By Nicolas Finet
You’ve decided to launch your new ecommerce venture. You’ve tracked down your perfect products, your online store is up and running and you’re ready for your first sale… but customers just aren’t showing up.
If this sounds like a familiar scenario, then you may need to spend some more time working on your ecommerce venture. It’s a simple fact that the more visitors you have coming through your virtual doors, the higher the chance that you’ll make a sale.
There are two major ways to get more visitors to your ecommerce store. The first is utilizing good SEO strategies and the second is a having a well thought-out web design. Using these tactics is a sure-fire way to get people clicking on to your site and through to the checkout. Keep reading to find out exactly how to to start using these tactics in your ecommerce business.
Search Engine Optimization
There’s no doubt that search engine optimization is at the forefront of driving sales and traffic. According to Inc.com, SEO has the highest ROI of any eMarketing campaign. Implementing a basic strategy will give you the advantage over your competition, and here are a couple of reasons why.
One-Time Investment
Social media and paid ads are a good way to generate and increase traffic, but they both require constant effort on your part. When you invest in a solid SEO strategy it will require very little effort after the initial set up and what’s great is that once you rank highly in search results you’ll be getting large numbers of visitors without even lifting a finger.
Get Ahead of the Competition
Most online stores are created without a second thought to search engines. Many ecommerce store owners get caught up in other aspects of their business, usually focusing on social media and paid ads as their number one marketing strategy to drive traffic. A recent study of ecommerce sites found that only 30% of traffic was coming from organic searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. This is a great opportunity for you to take advantage of and win prospects that your competition may not have access to.
Hopefully you can see that to get visitors you’ll need to invest some time or money in SEO. We suggest hiring a specialist who is knowledgeable about online marketing, with a working knowledge of best practices in the sector. Alongside hiring an SEO professional, you’ll need to do some research to help with your new strategy. Take a look around your competitors websites to get an idea of the keywords that they’re using and to see which ones you could also rank for.
Taking SEO seriously, doing your research and hiring a professional will allow your business to grow from organic search.
Web Design
Having a well designed website is one of the most important aspects of any online store. When designing your website you must be always thinking of the customer’s experience. It’s clear that even if you’re selling the coolest products, a prospect will leave your website if it looks like untrustworthy spam or if they can’t find what they’re looking for easily.
Here are a couple of ideas that you should consider when designing your website that will encourage customers to buy from you.
Keep It Simple
Users are visiting your website for one reason — to buy a product. Customer experience is key; to provide a good service and win the sale, you need to help your customers get to their destination as quickly as possible.
Some of the best designed websites keep things minimal, so rethink the loud complicated graphics and videos if they don’t have a clear purpose. Most of all, keep your web pages well organised and don’t be afraid of using white space.
Responsive Design
With 93% of all internet users going online via mobile devices, it’s crucial that your website looks good on all screen sizes. This is known in web design as ‘responsive design’. No longer do you need to create multiple websites to do this, just speak to your web designer or purchase a responsive web theme — it’s as simple as that.
With modern day responsive design, there’s code written into your website which allows your content to be reshuffled and resized when viewed on different screen sizes.
Readability
There are many websites out there that visitors simply turn away from because the website’s bad design means that it’s difficult or even impossible to read. Color is an important aspect of branding and can convey different feelings in your customers. When choosing your colors, one or two paired with white is really all you need to create a striking website.
The same goes for typefaces, remember that your visitors are viewing your website on different screen sizes, so it’s essential that you stick to standard fonts and don’t choose a style that is difficult to read on a smaller screen.
If in doubt, a web designer has the knowledge to create a website that is not only beautiful and a pleasure for your customers to use, but which is also created with search engines and conversion rates in mind.
As you can see, a simple SEO strategy and a good website can increase the number of prospects and improve your sales. If you want hundreds, or even thousands of potential customers coming to your ecommerce store, then it makes perfect sense that you need to be taking advantage of these two tactics.
Photo credit: SEO concept from Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock