You’ve just started your first e-commerce business and are faced with fierce competition every day – a veritable red ocean. You’ve got your website running smooth and looking sharp, loaded all the products and their descriptions, yet results are far from expectations. What’s going on? Well, e-business success really comes down to this trifecta: traffic, optimizations, and conversions.
If you’re not happy with your website’s results, this article is for you. Have a look at the pointers below and develop your own action plan.
Study & Optimize
First things first: impressions rule supreme. When customers visit an e-commerce website, they come with an established set of expectations, derived from previous experiences. You may not know exactly what those are, but you can figure it out if you track their online routine long enough. Websites usually have several attention-grabbing pages (i.e. the homepage, specific product pages etc.); make sure you know which of our pages drive the most traffic and optimize them from top to bottom.
Knowing what your customers are interested in, will also help you find the keywords that best match their search patterns. When selecting keywords, keep these criteria in mind:
- the number of searches/ keyword
- keyword relevance in connection to your product(s) and,
- if part of the merchandise addresses a specific area or category of consumers, weigh keywords’ popularity against these filters.
Be prepared for a pretty long list and know that optimizing for all keywords will involve titanic manual labor. The most productive solution is to refine the list starting with products that make you unique. The lower the competition, the higher the chances of those pages to convert leads faster or in a larger amount.
Related: How to Beat Competition in Business? 13 Steps to Beat Your Competition
Additional Improvements
We are social creatures; we tend to evaluate products based on what previous buyers felt about or experienced while using them. That’s actionable insight you should not ignore, so don’t kill the Reviews section. Place it in a highly visible location and populate it as much as you can. Your customers will feel that relevant information and opinions are honestly exposed and you get an additional tool to build some much-needed rapport.
Simply put, they will start trusting what you offer. Transparency aside, always work on refreshing and refining your site’s content. Things extend to your offering of products, which always has to be up to date. One of the worst things, for a customer, is when they order an item from your site, only for you contact them afterward, saying it’s actually out of stock. As soon as things change in the back end, your site needs to reflect that, and for this reason, it’s probably a good idea to run a reliable inventory management software (for example, like EMERGE App) This is a major influencer as far as online ranking is concerned and it pays to stay relevant over time.
Favor authentic content and remember that (sometimes) you will have to nudge your customers toward a specific purpose. Tend to your CTA’s, use multiple versions, test them thoroughly and see which ones perform better.
If for some reason, you run out of a specific stock you’ll be faced with yet another choice: serve the error 404 page or turn this into a data collection opportunity. Ask your visitors to share an email address so that you may signal when their selected products become available again.
All these can and will take a bit of time to set up but they are critical. While you focus on actually running the business, your marketing team should prop your efforts with effective strategies and excellent content. Practice shows that experienced content writers are instrumental to online businesses of any kind, so save your resources and go for https://essaypro.com.
Keyword Adjustments, a Must-Do
When searching for a product, customers don’t always type in a single word; they often use ample syntax meant to reduce unwanted search variables and get results that match what they’re looking for as close as possible. Therefore, consider using long-tailed keywords. Add explicit metadata so that your customers may preview what they’re clicking on before they do so; also ‘attach’ keywords and descriptions to all the images you’re using.
Time is of the essence to your customers, that’s why they don’t go buying stuff the traditional way. Craft your products landing pages content so that it’s easily understandable, a quick read, informative and catchy. People are likely to make swift decisions if they feel informed and engaged by what is being offered. Include plenty of product details in your descriptions, no matter how small, as they might just tip the balance in your favor.
Befriend Structure
As previously said, time is a precious commodity. A highly organized selling platform reduces the time spent buying and irons out the user’s experience. To keep your online customers happy and ensure repeat business, make the mechanics of any acquisition simple and intuitive. Link the main products/product categories to your best-converting pages, give them a clean look and avoid maze-like navigation patterns at all costs. Also set in place a searching bar; by allowing your customers to look for specific items, instead of browsing endless listings, you’re one step closer to your conversion goal.
Conversions mean money – that’s the e-commerce business’s most beloved mantra.
Last, but definitely not least: the checkout process. Lots of fields to fill in, a lot of time needed to process the different entries and, in the end, a frustrating ‘processing error’ message – if this happens on your site, business repeat chances drop to zero.
A Final Thought
Business survival starts and ends with you; it might just take a few minor adjustments to upgrade your game, however, if you need serious improvements, roll up your sleeves today. Time waits for no entrepreneur.
