How to Drive Traffic to Your Ecommerce Website Without Ads 

The average ecommerce company spends over 30% of its budget on paid advertising, and yet almost 60% of the total ecommerce traffic comes from organic search and referrals. This discrepancy uncovers a profound reality that is essential in developing a sustainable ecommerce business: Growth is not facilitated through attaching a budget to provide awareness through advertising. Growth happens when you successfully hone in on the channels that allow the customer to find qualitative, actionable, and targeted traffic to your site, again and again. 

If you want to continue to build ecommerce momentum that is not reliant on spending money on advertising, you will require a strategy that requires a data-driven, sophisticated approach to SEO and authentic engagement. This blog consolidates proven, actionable practices to increase high-quality free traffic to your ecommerce site - all without spending money on advertised channels.

Why Focus on Driving Traffic Without Ads?

Paid ads can deliver quick results, but also costs and risks. Over-dependence on paid media can impact your profit margins and can limit your brand’s exposure to only paid audiences. Historically, 70% of marketers report that they are looking to improve SEO and organic traffic ecommerce over paid ads, as these two avenues are viewed as having a greater long-term, higher ROI, according to a 2023 report by HubSpot.

In the case of ecommerce, traffic from organic and referral sources tends to have better engagement and conversion rates. If you take the time to get better at traffic optimization, you will stand out from your competition.

SEO for Ecommerce to Create a Solid Foundation  

SEO for ecommerce isn't just a quick keyword stuffing activity. It is a multifaceted issue that expands beyond ranking and speaks more directly to the user's experience with your site. 

• Site Speed and User Experience: 

Site speed is a Google ranking factor. Test your site with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to see where the bottlenecks exist. For example, according to Akamai's latest data, 7% of conversions will be lost for every one-second delay. 

• Optimized Product Pages: 

Each product page on your ecommerce site should have good descriptive, unique content that naturally integrates relevant keywords. This is part of your ecommerce blog strategy that optimizes for search rankings and provides the organic traffic ecommerce site needs.

• Technical SEO: 

URL structure, scheme, mobile friendliness, and SSL certificate. All this stuff matters! Google is mobile-first indexing; thus, you can be ranked differently based solely on your mobile site performance.

By optimizing your Technical SEO, you make your site more searchable, and because there is no need to lose any traffic, you make it easier for users to stay on your perfectly optimized website longer to discover more.

Content Marketing Ecommerce: Your Best Organic Traffic Driver

Content is still King, but especially content that informs and solves problems for your customers.

• Ecommerce Blogging Strategy: Consistent blog posts focused on customer pain points, product applications, and industry news can bring in long-tail keyword traffic over many months or years. For instance, a fashion retailer could write a post on modelling sustainable fabrics for conscious shoppers.

• Video Content: Product demos, tutorials, and customer feedback can be posted on both your website and social channels, which can all improve engagement and help improve SEO.

• User-Generated Content: By having reviews, FAQs, and testimonials on your site, you are creating authentic content that readers trust and also that search engines love.

You build trust and authority when you consistently provide quality content. You let your audience know that you listen and care, and that ultimately leads to ecommerce businesses' beloved referral traffic.

Use Social Media Traffic and Influencer Marketing Ecommerce

Although paid social media channels have been around for some time, social media channels are still a great source of free traffic for ecommerce brands without dumping money into ads. 

• Community Marketing Ecommerce: Building a niche community using communities on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok can lead to a loyal brand community and organic sharing, while helping brands transition from transactional-based relationships and obtain customer stories from their audience.

• Brands that join in the conversations and share the stories from their audience see much better retention. A community drives customer loyalty without the company having to pay.  

• Influencer Marketing Ecommerce: Partnerships with micro-influencers provide authentic exposure to curated audiences, while potentially sparking new referral traffic ecommerce shops. Micro-influencers can promote offers without charging a premium like most ads do. 

Both examples given here are fun and promote authentic engagement instead of the out-of-touch broadcasting of promotions that consumers have grown weary of hearing.

Email Marketing Ecommerce: Your Direct Path to Customers

Marketing through email is one of the highest ROI channels, and according to a 2023 DMA report, average emails can bring a return of $36 for every $1 spent on email marketing.    

• Segmented campaigns: Personalizing offers, based on prior purchases or browsing behavior, will have produced higher open rates and a much higher level of conversions. 

• Automated flows: Series for welcome, cart abandonment, or post-purchase follow-up require no continuous ad spend!

• Must-have content: Tips, product launches, stories from your products, and exclusive content! Enough will bring people back to repeat visits.

Strategically designed email marketing ecommerce concepts have proven to convert browsers into loyal customers.

Create Ecommerce Backlinks To Increase Authority and Rankings

Backlinks are still one of the most important ranking factors in SEO, also one of the benchmark indicators of your site's authority. 

• Guest Posting: Contributing high-quality articles on relevant industry blogs gives exposure to your brand and produces strong backlinks.  

• Collaborations: Work with charities or complementary brands to create cross-promotional backlinks. 

• Content Distribution: Medium and LinkedIn are great platforms to repost blog posts or infographics to maximize backlinking and reach.

The backlinks that are of higher quality help to bolster your site's domain authority so that when people search for key terms related to your business, your business will rank higher organically.

Extra Advice: Referral Traffic Ecommerce, and Free Traffic Sources Ecommerce

Referral traffic ecommerce sites benefit from being public on trusted third-party sites. Prompt happy customers to review you, or share their experience on other sites or social media such as trustpilot.com and yelp.com to turn them into brand ambassadors.

Forums and Q&A Sites: Add value by being genuine and responding to relevant questions on Reddit and Quora. Subtly reference the relevant piece of content wherever possible.

Affiliate and Loyalty programs: Allow customers and partners to refer new users, and measure the growth of traffic via word-of-mouth.

These routes are not the most measurable, but they do enable free traffic sources ecommerce brands to take advantage of in addition to their free traffic sources, selling without the extra advertising spend.

Final Take

Attraction is a complex issue where you find a mixture of SEO, content marketing ecommerce, social media engagement, outreach activities, and others working in tandem. Brands that invest their time working on improving their site speed, and a structured ecommerce blogging approach, and switching on all of the community and referral marketing growth opportunities, have sustainable growth and maintain good relationships with their customers.

Brands that work with an ecommerce marketing company in Ahmedabad, like Eta Marketing Solutions, and any of their specialised partners, report that they have a measurable growth in organic traffic and ecommerce activity, irrespective of what they are doing. Their work and more custom approach help ecommerce brands to navigate the complexity that tends to overwhelm ecommerce traffic growth, resulting in traffic growth that is not only better in quality, but also more durable. 

I think we can all agree that it is important in this highly competitive ecommerce market to be able to develop organic and sustainable approaches to gain traction early on while also establishing a growing customer base, and your objective will be to reduce reliance on paid channels, which can introduce volatility. 

The future is clearly with those who are able to drive traffic without ads, and drive it using an all-encompassing approach that is data-informed but human-centred and deliberate in care.