Ok, so you have a PPC campaign in progress, are using Facebook and Twitter, are regularly updating your website, and still aren’t gaining customers. You get traffic to your website and then, somewhere between arriving at your homepage and finalising a purchase, visitors disappear.  What’s the problem?

In terms of e-commerce, navigating a website should be like navigating a brick and mortar store. Customers should have a positive experience and be able to easily find what they need and purchase it without too much trouble.

Not being able to find what they’re looking for, an unpleasant shopping experience and taking too long to make a purchase are all things that frustrate customers in brick and mortar stores.

These factors are compounded in the online environment where attention and time are at a premium. If customers’ have this sort of experience online they are even more likely to bail on a purchase – all they have to do is click on the “x” in the corner of the window and they’re gone.

Here are some important factors in keeping visitors engaged:

Relevance

First, you need to ensure that you have what the customers who arrive at your website are looking for.

In terms of organic search, optimise your page for terms that people who are likely to make a purchase will search for, and concentrate on the most relevant terms possible. Your investment in SEO is wasted if you are getting visitors who aren’t really interested in your product or who are looking for information rather than at making a purchase.

If visitors arrive by clicking on a PPC ad, make sure your landing page directly correlates to the ad copy – you don’t want them to have to click around on your site to find the item they want to purchase. In fact, for visitors finding you from both organic and paid search results, you should minimise the number of clicks they need to make a purchase as much as possible.

Aesthetics

Make sure that you consider the atmosphere of your virtual store. Appropriate colours and good aesthetics encourage potential customers to stick around and make a purchase.  Don’t confuse visitors with cluttered graphics or make your text difficult to read against the background colour.

Organisation

Another part of a pleasant shopping experience is customers being able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for.  A good search function is extremely convenient for visitors, and gives them a direct way to find their destination within your site if necessary.

Of course, you should also obviously signpost different areas of website, and use categories that will make sense to visitors. Questions about products and the company should be answered succinctly and the answers should be easy to find.

Speed

For e-commerce sites, make the purchase process as simple as possible. Make their path from landing page to purchase confirmation as short as you can.  Don’t require unnecessary fields (middle initial or name, title, etc.) on forms. Additionally, give customers different payment options, if possible. Accept multiple credit cards, and allow customers to make purchases via Paypal. Perhaps create user accounts so that future purchases are even simpler.

Conversion Analytics

The best way to maximise the usability of your website – and thus the number of conversions you get – is by thinking about what customers are looking for when they come to your site, ensuring that there are simple paths for them to follow to their ends, and then analyzing user activity to find your weaknesses. (Learn more about e-commerce analytics here.)

When developing a new website or redeveloping your current website you can save yourself a lot of time and money if your SEO consultant is involved from the start.  Involving an SEO consultant from the planning stages will ensure that your new website’s information architecture and content is properly optimised and user-friendly.  As a full-service agency, we find that clients who implement our recommendations in the development stages see results on search engines more quickly and easily that those who don’t.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when developing your website to ensure that it is SEO friendly.

Content architecture

Create an information map that indicates the various pages that are going to present on the website as well as the relationship between pages in terms of content, links, relevance and so forth.

Keyword strategy

Create a comprehensive keyword strategy.  Tools like Google’s Keyword Tool will help you identify lateral keywords and key-phrase combinations that can be used.

Web copywriting

When writing your website copy keep in mind that reading online differs from reading a book for instance, reading each line from left to right.  Instead, online readers tend to scan copy and have short attention spans.  Keep your copy short and to the point and bold the keywords that you want readers to pay attention too.  Remember to include clear calls-to-action within your website copy.

Flash

If possible, avoid full Flash pages.  Even though Flash websites are very attractive and interactive they are not search engine friendly.  If you want to include Flash pages on your website, consider including an HTML version too.

Test the speed of your website

There are various tools available to test the loading time of your website.  A fast-loading website is essential in order to retain visitors, if your website takes forever to load it is likely that visitors will click away from your website and find the information they are looking for elsewhere.

Lastly, check your website’s appearance in different browsers to ensure that it is compatible with at least the most well-known browsers.  Browsershots.org is a good tool to check if your website appears broken in certain browsers.  A website can be your most powerful sales and marketing tool so it is worthwhile to invest time and resources in its development and optimisation.

We are frequently asked to share basic SEO tips so I thought I would provide some basic advice via a blog post.  We have discussed the importance of using Analytics software on your website in a previous post, so I’m not going to go into too much detail regarding the importance of analysing the data from your Analytics software.  However, to follow are a few basic tips you can easily implement to ensure your website is better optimised and more search engine friendly.

Start with the basics – create a keyword strategy

A keyword strategy will form the basis of your SEO strategy.  You will base your content strategy and information architecture, on keywords.  In essence the keyword strategy will comprise the keywords that searchers are most likely to use to find your website.  Think laterally and try to come up with a variety of keywords searchers will use to find you.  Keyword tools like Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool and Wordtracker are handy ways to find more key-phrase options to include in your keyword strategy.

Write content for your users

Once you have your keyword strategy, use this to create your content strategy.  While the keyword strategy will act as a guide when you write content, don’t try and force keywords into copy.  Write for your human users and not for search engines.  Once you have drafted the copy, reread the copy and see where you can fit keywords in (in a natural way) so that the copy flows and doesn’t seem ‘stuffed’ with keywords.

In addition to writing for human users, make it easy for them to read your copy.  Keep in mind that reading online differs from reading text on paper.  Online readers are more likely to scan copy – therefore, bold the key-phrases you want them to pay attention to.

Use descriptive title tags

Don’t use the same title tag on all of your pages. Make sure you have a unique, descriptive title tag on each page and try to include keywords relevant to the page’s content in the title tag.

Name images appropriately

Search engines cannot ‘see’ images, hence it is important to properly name them in order for search engines to index them correctly.  Read more about naming images on the TopRank blog.

Make use of proper in-text linking

In-text linking is used to draw visitors ‘deeper’ into your website.  It is important to make sure that the page you are linking to provides the visitor with relevant information.  In addition, link on the keywords relevant to the page you’re linking to.  For instance, don’t link “click here for more info”, rather link “advanced SEO tips”, if you were linking to a page about SEO tips.’

SEO is a long, continuous and time-consuming process, so you won’t see results overnight. However, through continuous measuring, testing and tweaking you are sure to see results eventually.  For a more aggressive approach contact us to find out about our SEO packages.