Running your ecommerce store sure ain’t easy. You’ve got to wear all the hats yourself — and expertly. Instead of being an employee and in charge of just one thing, you’ve now become the financier, marketer, publicist, tech guru, writer, logistics manager and more. But often, in the day-to-day hectic-ness, one thing is typically overlooked: optimising your ecommerce website. Today, RepricerExpress will take a look at some of the tips you may have forgotten and how to whip your site back into shape.
Start Broadly: How Good is Your Site’s SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is absolutely crucial in a website’s overall health. The higher you rank in a search, the more traffic will be potentially drawn to your site; and the more hits you can accumulate, the better your chances of converting them into sales.
There are two ways of looking at SEO rankings: what you can do to help it along, and what you should stop doing to help you along. For example, for the latter, putting out duplicate content upsets Google because they think you’re trying to spam them and cheat your way to the top. If you’ve been guilty of this, it’s time to concentrate all options for each product on its own page and finish off with a canonical URL.
Examine What’s Right in Front of You, Like Images and Product Descriptions
We briefly alluded to product descriptions in the above point, but to expand a bit, you should take another look at how how your product descriptions look. Have you been doing things keyword stuffing or miscategorising? If so, you know we don’t have to say what to do.
Often, we take for granted what’s right in front of us because we’re so used to seeing it all the time. If you’re having problems spotting the forest for the trees, get a fresh pair of eyes to look at your site for things like image quality, keyword list, page title, HTML and all the other fiddly things you usually ignore because you’ve already put it in place.
Go For Quality Over Quantity
Having had to learn a thing or two about marketing when you developed your own ecommerce site, you know that you can, to use a fishing analogy, either send out a big net and focus on catching as much as humanly possible, or attach a very specific bait to your hook so you can target one type of fish.
The same is essentially true with optimising your ecommerce website, except you only want to use the second strategy: quality, or, in the language of optimisation, relevance. Just as you’d attach a certain kind of worm to the end of your line, you want to make sure everything on your site is dedicated to the same goal of trying to catch the fish that is Google.
One of the best ways of doing this is with keywords, but there are two different ways of looking at it: specific and general keywords. Say you sell Nike sneakers — your top specific keyword would be Nike, and the top general keyword would be sneakers. If you have to choose, focus your energy on the specific keyword, which is easier to set yourself apart in. But either way, conduct research as to what the top terms buyers are looking for and make sure they’re all over your site so Google will recognise the relevance of them.
Impart a Secure Feeling on Your Shoppers
Your buyers are taking a chance on security by shopping on your site, as information that passes in the ethers is always vulnerable to attack. The least you can do is show them a tight SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, which proves that there’s encryption between the client and server.
