Best Ways to Boost eCommerce Store Traffic Without Buying Ads

Paid ads are getting more expensive every year. Every eCommerce store owner knows this firsthand, noting the continuous rise in customer acquisition costs.

Fortunately, higher ad costs don’t mean store owners are running out of options.

The solution to this problem is the diversification of eCommerce traffic acquisition channels. From the widely-popular tactic of implementing SEO to encouraging user-generated content, this article will tell you about five ways how to increase traffic to your ecommerce website without relying on paid ads.

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Why Relying on Paid Ads Alone Is Risky for eCommerce Growth

If you’re reluctant to try something new and continue to rely on paid ads to drive traffic to eCommerce site, you’re essentially standing on quicksand. Maybe you hope the costs will normalize, or you think you could find ways to optimize the process.

In psychology, this situation is known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy — that’s when you’ve already invested heavily in something that cannot pay off, but won’t stop, as you feel an emotional connection and the desire to achieve success.  

Eventually, this stubbornness will let your business down. When ads are the only traffic channel, there are so many factors at play that make your eCommerce store’s growth risky.

Let’s just name a few of them:

• The rising cost of paid traffic — research shows that the annual cost-per-click (CPC) increases 2.33% annually, making paid traffic more expensive year-over-year.
• Traffic stops the moment you stop paying — it’s a common feature of paid traffic, where ads work and continue to drive traffic to online store as long as you pay for them.
• Ad fatigue and declining performance — another innate trait of paid ads, as people get used to the old ads and require frequent updates and substantial creative effort (which also costs money).
• Limited trust compared to organic discovery — perhaps, the worst pitfall of a paid ad is that people tend to trust organic discovery more. Ads, no matter how creative and effective, would always find skeptics among viewers.

These, and many other factors, make paid ads not an ideal solution for driving traffic to eCommerce stores.

5 Proven Ways to Boost eCommerce Traffic Without Buying Ads

Let’s now explore five proven alternative ways or diversified channels to boost online traffic to an eCommerce store. And we begin with SEO as the most popular and undoubtedly one of the most effective organic ways to attract high-quality leads. 

1. Build Backlinks to Increase Authority and Referral Traffic

Imagine you talk to ten people during a week, and in a casual conversation, they all recommend that you buy a particular brand. They give positive feedback and share their experiences that convince you. Your desire to buy this particular product would be even stronger if you respect all these people and they look authoritative in your eyes.

That’s exactly how backlinks help to promote your eCommerce store, your products, and brands. They remain one of the strongest signals that search engines use to evaluate your brand. Backlinks vouch for your brand, just like people do in the real (physical) world.

The following two benefits come to surface:

1. The strategic benefit — your brand moves higher in the search rankings, or search engine results pages (SERPs). 
2. But beyond rankings, backlinks’ direct and immediate role is about attracting real traffic. People follow these links and visit your product listings in your online store or your page on a specialized marketplace.

Building backlinks is a time-consuming, manual process. You publish high-quality content on authoritative publications (e.g., blogs, directories, news and review sites, community discussions, etc.). Alternatively, you can spot and claim unlinked brand mentions, i.e., when someone mentions your brand, but doesn’t care to link back to your store.

There are several other practical ways to build backlinks for your eCommerce store:

• Editorial backlinks. That’s when other high-quality publications reference your brand in their publications. You may encourage these types of links by submitting useful guides, research, product comparisons, or unique materials to potential publishers or bloggers. 
• Guest posting. Writing articles for relevant sites to showcase your expertise to new audience members, obtain effective contextual backlinks and get traffic to online store.
• Partnerships and collaborations. Brands, suppliers, or other industry platforms that complement each other can provide references for collaborative partners, share content with each other, or place mutually beneficial links to promote each other’s sites.
• Product reviews and features. Expert or user reviews, mentions by bloggers, or niche publications increase exposure for your product, provide authoritative backlinks, and help you build credibility.
• Strategic link acquisition. Some companies attempt to buy href links from reputable sources in addition to natural outreach to increase their site’s authority; however, relevancy and quality should continue to be the top criteria when purchasing such links.

If you want to take a more proactive approach to backlink acquisition, you should know about buying links from niche-relevant platforms with established audiences. For a moderate price, you’ll get access to thousands of relevant sources with high domain authority (DA), and can publish your content or order content writing from expert writers.

2. Optimize Your Store for SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, allows eCommerce sellers to build visibility of their products and brand in search engines like Google and Yahoo. And visibility in those popular search engines equals traffic, lots of traffic.

SEO can take on many forms, each one promising you higher eCommerce traffic if applied systematically:

• On-site SEO. This encompasses everything one can do on site (in our case, in the online store) to optimize content for search visibility, and includes using the right keywords, building internal links to signal relevance and authority, optimizing headings and titles for readability, and many other things.
• Off-site SEO. Here, you can employ guest posting to popularize your brand and its products, build external links on high-ranking resources (more about this in the next chapter), engage in digital PR campaigns to earn media mentions, and collaborate with industry communities to increase brand exposure and referral traffic.
• Technical SEO. Technical SEO is all about optimizing your store’s setup for better search engine crawlability and ranking. Activities that will increase traffic to your eCommerce website include optimizing schema markup and site load time, eliminating errors, and making your store mobile-friendly.

3. Create Content Around Buyer Intent

Do you know the main reason buyers become so spoiled, and their attention span is diminishing year by year? It’s the intense competition between sellers, when each of them wants to be more successful than the others in capturing buyers’ attention.

Sellers compete to anticipate and exceed buyer expectations, and the key success factor here is understanding buyer intent and reflecting it in the content. Here is how you can create content that is perfectly designed to meet buyer intent:

• Address specific customer problems and pain points. Provide them with how-to guides and tutorials in addition to FAQs to answer potential buyers’ questions prior to purchase.
• Build content around your product positioning strategy. Create content that clearly positions your products as solutions to enhance your visibility and encourage stronger engagement.
• Target different stages of the buyer journey. Use content to educate buyers when they lack knowledge of your product, provide detailed product information when they are considering a purchase, and give them persuasive messaging when they are ready to buy.
• Use search intent signals to guide topic selection. Look at the queries, customer feedback, and the way people behave on your website to create content that meets the needs of your customers. 

4. Encourage User-Generated Content and Reviews

Buyers are finicky, and they often compare and review products before buying. Some even spent days and weeks considering their options and reading other buyer reviews. And reviews are exactly what you can leverage to your advantage.

Here are several practical ways how you can encourage customer reviews and drive traffic to eCommerce site:

• Encourage customers to share photos and videos of product use. Search for and select favorable (positive) user content to feature on your product pages and social media to build trust and attract new visitors.
• Give away free samples of your products to bloggers with large subscriber bases. Because of the free sample, they’ll be obliged to review your product in a favorable light, highlighting the pros and hiding the cons.
• Showcase customer testimonials and success stories. Highlight real buyer experiences on your website to generate social proof and referral traffic.

Additionally, you should simplify the review process by proactively contacting satisfied customers and offering them to submit their reviews in exchange for future discounts. Send them a simplified, one-click review form or prepared prompts to streamline their participation.

5. Use Email Marketing to Drive Repeat Visits

Although widely regarded as slow and old-fashioned, email remains one of the most impactful and cost-efficient marketing channels.

Email campaigns play a major role in the monetization of web traffic by bringing visitors back and encouraging repeat purchases. Thanks to its high personal nature, an email can nudge a hesitant or passive user to make a second purchase, provided you know how to target a user with maximum efficiency:

• Personalize your email to stand out among other mass-dissemination email campaigns. Address the recipient by name and highlight their previous actions (e.g., viewed an item, added to a cart, etc.) and ask what made them reconsider purchasing.
• Notify subscribers about new products and restocks. Send periodic (not too often!) notifications about new items, old items, restocks, updates, etc.
• Share valuable content and product usage tips. Follow up with the buyers, offering them useful usage tips, storage and care guidance, etc.
• Segment your audience based on behavior and geographic regions. This will help you to tailor your messages based on purchase behavior (e.g., quick checkouts vs slow) or regional preferences, e.g., German customers prefer clear, relevant, and useful communication, while customers in the US often respond better to more promotional messaging and time-limited offers.
• Offer discounts and participation in loyalty programs to further nurture user engagement and repeat purchases. 

Most users need a slight nudge to complete their purchasing process, and you can do that most effectively by sending email reminders on the same or the next day.

The Bottom Line

Paid ads work best when you want to get quick results, but don’t expect them to last for long. Ads need continuous refinement and periodic funding to remain effective.

However, there exist other ways in which you can effectively and more sustainably increase eCommerce traffic. These include:

• Building backlinks to improve search engine rankings.
• Implementing SEO practices for your store and listings.
• Optimizing content around buyer intent.
• Encourage and promote user-generated content (UGC) to build trust.
• Leverage email marketing to create urgency and drive repeat purchases.

The cumulative effect of following all of these recommendations will be much greater than when trying only one thing or a few. 

When applied to both the open web and an eCommerce marketplace, the results will be even better since the latter functions as a search engine of its own kind, bringing more qualified traffic from diverse sources.