Guest Post: 6 Key Things to Optimize on an E-Commerce Site to Drive Sales
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Creating a proper e-commerce website is very important for the success of your business. But to increase e-commerce sales, a good website isn’t enough. There are 26 million e-commerce sites worldwide, so getting the audience’s attention is important. It is better to optimize the site to boost search engine rankings, make it appealing for visitors, and encourage existing customers to buy more.
You can use some tips and tricks to make your e-commerce pages stand out, draw more traffic, and get more sales. The recommendations are actionable, so you can start using them right away. From website audit and SEO to creating best-selling item lists, it’s all there.
#1: Boost E-Commerce Search Rankings Through E-Commerce SEO
First, optimizing the website for SEO (search engine optimization) is recommended.
Research keywords for category and product pages because they are essential pages on your website. For categories, the keywords should be rather generic and short, easy to understand, and familiar. For product pages, add the name of your brand, the name of the product, the model, and additional useful keywords relevant to your product positioning.
To research keywords, use digital tools to track their rankings, provide difficulty scores, show competitors, and present relevant suggestions.
Additionally, you should use e-commerce SEO best practices like:
Insert key terms into your meta title and description, H1, H2, etc., image file names, descriptions, alt-text, etc.
Adapt your meta title and description to hook the attention of your target audience.
Build links to your blog posts, homepage, product pages, etc.
Run website audits to find out what may be jeopardizing your rankings.
As to the content, it should be diverse. You need not only neat product and category descriptions but:
Buyer’s guides
Gift guides
A vs. B articles (comparisons)
How-to and learn-to guides
FAQs
Reviews and testimonials, etc.
Diversifying your content will improve your SEO efforts, bring more value to your potential customers, and build trust. Along with that, make sure there’s no duplicate content.
Results monitoring and adjusting your strategy accordingly is crucial for sustainable growth. Check your rankings via SE Ranking Google rank tracker to see everyday dynamics in the positions of your pages. The tool shows rankings over time in any location and the most popular search engines. When a page drops from the TOP-10 list, you will see it and know to start fixing the situation.
Keep in mind that there are drops that are not your fault. Usually, they happen due to Google algorithm updates or Google Flux. Keep your web source as well-optimized as possible to prevent the first case. In the second case, you can’t do anything because it’s an event that isn’t connected to you or the algorithm updates.
Make sure the key pages that drive traffic and sales have excellent SEO and are always in the TOP-10 in Google for focus queries. Also, check the dynamics of the keywords to find out what the most popular ones are at the moment. Maybe some keywords are trending, but your competitors haven’t found out about them yet, so that you can fill the gap.
If you can’t reach the TOP-10, no matter what you do, perform a website audit to find any technical or content issues you may have. Oftentimes, you don't have enough experience for EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) on Google. You'll need much more content on a specific topic to be considered an authority by Google.
This should be your starting point in your e-commerce SEO strategy, along with keyword research.
Also, keep your website search queries in mind. Your visitors show you what they want to find on your website by using the Search bar. Review the top keywords regularly in Google Analytics and test suggestions and results pages to understand what buyers see when using those keywords.
#2: Improve User Experience
One of the best website optimization techniques is improving the user experience. Not only is it good for visitors to your e-commerce website, but Google also pays attention to it.
SEO isn’t just about keywords. Here are some key things you should work on:
Website navigation – an easy-to-understand (and find) menu with all essential sections (Categories, Blog, About Us, Contacts, etc.), breadcrumbs (links to the pages that lead to the current page), etc.
Bounce rate – to reduce the bounce rate, you should avoid basic UX mistakes. These include poor typography, a too flashy and crowded design, too many colors, no mobile optimization, too many pop-ups and fields to fill before gaining access to the information, etc.
Loading speed – a site that loads in one second gets an x3 higher conversion rate than a site that loads in five seconds. Use caching and lazy loading, and compress the media files you use.
Mobile friendliness and design responsiveness – make your e-commerce website accessible from any device maintaining user experience.
Before improving any of these, look at the results from your website audit. You’ll see what points above are urgent and will impact your results the most.
#3: Create a List of Best-Selling Items
This is a beneficial practice both for landing pages and your site in general. For example, by placing the list on a landing, you’re already going to nudge the target audience to start shopping. They will also figure out that other people are buying from you if you have such a list, which means your shop can be trusted.
Also, visitors may be overwhelmed by the number of items in the shop and leave before they buy anything. But seeing a limited list of products that sell the best may make them stay and consider getting something for themselves.
For successful landings with best-sellers lists, use SEO practices. Start by inserting relevant keywords on the page to ensure your target audience can easily find it. The same applies to separate sections with the best products on your website.
#4: Optimize Online Store Prices to Location
Using IP geolocation, you can analyze the traffic coming to your e-commerce website and adjust your pricing according to the data. Depending on the country, change the tax rates, currency, and other financial elements.
When people see clear information on the pricing for their country and that you care enough to include their taxes in calculations, it builds trust and increases sales.
Besides, you can adjust not only the pricing but product suggestions as well. For example, soccer-related recommendations won’t work for most Americans because they aren’t really interested in this sport. But buyers from the UK may be intrigued by such shopping suggestions.
And finally, you can use SEO to drive people from certain countries or appeal to customers from locations where you get the most sales. Local keywords can help you. Research keywords with locations, for example, “event planners San Francisco” and optimize your content to them.
#5: Try Upselling Your Customers
It’s easier to sell to an existing customer again than to acquire a new one. The probability of you persuading a client to make a purchase again is 60-70%, while the chances of you charming a new potential buyer are only 5-20%.
The people who already know about your service, delivery options, prices, discounts, item quality, etc., are more likely to buy if they enjoyed their last experience. So, you need to upsell them.
For example, you can:
Offer related products.
Show popups with related items when a buyer adds a certain item to their cart. If you have other popups, just create a section right under the description of the item, like “People also buy” or “ Item_name goes well with.”Encourage them to buy a more expensive version.
Offer a combo or a more expensive item version on the product page. It can be a larger size, an addition to the item, a set, etc. You can nudge buyers to opt for the “better thing” during and even after checkout.Offer discounts for more expensive versions.
Offer small discounts for more expensive versions of your products when customers want to buy cheaper ones. It won’t hurt your wallet but will make the customer loyal, improve customer experience, buy more and increase your revenue to reach short-term sales goals.
The same approaches may help you turn leads into customers you can then upsell in the same way.
#6: Add a Live Chat for Urgent Questions
A live chat will help you establish a personal relationship with each buyer who uses it. Whenever there’s an urgent question about any product, delivery, ordering, confirmation, payment, etc., receiving an answer immediately boosts the customer experience.
While you should have full information about all of that on the product page and in separate sections and FAQs, sometimes there are non-standard questions like delivery to rural areas, etc.
You can use chatbots for general questions that come from people who are in a hurry or don’t want to search for additional information. These can send immediate standard answers to standard questions. Besides, you can monitor what people ask and even request feedback to analyze how satisfied your clients are.
If the question is more complicated than the chatbot’s base, you can offer to contact a human operator that will clarify the concern. And if they ask questions during non-working hours, you can ask for an email or a number and deliver the reply later. This will show you care about every customer. You can use provided emails in marketing campaigns if the owner approves it.
So, by ensuring all the information is easily accessible, you strengthen customer trust, make a good impression, and increase sales.
Conclusion
To increase sales, you can optimize your website and use marketing recommendations to make the pages more appealing to the public and search engines and to engage potential buyers. You can do it by using a complex approach that showcases the popularity and credibility of your shop:
Make sure to get higher rankings on the search engine results pages. Use SEO techniques, include effective keywords in your content, and enrich the shop with engaging writing and visuals.
Also, you should work on the user experience of the site so that people find it easy to access and navigate it. Improve the loading speed of your site, conduct website audits regularly, and don’t forget about mobile friendliness to minimize your bounce rate and increase conversions.
Besides, you can nudge your visitors to buy from the store by optimizing prices according to their location and creating lists of best-selling items. And don’t forget that upselling an existing customer is always easier than persuading a new one to make a purchase.
Use these methods to improve every aspect of your online store and scale your sales!
About the author
Diana Ford is a digital marketing expert with 10+ years of experience and helped multiple businesses set up SEO and beat competitors in search results. She currently provides SEO consulting and writes expert articles for digital marketing resources. Connect with Diana via LinkedIn.
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