“Looks Matters “I am sure you might have heard this. Talking about looks, the look of your e-commerce website matters as well. In the hustle bustle of making profit, stocks, inventory, staff management, media reports and every other thing you feel is important, a very important thing is missed out. You keep on using outdated information’s for months and years, the product pages are at times un-optimised, old coupon codes still active and being used as well, the SEO meta data is missing at times, the most important factor of where and how you are indexed in the various search engines is also ruled out at times. These are very serious problems and may cause a loss of traffic, based user experience and loss of sales as well. In fact come to think of these are very small things that we tend to ignore because they are not at all important when the revenue generation is concerned. Here I'm sharing with you steps to update and optimise your store will make it look good and help you to generate more numbers from your store.
The role-play :-
Wear your customer’s shoes (well not exactly), try and look at you website from a customer’s point of view with a free and open mind. Ask yourself the two most important questions. Can shoppers tell what you sell within three seconds? Would a shopper trust his or her credit card to you? If in case your answer is yes then you need to work really hard on your website.
It should not be difficult to reach you : -
We would suggest adding a phone number for the people to reach you in fact that is something that will improve your credibility. In case if you don’t want calls pouring in then give your support email, address, social media links
Highlight the extra mile you running : -
Do you have a free shipping option, or your return policies are easy and smooth or you claim of throwing away the lowest price? Why not flaunt it. These are certain objections that might stop people from making transactions but since you have already solved these and are flaunting it happily they might be relieved and the sale would happen even before you notice. You might have the awesome idea and would have been implementing as well but it’s of no use if it’s not been marketed properly. You can even make a small icon on top of the site with these pointers.
Testimonials / feedbacks / Ratings : -
A study shows that customer ratings and testimonials are considered one of the most important purchasing factors by 40.9% of people. But if the customer has to go to a separate section to view them it’s not fetching you that results. Pull up the important and nice one liner said by customers about you and post them on your homepage. If in case you can add the pictures as well you get brownie points for it. That actually helps the buyers create an image about your product and your site.
Online Check-up : -
Sit back and take a moment to analyses your site for those aspects that you might consider are not so important in your day to day sales. Listing down a check list for you.
- Store pages (About, Contact, FAQ etc.)
- Product listing pages
- Product images
- Coupon codes
- Store Policies
We are very sure of the fact that these points go un-noticed and eventually spoil the user experience.
Optimize Web Pages : -
Review your core content on the website. The core page of your site is a good place to start reviewing your content. Pages like your 'About Us', 'FAQ' and 'Contact' page are especially important since they tend to be popular pages for ecommerce businesses and can assist in conversions heavily. When reviewing these check out the clarity, content, copy, SEO, Meta description, URL, Page titles, missing information’s etc. You might have missed these out and they keep lying there un-noticed and still affecting the business.
Use a Sitemap:-
Search engine web crawlers like Google-bot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site. Thus why not just tell the search engines where all of your relevant pages are? Sitemaps do just this and pretty much spell out which pages a search engine should worry about on your site. Sitemap helps in crawling of your site and also helps to provide the metadata associated with the pages. This is essential. Most search engines such as Google and Yahoo have a way for you to submit your sitemap directly. Make sure you take advantage of this feature!
Content, Links, URL, keywords : -
Do not write very short product descriptions and never rely on a photo to describe your product. Write its detailed readable description and add a picture. Make sure the content you use is original and highlight them with a lot of relevant keywords and links. This will increase the organic search as well. Use URLs’ but please note it’s not like - "http://mystore.com/item.cfm?id=756&subcatid=31" Instead have your URLs read like "http://mystore.com/pampers-diapers.html"
Offer of the day : -
We are sure that being an ecommerce in the race you publish the deal of the day/ month / special deals. What we advice is publish them on the home page. Yes you do have a separate tab for it but the new users might not know where to look for it thus the home page will make the deal popular.
After you've completed all the steps and checked and re-checked everything again, make sure you do this exercise once in a while and repeat it on a regular basis. This keeps your content and focused keywords for SEO fresh and relevant, giving you free traffic boosts over time and increased conversions.