Is it possible to get daily traffic without ads?

Let's be honest, the majority of e-commerce stores aren't interesting.

Most of us don't wake up and say, "let's go browse Amazon today because I like their content."

You might go to look for a product.

You might go to see what products are new in a category.

You might go to check on a product release date.

You don't go because it'll be fun.

Physical stores can be a bit more interesting. Colorful displays, seeing physical objects in a physical space, exploring huge warehouses, those can all be interesting. Still not as good as a proper entertainment venue but it's better than online.

People's main goal of visiting stores is to shop and buy. Entertaining or educating them in the process is good, but it's a side benefit.

That's why when I hear questions like this one from a merchant I get suspicious (or sus as Gen-Z likes to say):

Our Shopify store has been active for 1.5 years, and I have been working on SEO optimization. However, despite my efforts, I am struggling to attract daily organic traffic without paid ads. Currently, I publish two blog posts every day.

I would like to ask: What are the most effective ways to generate organic traffic to my store without relying on ads? How impactful are blog posts in this process? What strategies would you recommend for the best results?

My first response is twofold:

• If you're "working on SEO" and not getting organic traffic after 18 months, what are you doing?
• If you're publishing twice a day and no one is showing up, do they even notice? Do they even care about your topics?

SEO after 18 months

SEO takes a long time.

But in 18 months you should be getting some results. Typically you see a smattering of stuff in the first six months, year tops.

To see nothing in 18 months feels like the "SEO" being worked on isn't really SEO.

I've seen my fair share of convoluted traffic generation and content strategies pitched by SEOs that wind up being 95% busywork and 5% actual output. If that's what you're doing, I could see not getting any SEO results. All the effort and money is being wasted (well, not wasted... just transferred to the SEOs pocket).

A legitimate SEO strategy should have a clear plan to get you some traffic increase within six months. No one should have to pay for longer to see no results (unless your store got blacklisted and you're in damage-control mode).

Six months probably won't make SEO your top traffic channel (though it might). I'm talking like maybe 10% of your existing traffic is now coming from SEO. A few hundred to a thousand visitors per month (which is only a few people per day).

If you get a plan that delivers that, you're doing fine. Keep going. The traffic will start to stack up.

If you're not getting those results, go back to the SEO fundamentals and make sure you're doing all the basics. Start with my article on Shopify SEO and do everything in there.

If you publish it, will they come?

On the publishing blog posts side, to speak frankly: if you're publishing two articles every day and seeing no traction, the articles probably aren't valuable.

By valuable I mean they aren't useful, entertaining, informative, or the like.

And if they aren't valuable, good luck getting Google to index them which makes it even harder to be seen.

Think back to the browsing stores examples earlier. Articles are meant to give someone a reason to come by that isn't shopping. If your articles aren't delivering on that, they aren't doing their job. Full stop.

Also, why two a day? If you haven't proven that one article a day is working (via organic traffic growth), why do two?

You're better off creating one great article per week or even per month than two a day. I've seen huge organic traffic powered sites built on the back of 6 to 20 articles per year. Those articles end up being impressive works of art but they all started with something basic. They all started as something valuable.

One thing to keep is mind is that with automation and especially AI tools like ChatGPT, a lot of people are starting to look at scaling up content creation via AI. Especially before they have a working content process.

Resist that. These AIs make content that is on the boundary of: crap to meh to average.

Filling your store with that sort of content won't give you what you want

Getting off the advertising

The merchant was implying they are using ads to keep going but they want to get away from them. Basically they are looking for other traffic generation strategies.

There are dozens of strategies with literally 1,000s of variations of ways to get traffic.

To be fair, advertising is fine strategy. If you're getting consent, keeping expectations in-line with your products, and otherwise operating ethically, ads can be a solid marketing strategy. It'll cost a lot but that might just be a cost you have to bear for your business.

To avoid advertising though, you have to look at earned traffic channels. These are things you build up and cause people to want to visit (and shop) your store. Anything earned won't come easy so don't take shortcuts.

Earned traffic could be content-related (e.g. blog posts) or personality/culture related (e.g. branding) to name a few. You have to try a whole bunch of things and see what sticks.

Content and SEO combined with providing a stellar customer-service to my customers is what works for me. That exact combination might work for you or it might not.

Trial and error is the only way to find the best channels for you.

In the end, yes it's possible to get daily traffic without ads, but it will take time and the right mix of marketing strategies.