Having a multi-million dollar e-commerce business is every business owner’s dream. But in order to be successful in the e-commerce world, one needs to have a robust website optimization strategy. If not, it can result in negative reviews, cart abandonments and your business going kaput.
So should you invest thousands of dollars into Search Engine Optimization or there are other ways as well? Well, there are several ways you can optimize your e-commerce website. But you need to make incessant efforts and take smart decisions to make it possible. First and foremost you need the right e-commerce store development strategy. Only once you have the right e-commerce store in place you can think of further optimization.
For all those who have been looking for the best e-commerce conversion optimization techniques, here are a few insights on how to do it.
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1. Master the art of SEO and get found
Search Engine Optimization is an art very few have mastered. It involves undertaking off-page optimization and creating meaningful URLs helping the visitors to find what they are looking for. So make sure you have content which describes your products and services well and is void of keyword stuffing. When you are describing the products that are similar to your competitors, you might find it difficult to be original. But try to avoid plagiarism at all costs!
A good way to get rid of this is to put the different characteristics of your main product on the same page and use canonical URLs to give the SEO benefits to that product. For example, if you are selling a particular t-shirt, provide the options of different colors on the same page. The buyers just have to click once to be able to find what they want.
2. Build the trust amongst your customers
When customers choose to buy from a particular brand, it is not just the price factor they consider. If you take a look at your analytics, you will observe that people often visit the “About Us” page to know exactly who you are so that they can trust your brand. In order to build the trust, you need to be transparent and provide all the information about your product and services.
In one of the Surveys conducted by Shopify last year, it proved that customer reviews have the potential to boost the conversion rates by 14% to 17%. Also, safe shopping trust marks can make a lot of difference according to Actual Insights. These research studies prove that you have to build the trust amongst your customers before they decide to do business with you. Decide whether you want to do it through a powerful message, genuine customer reviews or trust logos.
3. Provide an excellent UI/UX design
It is a very well known fact that websites that are slow as a sloth lose a lot of visitors and revenue. So when it comes to providing a reasonable UI/UX on your website, the loading speed of your page needs to be improved. Google wants your page to load in few seconds if you want to make successful conversions. And in order to adhere to these demands, companies like Amazon and Walmart enhanced the speed of their website. Thereafter, 1% to 2% of an increase in revenues and conversions were observed.
Also, planning your navigation wisely is another important aspect of enabling optimization. Most of the customers know exactly what they want. So if you provide a smooth navigation experience, there will be lesser cart abandonments and increased revenues.
4. Eliminate unnecessary coding
Developers often use WYSIWYG resources to build a Web page. However, they tend to create a code mess which can make your website slow. It is important to remember that every line of unnecessary code increases the size of your page making it load slowly. So make sure that you get rid of extra space, indentation and line breaks in your code.
Google has provided some steps to minify your coding. Take a look at these steps given below:
- Make use of PageSpeed Insights Chrome extension to minify your HTML and create an optimized version of your code. Thereafter, you can run the analysis against your HTML page and read through the ‘Minify HTML’ rule. You can also click on ‘See optimized content’ so that you can get the optimized HTML code.
- For minifying your CSS, use YUI Compressor and cssmin.js.
- In order to minify JavaScript, use Closure Compiler, YUI Compressor or a Java Script Minfier. Strategize a process through which you can use these tools to minify your codes. Rename these development files and save them to your production directory.
5. Streamline the Checkout Experience
So what makes people abandon the carts? A prolonged process of account creation? A complex navigation process? Last minute surprises about shipping costs? Or lack of time? It can be all or any of the above-mentioned reasons.
A report by Radware revealed that 70% of online carts suffer due to midway abandonments. Also, loading speed of the websites should be good enough if you want to lessen the cart abandonment rates. In order to streamline a better shopping cart experience, do the following.
- Display a progress bar on the website to let your customers know how many steps are left to checking out
- Lessen the number of pages and navigation needed to accomplish a transaction
- Mention about the availability of product on the product page itself
- Simplify the design of checkout page to lessen distractions.
- Send cart abandonment emails to let the customers know that you care
- Follow up with an email if/whenever the product is back
When e-commerce business owners get desperate, they tend to walk on the belief that gaining more traffic is the only solution. But that is not the only way to make successful conversions. If you optimize your website according to the guidelines given above, you will definitely perceive a change for good.
If you think that you do not have the technical knowledge to undertake these steps, consider hiring professionals that can help you with website optimization solutions.
