5 Ways To Optimise Your E-Commerce

So you have your online shop but the sales aren’t quite pouring in as you had hoped? You need to optimise your e-commerce – here are 5 fundamental ways to help you.

Write more copy in your product descriptions

As well as being a major convincer to the customer, the descriptions will also bring you major SEO benefits.

Google loves content and customers love information so it’s a win-win situation if you just add more copy. Powerful product descriptions are far more likely to make people want to buy.

When you’re buying off the internet, you can’t exactly pick something up, feel it, try it or even smell it. The only thing you have are words and pictures, so be expansive in your descriptions. This will give the viewer more opportunity to buy into what you’re selling but it will also give Google a better chance of picking up on keywords. Getting more interest on Google will then help to drive more traffic you your products, so don’t be lazy, be descriptive and lure those sales in.

Tablet users spend 21% more than desktop users

Write unique product descriptions

Each product description you use should be unique to anything else on the web.

If you don’t use unique descriptions Google will know and will not be very happy with you. They call it ‘duplicate content’ and it’s considered very naughty so don’t be tempted to to copy paste content from similar products, your content needs to be

• Your own and
• Different from anything else on the web

It needs to be yours because anything else is stealing and it needs to be different because if it’s word -for-word the same as someone else’s, Google is likely to smell a rat and mark your site down for it. Even if you have lots of products that are nearly the same on your site, you still need to take the time and trouble to write a product description for each one. It’s tough but you will be rewarded with more traffic and more conversions in the long run.

Use large images

As big as you can (without being ridiculous). It makes sense – if you’re going to buy something, you need to be able to see it.

The worst thing about shopping online is that you can only use one of your senses – sight: you’re relying totally on a tiny picture. And it’s not just the size that matters – good product images sell merchandise on e-commerce sites. Your pictures need to be large enough to show the details and of good enough quality to entice the purchase. Good quality photos and useful product copy increase sales and reduce returns.

Focus on your title tag

Make sure that your page has a title tag and that every page has its own unique title tag that describes the product to help optimise your e-commerce site.

A meta tag is an HTML or XHTML element used to provide information about a web page and is used by search engines and website users. The Title tag is what shows up in the search results, so it should contain important keywords to help the search engine determine what the page is about – but here’s a tip: write title tags for humans and keep it between 50 and 60 characters.

Here’s a useful link to help you preview your title tag as it appears in Google. Page titles matter for SEO and for conversions so make sure that you take your time to make them unique, descriptive and accurate.

87.5% of online buyers use Paypal

Cart Checkout

Cart abandonment is a big issue for e-commerce sites. Abandoning a shopping cart can be caused through many things; running out of time, not wanting to create an account or the process is just too complicated.

Did you know that 70% of online carts are abandoned before checkout and a 2 second delay in load time can increase the abandonment rate to 87%.

However there are things that you can do to help reduce the risk and improve the conversion experience:

• Show the user how far they are in the checkout process
• Reduce the number of pages to complete a transaction
• Make sure the user knows a product is in stock
• Keep the checkout simple
• Remembering a cart so that shoppers can resume purchase at a later date

Whatever it is that you are selling make sure you optimise your e-commerce site, you are looking after your SEO, monitor your analytics for patterns in how the site is being used, test and measure and make the necessary changes needed to improve in these areas.