To maintain consistent sales and generate the income needed to make the ecommerce business profitable, online stores must generate traffic to their product pages.

But it’s not just about generating traffic haphazardly; for that traffic to generate sales, you need it to be qualified traffic. That means attracting users to product pages that are really relevant to them.

The sources of traffic to a specific product page can come from several activities:

• Results of searches on search engines
• Advertising on the Internet (either through display, search engine, emailing, social networking or any other technique)
• Social networks
• Backlinks from other websites
• Direct entry from existing customers

Most of these options are beyond the control of the company, except for online advertising techniques and also optimizing pages to boost search engine results.

The major source of traffic for online stores is from search engines result pages. A good product page should be able to generate good SEO positioning in itself, and be able to capture people who are looking for that particular product on search engines.

That product pages can attract traffic from search engines will depend largely on the content on it. To generate this SEO, many elements on the page can and should be optimized for keywords defined in an optimization strategy, including:

• Page URL: It should contain keywords and avoid characters not readable by people.
• Page title (title tag): Must describe the product accurately and in a few characters.
• Meta description: While it is no longer considered a ranking field for search engine optimization, it is still a factor that will increase the ratio of clicks from the search results page, since it is the text that will appear in the search result.
• H1 and H2 tags: Accurate and descriptive titles, and bolding or underlining the style classes will help boost the position of the product page.
• Images: The filename, title tags and alt attribute should include relevant keywords.
• Sharing on social networks: Allowing users to share products on social networks will give the product more visibility and as a result make them more attractive and boost the page rank.
• Content marketing: Unique and compelling content for users that contains relevant keywords will help generate a good search engine positioning.

One of the best ways to attract traffic to the online store is to generate unique content so that users receive appropriate inspiration and decide to buy the products more rapidly once they are on your site. This is a technique known as “Inspirational Shopping,” which helps to funnel qualified traffic to the product pages. And if the inspirational content piece is done correctly, it could also generate massive traffic.

Utilizing Inspirational Shopping techniques, you can begin to control the traffic from both loyal and registered visitors in the inspirational site as well as from referral traffic and social networks. The goal is to become the reference in the contextual activity that will generate sales in the online store.

Before deciding to buy a product, the majority of online shoppers will research information on a product and its alternatives. This is a natural part of the buying process. We need to find out what we want first, and then we will buy it.

This discovery is based primarily on accessing content surrounding the products, and usually also takes place online. And that content consumption does not normally happen directly at a store, but at specialized sites where the user can receive information about the pros and cons of a particular product in a specific environment. For example, a cyclist would not look for a place where information is given exclusively about cycling shoes, but perhaps already visits cycling sites where such topics can be found in reviews or generated in forums.

Inspirational shopping is a great tool for generating qualified traffic of buyers convinced about the product to the product pages in an online store. Once the user is on the product page, it is much easier to convert that traffic into sales.
In our next post, we will talk about how to optimize the product page to convert visits into sales.

See also:
Optimizing product pages on ecommerce websites, Part 1: Two key factors
Isn’t is time for Inspirational Shopping?