Let's say, a businessman has made an order for an online store development. He has chosen some cool design, made the developers and copywriters create a perfectly user-friendly flypage and powerful texts for his website. He has put a lot of effort and money. The moment has come — his website is launched. And what does he get in return? Zero customers. His online store turned out to be like a big invisible shop: it shines bright from the insight and offers tons of goods to fit any taste, but it remains empty. His potential clients would be happy to buy something, but they don't know how to get in, and just pass by. The solution is pretty simple — the store owner has to tell his customers about the store, otherwise, he won't sell anything even if his website is of the highest class.

Search engines is one of the traffic sources for online stores. A user makes a request, sees information in the search results, and clicks the link. Those potential customers are the most preferred for you, as they intentionally come to your store to find the product they need.

Search engine results can be organic and sponsored. Sponsored result is paid. The advertisements are set via Google Ads and Yandex.Direct, and marked as an Ad. Other results are organic, i.e. natural, and free of charge. You can't buy a place in the organic results. Actually, organic traffic is made of those users who went to your website by clicking the link in the organic results.

What is Good about Organic Traffic?

1. Users have more trust in online stores that they find in organic results.

Search engine's output is not seen as some advertisement tool, because the user typed the query in the search box, chose the link and clicked it all by himself. Usually, users believe that the online stores from the first pages of search results, that are not marked as an ad, exist in the market for a long time. People buy in those stores, so they can be trusted.

Another important moment is that some users disable ads in their browsers, or use special plug-ins. That is why they can see only organic results. If you only count on ads, you can use those potential customers.

1. Organic Traffic is Free

The great advantage of organic traffic is its cost. You need to invest in SEO to bring your website to the first pages of key request search results. The amount of the investments will depend on the assortment of your store, and on how many competitors you have in the market. But when SEO is done, views and click-throughs to your store, unlike the paid search, will become free.

1. Organic Traffic is Stable

Paid search customer traffic only goes on while you pay for ads. No budget for ads means no customers. Situation is different when it comes to organic results. Make investments in SEO, take a good position in the search results, and even after your promotions are done, you will keep your traffic level for a while.

1. Those users who come to your store from the organic results are targeted and "warmed-up'.

When a user searches for "iPhone 11 256 gb", he is ready to pay for it. Targeted users come from organic search. It means that conversion and payback in this case will be higher than for other types of traffic.

How to Attract Organic Traffic to Your Store

To attract organic traffic to your store, you need time. This is a long and systematic work, but its results will please you for a long time. The traffic you've reached with search engines can not suddenly fall, unlike the sponsored one.

So, what do you have to do to make search engines steadily attract new customers to your online store?

1. Carry Out the External and Internal SEO Properly

External SEO is a process of getting links to your online store from other resources. If your website is recommended by other sources, it means that you can be trusted. However, remember that when building up the link mass, it is important to select websites correctly. Otherwise, if some unreliable source refers to your store, it may reduce your position in the search results. You can obtain the high-quality external links by mentioning the store in social media, catalogs, and on thematic forums.

The internal SEO deals with your website content. When carrying it out, you have to take a lot of things into account:

• Deal with navigation. Make it simple, create a clear structure and the website map.
• Carry out technical optimization. Delete the duplicate and non-existent pages, set up the redirects, main website mirror, robots.txt file and friendly URL.
• Fill in metadata for all entities (title, h1, keywords, description). In order for images from your store to be indexed by search engines and attract additional organic traffic, you need to fill in the alt and title meta tags for them;
• Implement a markup to help web bots understand the content of online resources and display the links on your website correctly.

1. Speed up page loading.

Slow page loading has a negative impact on the user's experience and website ranking. When a page loads for more than three seconds, a potential customer most likely will not wait and leave. Search engines can exclude the page from the indexing, and pessimize it (i.e. downgrade it's position in the search engine's output). That's why, the performance of your store is a very important SEO parameter.

First thing you need to do to speed it up is to work with images. The more high-quality pictures of your products you upload, the more space they take up on the server, and the more they slow down the website. Each image has to be compressed as much as possible, while it's quality has to be maintained.

There is another trick. When there are a lot of images on the page, the website performance can be slow. However, if you load the images one-by-one, as you scroll down the page, you can significantly improve the performance, and use the resources of your devices more efficiently. This trick is called "image lazy-loading".

1. Work on Your Blog

A blog in an online store is a source of useful information about your products; a way to make customers more loyal; an additional source of traffic, and an opportunity to improve the SEO. You can add links to your products to the articles. It does not only boost the sales, but also looks appealing for search engines, because it increases the amount of internal links on the website. 

There is a general rule: the content must be good and regularly updated. What do we mean by "good"? It means that it has to be relevant (i.e. meet requirements of users) and unique. All the blog posts must be clearly structured by categories and tags to help users navigate between them and search for useful information.   

You can start working on it today, and, what is more, do it on your own. CS-Cart add-ons from the Marketplace will help you automate your work and make it easier. By using our add-ons, you will significantly improve the SEO indicators for your website and, as a result, its positions in search engine's output. The higher you are in the output, the more potential customers will come to your online store.

CS-Cart Add-ons That Can Help You with SEO

Below, we have made a brief review of add-ons that will be useful for SEO of the CS-Cart based store. You can find more information on any add-on benefits, and how it works, on the page of each add-on. 

Speed Up the Pages Performance

Performance is one of the key factors that affects the website ranking in search engines, and behavioral metrics. Image optimization can help you improve the performance.

1. Lazy load for images.  (load the images one-by-one, as you scroll down the page)
2. Image Optimization. (reduce the image size without quality loss)
3. WebP Images. (convert images to modern WebP format)

Add Solutions for Working with Content

High-quality optimized content is the formula of success in SEO promotion. 

1. Custom H1 header. (change the page header without changing the main title)
2. Power Blog. (advanced features for the blog)
3. Power Reviews. 

Automate Meta-Data Generation

When the store's catalog has tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages, it is impossible to optimize the meta-data manually. It is easier to automate this process.

1. SEO templates  (автоматическая генерация мета тегов)
2. Automatic alt-text and title generation for images 

Implement Structured Data

An attractive search snippet or cover in a social media is a guarantee that users will want to go to your website. That is why you need to use markup in your store.

1. Open Graph Markup. 
2. JSON-LD Markup. 

There are more than 500 out-of-the-box solutions for every online store in our Marketplace, including the solutions for SEO automation. You will definitely find something useful there. All the add-ons described above are easy to install. They work properly on any device and in any operating system. 

To achieve maximum organic traffic, you have to make complex and consistent decisions. You have to constantly monitor the state of your store, and respond to the decreased SEO indicators in a timely manner. CS-Cart partners will help you solve those difficult tasks. By engaging a good contractor to promote your website, you get not only a SEO specialist, but also a whole team that consists of programmers, designer, marketer, and copywriter. 

Cart-Power is one of the acknowledged authorities in SEO promotion. Trust your work to professionals and get a preliminary audit of your online store and a promotion strategy that suits you. As a result, the targeted traffic and conversions on your website will increase.