The Internet continues to grow at an amazing rate. Businesses are able to earn money with direct sales online. This creates both opportunity and increased competition.
To do well in this growth environment, businesses need to promote their websites with search engine optimization. E-commerce allows any business the opportunity to supplement their retail business with online sales. How can online stores strengthen their sites to increase online sales?
- Social Commerce: Use social interaction to help shoppers make their buying decision. Add product reviews, product ratings and user feedback.
- Content Growth: Focus on content creation with a blog, articles and how-to guides. Many ecommerce sites today are thin on content.
- Duplicate Content: Many stores use stock content provided by manufacturers. This causes search engines to discount this content. Instead, rewrite and reword manufacturer descriptions to make it fresh and original content.
- Video: Visitors want to consume video content. Add how-to videos to allow people to visualize the product in use or even how to assemble it. Make sure each video is tagged with keywords.
- SEO Basics: Make sure all store pages have keywords worked into Good Title tags, H1s, content, hyperlinks and in the ALT tags of images. Link internal relevant pages together using keyword anchor text.
- Social Signals: Incorporate Tweets. Likes and +1’s into site design. Embrace these social signals and encourage content sharing.
- Mobile: Make sure a mobile version of the site not only looks great on a Smartphone, but works great for an efficient mobile purchase. The mobile version of the ecommerce site needs to minimize the bandwidth usage.
- Google Analytics: Incorporate detailed Google Analytics reporting to clearly understand buyer behavior. Monitor site search to understand what your visitors are looking for.
Successful eCommerce needs usability improvements, conversion rate optimization (CRO) and search optimization.