Why is it that relatively few retail-based websites ever see the light of success?

While such websites may be offering quality products at competitive prices, that is not enough at this time.

Cheap products will not drive massive quality traffic to your site until people get to know your products are cheap when compared to competitors.

Online marketing is not much different from others, it’s about exposure – getting the words out about product or service.

With billions of keyword searches daily on Google and other major search engines, the best traffic you can get to your site is search engine traffic, also called inbound traffic.

Websites that are able to rank their targeted keywords in their posts on the first page of search engines will get inbound traffic.

There are more than 200 ranking factors for most search engines, and optimizing your websites and contents to conform with the webmaster guidelines of these search engines will help you in getting search traffic.

Therefore, developing an interest in the content and web optimization is important, especially if your sales are going down.

What are some proven techniques to employ and how can these transform a poor website into one which enjoys a steady flow of quality visitors?

More is Not Necessarily Better

The one-all-too-prevalent mistake is believing that online exposure is nothing more than a game of numbers.

While content is king, some folks believe that more content means more traffic but this is not true.

While this might be true from a purely quantitative perspective, you need to be able to focus your efforts in the right direction – Optimization.

You need to work on both on-page and off-page optimization. For off-page optimization, you need to try many things to see what really converts for you.

In other words, there are certain sales channels that will always perform better than others.

Once you see a channel that’s performing, you’ll only need to focus on it.

So, what channels are the most appropriate? This will primarily depend upon the type of audience that you are looking to target.

Nonetheless, you can break your options down into major sections you are targetting.

For younger and more dynamic audiences, social media circles such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are often prudent choices.

Those targeting professionals are wise to leverage other social networks, including LinkedIn, Xing and Lunchmeat.

Since it is free to establish your presence within such communities, it is wise to experiment in order to determine which ones represent the most lucrative opportunities to pursue.

Working with a Qualified E-Commerce Provider

Inbound traffic is also heavily influenced by what happens at the backend of your online store.

We are referring to the e-commerce architecture related to your website. Here are some elements which serve to define a reliable e-commerce enterprise solution:

Scalability
Ease of using a modular nature
Excellent levels of customer service
Cost-effective subscription packages

E-commerce packages essentially provide you with the “nuts and bolts” that will be required to streamline your presence while enhancing the user experience.

This is why it is normally better to partner with a respected third-party firm as opposed to utilizing standard open-source architecture such as WordPress.

It should finally be mentioned that any changes are likely to take a bit of time to show results.

This is why it is prudent to look at your historical data in order to determine whether or not the methods above are producing viable results.

Attracting more visitors to your stand-alone website does not necessarily require you to reinvent the digital wheel.

It rather involves identifying which approaches seem to be working as well as those that need a small tweak.