It is difficult to get sales if your e-commerce website is unprofessional, outdated and below standard. You can get professional services from an expert ecommerce development company and SEO agency to make your ecommerce website more engaging and traffic driven. Here are some ways where you can improve your e-commerce website:
- Use the right photos: Excellent photos are important for an e-commerce website. The photos on your e-commerce website affect its design as it can hurt conversion. Tips you can use to improve your website are:
- Remove logos from product images.
- Choose stock photos from quality websites.
- Remove pixelated images from your website
- Make sure your banner photos are related to your industry.
- Do not have big images on your website as it affects your page speed.
- Select the right colours: Try to limit your website design to three colours. Other tips you can use when designing your website are:
- Colors invoke different emotion and they can become a brand trademark. Follow the trend of your industry such as most healthcare websites use blue colour.
- Stay away from distracting colours. Use colours that flow with the audience.
- Get feedback from family, friends and experts on the colours you have chosen to use for your website.
- User-friendly navigation: Everyone will easily navigate your website if you have an intuitive theme. With the right theme you can increase your conversions. Provide simple navigation and have clear call-to-action (CTA) buttons.
- Look at the impression of your website: First impression matters. Make your homepage appealing and choose the best layout. Refreshing your homepage design especially on holiday seasons may help improve conversions. Mistakes you should avoid when designing a website are:
- Having an empty homepage
- Having a placeholder text on your live website
- Not having necessary pages such as about us page and contact us page on your website.
- Grammatical errors: Avoid grammatical errors in designing your website and you will get conversions. You can use tools like Grammarcheck and Spell Check Plus to check all grammar before you add them to your website.
- Use product videos: Product videos can help customers have a feel of the product they want to buy from your e-commerce website. Product videos give the product more detail and reduce the uncertainty of your e-commerce website visitors.
- Use the right fonts: Your e-commerce website will be enhanced if you use the right font. Font tips you can use for your website include:
- Avoid coloured fonts
- Do not underline, bolding and italicize the same sentence or text.
- Use fonts related to your industry
- Use fonts that are familiar to customers.
- Update your website regularly: Regular updates increase conversions and improves your search engine performance. A regularly updated website is seen as active by customers and it will help drive traffic to your website.
- Customer reviews: Customer reviews impact the trust and credibility of your brand as it gives insight into how customers see the product or services that you offer on your e-commerce website.
- Use minimalist website designs: Minimalist website designs are engaging and SEO friendly. According to Mike Falkow, “Over the years there has definitely been a move towards simple, almost minimalist, design. This will continue. The reason this works so well in design is that it keeps the site looking professional and timeless.” Minimalist designs allow visuals to stand out. To Damon Burton, “If you are launching a website, you’ll want to make sure it will be useful, understandable, unobtrusive and aesthetically pleasing.”
- Get rid of pop-ups: Avoid multiple pop-ups. Try to have one pop-up that is effective and boosts conversions.
- Social media sharing: Make sure your visitors can share your product and services on their social media accounts directly from your website.
- Have specific categories: Your e-commerce website will be more navigable if you have specific categories for your products and services.
- Secure shopping: Make your e-commerce website secure to reduce the chances of your website getting hacked. Make sure your e-commerce website is trustworthy. Get an SSL certification.
- Incorporate your uniqueness into your website: Whatever makes your brand unique should be incorporated into your e-commerce website. According to Joe Goldstein, “If you’re looking to take your website to the next level, consider what makes your brand more than a commodity, and remember that there’s more to design than aesthetics.”
- Craft a blog: A blog can optimize the SEO strategy of your e-commerce website.
- Mobile first: Having a responsive design is important. You will lose customers and your SEO will be affected If your website is not mobile friendly. According to Mali Phonpadith, “Several critical things to keep in mind if you’re planning to design or redesign your website in 2018 include designing for mobile first, incorporating bold visuals and engaging content and checking your load times.”
- Use emotional content: Make sure your content is not automated. According to Anastasia Vasilieva, “Focus on your content to make it more human and emotional. Feel free to experiment with custom photos and illustrations to make your website more personal and friendly.”
- Promotions: The offers and promotions you have should be clearly visible and easily seen by your visitors.
- Easy checkout: Make sure the checkout process on your e-commerce website is not complicated. Simplify the steps to checkout and make it convenient for customers. Remember to show delivery information and the return policy.
An SEO friendly website focuses on marketing strategy, keyword research, content, reputation, social media integration, on-page and off-page SEO, SEO coding, local SEO and citations.
- Marketing strategy: In creating your marketing strategy get to know your audience. Know your target audience, the type of content your customers like to consume and the goals you want to carry out with your e-commerce website. Develop your marketing strategy goals. Do you want lead generation, more sales or more visibility. Make sure your goal is clearly defined. Make your brand value proposition clear across your website.
- Keyword research: Keywords can make or break your e-commerce website. Keywords research helps you know which keyword to use. Google AdWords Keyword Planner is important for SEO. Use keywords that receive the most searches monthly. Build your spreadsheet and add keyword groups.
- Use on-page SEO: On-page SEO is the optimization of the structure of your page so that web crawlers can find the keywords that you have targeted. There are parts of your e-commerce websites that have to be optimized if you want your website to be successful. Include keywords a minimum of four times in the body of content.
Make sure keywords are added to the alt tag when you use images. Meta descriptions should include your targeted keyword and include your target keyword in your URL.
- Use off-page SEO: Off-page SEO is everything you can do outside your website to increase your ranking. An effective off-page SEO must include social networking sites, blogging, blog marketing and link building.
- Optimize citations: All citations are important when it comes to SEO. Your business name, phone number and address are all important. Citation is an important part of ranking algorithm and it is important to Local SEO
- Reputation management: Most people trust online reviews. It is important to have a quality online review strategy. You can build an online reputation management plan by engaging with your reviewers and gathering reviews on your website.
- Social media: You will get inbound links and conversions when you build social media for SEO. Social signals that are important include your community size and your like/share ratios. Social posts that contain good keywords receive visibility. With keywords and hashtags your content can be found. Build your brand on social media.
- Blogging: SEO is important for every blog. Define your blog goal, think about SEO before writing your blog, figure out user intent, do keyword research and consider your content.
- Website hosting and website speed: Your e-commerce website must be responsive. Your website must be fast. You can increase the speed of your WordPress website by using a content delivery network (CDN), using an effective caching plug in, optimizing your WordPress database and choosing a good host.