strategy is to use social media scheduling tools to batch create posts. Schedule an hour or so once a week to load in all the content for social media. This frees up your time dramatically so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

Email marketing

Existing customers and email subscribers are also great sources of traffic. These people already know about you. They’ve likely been to your website at least once, and either bought something or signed up for your email list.

Either way, they know you. But are you still communicating with them?

Ideally, you should send out consistent emails at least a couple times per month. Once a week is better. Each email can focus on its own topic. It might be a sale. It might be new content that solves a particular problem. It could be an upcoming event, a customer review, a new video, or many other things. 

But like social posts, email marketing lets you stay relevant in the lives of your customers and subscribers, but it’s more effective because social posts are easily missed. Some subscribers will click through and visit your site, and some of those will convert and make purchases. 

To get more email subscribers, begin by simply adding opt-in forms to your website. You should put them in visible spots on your site — at the top of some pages, in the sidebar of others, and in the footer. Another great place can be in the middle of a blog post. 

Email with WooCommerce has never been better. Check out Mailchimp, MailPoet, or AutomateWoo to see what these powerful email marketing tools can do for your ecommerce business.

Affiliate marketing

Another way to drive traffic is to start using affiliate marketing. This may be the least-used method of all on this list. But it also has the potential to produce exponential growth down the road.

What is affiliate marketing? It’s sort of like amassing a bunch of micro-influencers and getting them to go out and promote your products to people you would never otherwise be able to find. The difference is that you don’t pay your affiliates to promote your products. You pay them to sell.

In a typical arrangement, the affiliate marketer will create links and other content pointing to your WooCommerce product pages. When people click on their links and complete a purchase on your website, the affiliate gets a percentage of the sale price. 

So it’s like pay per click, except it’s pay per purchase. You only pay the affiliate when they generate a sale. 

You can see why it’s a slower process at first. It may seem relatively easy to get people to sign up to be an affiliate. But how many of them will put real effort into marketing your products? And how many people do they interact with who might be interested in what you sell? 

This is why having just a couple affiliate marketers won’t make much impact. But if you can get a crew of dozens, hundreds, or thousands of affiliate marketers, that’s going to move the needle in a very positive direction. You’ll get more traffic that converts into customers. 

Drawing traffic to your site produces an array of data and metrics. And just like revenue-related ecommerce metrics like average order size, you’ll want to pay attention to particular traffic-related metrics. 

Tracking these will enable you to see what’s working. 

The starting point for tracking marketing activities is Google Analytics, which monitors metrics such as average time on site, bounce rate, impressions, and click-through rate.

Google Analytics provides valuable insights about where your traffic is coming from, and what people do when they reach your site.

Suppose you’re running ads on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. All three are pointing to the same five product pages on your online store. Those platforms may provide basic information about how many people clicked to visit your site, but what about after the visitor lands? 

Maybe Instagram traffic is lower, but visitors are going to a lot of pages. Even if they don’t convert on the first visit, this indicates that the quality of traffic is strong and you may want to continue investing in this audience for an eventual payoff.

Google Analytics gives you this type of customer behavior information so you can continually improve your traffic-generating marketing activities. Coupled with Google Search Console, you can see which pages on your WordPress site are performing the best.

WooCommerce has a free Google Analytics extension that makes it even easier to collect and monitor user behavior on your site.

If you run ads through direct mail, radio, streaming, or similar marketing channels, you can include unique URLs so you can track the volume of traffic that comes from those sources. 

Again, you might find more traffic coming from one source than another. You can compare the value of that traffic to the cost of acquiring it, and make more informed decisions about what to do next.

Perhaps you run a TV ad that generates tons of traffic, then a direct mail campaign that generates less. But if the TV campaign costs a hundred times more to create than the direct mail campaign, that TV traffic might not actually be more valuable. 

That’s why, in addition to monitoring your traffic analytics, you want to track your ecommerce analytics. That way you’ll know how much revenue is generated from all of your traffic sources.

You have numerous strategies at your disposal to increase traffic to your ecommerce store. Some generate higher volumes of traffic much more quickly, but tend to cost more. Others will drive more traffic over time, but cost less up front. 

Some strategies reach people on particular platforms online. Others extend offline. And still others engage your existing customers, subscribers, and followers.

But no matter where you go to increase your traffic, just remember to make sure that they’re having a good customer experience once they reach your site. Make sure your checkout is streamlined, the payment process works well, and your product pages are easy to navigate. And optimize your WooCommerce store performance and security. 

Take any of the traffic-generating strategies you feel will be most effective for reaching your relevant audience and get started. Stay consistent and improve over time, and you’ll see better numbers year after year.

Is WooCommerce SEO-friendly?

Yes, they are very SEO-friendly. WooCommerce stores are built on WordPress — a widely-used, safe, content-driven platform that’s used by more than 40% of all websites. It’s simple to set up your site navigation for search engines to crawl and index your site. Plus, you have the freedom to customize your ecommerce website design and fully optimize it without restriction. 

Can WooCommerce handle high traffic?

Yes, WooCommerce is built to scale. There’s no limit to the number of products you can list or sales you can process. You’ll need to invest in more infrastructure like better hosting as you grow, but these decisions are fully within your control. 

If you’re expecting to be the next social media sensation, here’s how to prepare for a sudden surge in site traffic. 

How can I speed up my WooCommerce store?

There are several ways to speed up any WordPress website, including your WooCommerce site. Begin with a free tool that will measure your site speed. These often provide a list of suggested ways to improve performance. 

The number and file size of images are a common culprit of poor speed performance on ecommerce stores. You can optimize images for a quick boost if you’ve never done so before. 

Here are some more tips to speed up your WooCommerce store. 

How do I increase sales in my WooCommerce store?

There are two ways to increase sales:

1. Get more traffic to your site
2. Convert more of the traffic you’re getting into paying customers

You can get more traffic using paid search ads, paid social media ads, influencer marketing, SEO, email marketing, social posting, and various other strategies. 

You can convert more of that traffic by improving your online content, speaking to the needs of customers, having a website that’s fast, easy to use, and trustworthy, and answering common questions.

How can I quickly generate traffic to my website?

The quickest way to generate website traffic is to pay for it. Depending on your budget, you can pay for online search ads, social media ads, Google Shopping ads, display ads on various websites, and influencer marketing. You can also pay for offline ads that reach your best customers through TV, direct mail, and other sources. 

How can I drive free traffic to my site?

You can drive free traffic to your site using SEO, posting to social media, and partnering with complementary brands and individuals to cross-promote. SEO requires you to create high-quality content on your website. But if you create the content yourself, you don’t have to pay for it. The same is true with social media. You can post as often as you like on any platform and use that to gain interest and send traffic to your website. 

About

Vanessa Petersen

Vanessa has spent her career writing helpful things for people across the tech space. Outside of work, she enjoys training for triathlon, rotating through hobbies, and exploring new places both urban and natural. She has two fluffy cats, maintains a few succulents, and has far too many books on her TBR shelf.