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Most Valuable Traffic Sources
Every site owner is concerned about incoming site traffic. It’s getting more and more difficult to get a bigger slice of that traffic pie because the competition is severe. It seems like a lot of opportunities exist, but we should ask ourselves what are the richest traffic sources.
Let’s turn to Alexa ranking for some reliable data. Looking at its TOP 50 sites listing we can see something interesting: 40% among the sites with highest reach are search engines. 12% are blogs and 8% are sites for online shopping. See the diagram below.
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Source: Alexa.com
And not very surprising is the fact that 22% of sites by quantity are Google.com and Google’s local versions. So the first thing we should consider when trying to increase traffic is still search engine optimization.
The second biggest sector is Blogs. Content is the king. People want more valuable content and providing it may be the primary function of the Internet. Micro blogs (like Twitter) are also included into this sector. People want to know what’s happening and what others think about this. Thus in the name of traffic you should be professional, interesting and very active. You may have your own blog or give other bloggers a reason to write about you.
Even while being a representative of eCommerce industry, you may take advantage of the traffic that major online shopping sites attract. It might be useful to have your products listed on Amazon.com or eBay.com for the sake of more sales and more traffic to your site. There are quite a few integration opportunities for Magento and these sites. You can choose extensions or online platforms as well third party services for integration. All of them provide simple creation and management of product listings, automated synchronization of stocks and prices and many more features.
Social networks is the smallest specified sector in the diagram, yet it’s very important. It contains Facebook, which has 44% reach worldwide. Facebook is probably the only site today which is able to compete with Google.com in worldwide reach. All other sites have a significantly smaller reach. See the diagram below.
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Source: Alexa.com
If we take a look at reach in the USA and some European countries, the situation is only slightly different. See the table below.
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So, the main conclusions are the following:
The major traffic sources for online retailers are search engines. And the main, of course, is Google, no matter where your business is located. That is why search engine optimization should be your priority when trying to increase traffic to your store.
After SEO is done or maybe at the same time, be active in creating interesting content for your business niche and post it not only on your blog pages, but also use blogging services. And keep in mind that a good blog on your site can also contribute to your SEO efforts.
It might make be useful to have your products listed on major online shopping sites.
Presence and activity in social networks is important and useful for generating yet more quality traffic to your store.
And be creative in ways to get some direct traffic: offer your customers something to have them coming back to your site, use offline promotions, and do whatever else makes sense for your business.
What is your experience with increasing traffic to your store? Please share in comments below.
