In the hypercompetitive e-commerce industry, it’s imperative to stand out and beat the competition before it beats you. One of the most critical online marketing tools for any business is a well-designed, user-centric website. This is especially important for e-commerce businesses. Your e-commerce website is your 24/7 online shop where business takes place. So coming out on top is essential to your success. With a few simple tweaks, you can dramatically improve the performance of your brand’s site and maximize conversion rate. Here is what you need to do:
1. Follow SEO best practices
Search engine optimization determines the growth of your e-commerce business. From a technical perspective, SEO helps show keywords you want to rank for, makes the site easy to crawl, and establish authority through backlinks and content. Simply put, it helps your customers find and purchase your products. 43% of e-commerce traffic comes from Google search (organic). Here are few recommendable SEO best practices to boost your sales:
- Use unique title tags for product pages
- Optimize category pages with keywords
- Implement schema markup to add Google’s rich snippets into your online store
- Optimize product page permalink and structure
Related: The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites
2. Streamline checkout process
If you successfully draw in prospects to your online shop where they are interested in making a purchase, it can be painful to see them abandon their shopping carts. Average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.23%.
Your customers shop online for convenience and they want your checkout process to be as easy as possible. Websites that are hard to navigate witness high bounce rate. Therefore, remove all the unnecessary steps and simplify the checkout process from start to finish to maximize online conversion. Your customers should be able to add to cart with great ease.
3. Provide personalized user experience
59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on personalized online retail stores; people are likely to buy from a site that offers personalized recommendations. So give your users a personalized interface to increase conversion. You can display personalized recommendations based on your user’s interests and past product views. Applying a personalized approach to the content, email marketing, and retargeting ads will amplify your digital marketing results.
4. Design a mobile-first experience
Simple, more intuitive shopping experiences make people more confident and comfortable using their mobile devices to make purchase decisions. Building a desktop-first experience for your e-commerce site can alienate more than half of your web traffic. Mobile sales are growing at an unprecedented rate. if the user interface is not designed for the dominant devices or your site presents a bad mobile experience, you are set to lose more than half of your customers to your competitors. So be accessible to mobile devices.
5. Eliminate distractions
When a user is in the purchase funnel, make sure there is no distraction on his way. Adding sharing product pages and social icons within the funnel can badly affect your conversion. It’s recommended to have customers sharing their shopping experience after they checkout. You are likely to lose business when buyers get distracted sharing content on social channels.
Key takeaways
No matter how fascinating your e-commerce website is, if it doesn’t meet customer expectations, you will lose sales. Your site is the best salesperson you can get; therefore, put it through a thorough quality assurance process before it goes live. Here are few quick tips that will help you establish a sound online identity for your e-commerce business:
- Introduce your unique story to your users to stand out from the crowd
- Create instructional content in the form of how-to videos explaining your products
- Cross-sell during checkout by displaying products that complement those selected by users
- Offer simple, speedy, and seamless user experience
About us
Reach First is a leading online marketing agency in Edmonton where we build successful e-commerce businesses. From e-commerce website development to lead management, we provide measurable, one-stop digital marketing solutions to businesses in Edmonton and across Canada. Browse through our site to learn more about our services!