E-Commerce Best Practices for Continuous Sales Growth

Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

Retailers just love the ring of the cash register. Each ring is proof positive that their marketing efforts are successful. Now, retailers have more opportunities to hear the sweet sound of the cash register – with online retail. If you do not already have an e-commerce website, now is the time to start getting the ball rolling towards getting one. Now, if you already have an e-commerce website, you can still establish best practices that are geared towards growing your sales and building a loyal customer base.

One of the key ways to do this is to strengthen the presence of your e-commerce website, making it easier for search engines like Google (and the potential customer) to find you. Before we begin, though, keep in mind that an effective SEO strategy looks towards the long-term and achieving a substantial SEO pay-off will usually take time. For quicker results, you can look into paid advertising. However, a careful and well-planned SEO strategy does have its pay-off over time.

Here are some best SEO practices that can help you promote your e-commerce website:

• Check and test thoroughly before going live. This goes not just for the initial website launch, but for any succeeding updates and changes you might have. A thorough testing for bugs and hiccups ensures that your customers get a smooth experience. Website errors such as drawling errors and 404 errors will also cause search engines to penalize your site.
• Arm yourselves with the right website tools. This includes SEO analytics tools and webmaster tools that can help you easily get a list of keywords, as well as check for any errors.
• Mix keywords with quality content. Provide your readers with interesting and relevant content – one that is neither wholly sales oriented nor only focused on magazine-like articles. You need to determine the right mix of sales pitch and information to keep your readers interested, but also to remind them to press the “buy” button. For instance, if you have a clothing or accessories website, you can have a “look of the week” section that features your newest arrivals. When mixing keywords with page titles, be sure that your titles are “human-readable”.
• Go for unique content. Categories and product descriptions should be unique, so that search engines have a lot of content to index. Do not use the manufacturer’s description – which other websites may already be using.
• Optimize images for quick loading. Although images should be eye-catching (and even provocative), these should be small enough to improve loading times. Slow-loading websites may put off impatient customers who may opt to leave the page before it is loaded completely. When you have a lot of customers leaving without even taking a look at what you have for them, you not only lose out on potential sales – you also get penalized by the search engines.
• Always check mobile friendliness. People are now choosing to shop in mobile platforms or go back and forth their desktops and mobile devices. As such, aim for a design that shifts seamlessly whatever device your readers use. Two options you can look into is to create a nimble and responsive website that adjusts to the size of the mobile device’s screen or, you can create a separate mobile website app. Weigh the pros and cons of each option and decide which one works best for your requirements.
• Make it easy to reach the shopping cart. As they say, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The same goes for navigation on websites. Highly usable websites have streamlined navigation paths that limit the number of clicks the reader has to make in order to go to a particular page in the website. You should also have a handy search bar if the reader is looking for something specific rather than simply browsing through your site.

About Adaptivity Pro

These are just some of the best practices you can implement in your e-commerce website in your bid to increase leads and sales. Adaptivity Pro still has more of these techniques in its magic bag of tips and tricks. Adaptivity Pro is proud to provide clients with quality SLC Search Engine Optimization strategies and implementation. However, that’s not the only thing Adaptivity Pro can offer you and your e-commerce business. We also have a team that specializes in Utah website design and programming, copywriting, graphic designing and other Internet-based services.