How to maximize your Ecommerce site with regular upkeep. When your Ecommerce site is the livelihood behind your business and sales, you can’t neglect it. Having an updated and secure platform for your online business is the first, and most important step, however, it doesn’t stop there. You need to perform routine maintenance and updates on your site to attract the search engines.
First priority is regular maintenance. Ensure you or your webmaster is performing routine check-ups and maintenance on your site. Security and hands-on monitoring are crucial to ensuring your Ecommerce site is running at peak performance. Any slack in security or needed updates will result in 404 Errors, unsecured notices, and malfunctioning of your site. Any of these issues will immediately result in low rankings and visitors leaving.
Note the importance of mobile indexing. Mobile traffic has continued to rise and surpass in many areas, so all aspects of your site need to be fully mobile optimized. Take a minute to scroll through your site as a consumer. How does everything flow? Does your shopping cart function as expected? Do images open and enlarge as they should? Assess your site from design to SEO to please the mobile needs. Slow to load, link errors and resizing issues all lead to higher bounce rates and ultimately, loss of sales.
Don’t underestimate the power of visuals. While you don’t want to overwhelm your visitors with flashy signs and constant attention grabbers, you need to capture their attention and keep it with a visually appealing site. The visuals you choose need to look good, fulfill a purpose and function properly.
Creating a healthy balance of graphics and imagery will allow your website to tell the story you want and guide your consumers to a mutually pleasing outcome. Picking those graphics that look great on desktop and mobile will increase your optimization. First impressions are everything, if you have low-quality images representing your goods, they will assume the same quality back the products you are selling.
Cater to all shoppers at all times. Repeat customers, first-time visitors, impulse buyers, to the well planned and researched purchase – they all have the same goal in mind and that’s to find what they are looking for on your site. Your site needs to attract each one of them within seconds and provide the right amount of information to fulfill those needs. Easy access to previous purchases, attention grabbers for what’s new, reviews providing backing support, and enough details and visuals to confirm their choice. Take the time to consider each shopping behavior and assess your site as each type of consumer to determine if it leads to a sale. Does it meet the expectations? Did you find what you needed? Did you feel comfortable enough to finalize that purchase?
Become a resource and gain backlinks. Ecommerce sites can rank low with SEO due to lack of content, don’t let that happen. Don’t just rely on traffic pulling to your site because of your great products. You need to reach all audiences and provide noteworthy content worth sharing. Beyond focusing on the details of your goods, share your knowledge in the industry. By providing content that viewers are looking for, you increase your odds of them linking back to your site as a source, sharing on social media and email. The more back-links you receive the higher your organic rankings.
Utilize organic and technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Continually track metrics, insights, and test your site. Without a robust performance from all fronts, your site will not get a strong ranking and your chances of popping up in Google’s recommendations diminish. Test how technically sound your site is performing with a regular site audit. How’s the load speed, crawlability, https implementation, SEO score? All of these metrics need to have a high percentage performance to be deemed “worthy”. Break down the notes suggested in the audit and tackle each recommendation the best you can. Know when to call in the experts for optimal results.
To sum it up, you need to keep it fresh, keep it relevant. The same old, same old won’t always cut it. Follow trends that make sense for your marketing. Ecommerce sites are a dime a dozen, it’s your job to stand out. Make note of National holidays and events that you can use to your benefit. Jump on any opportunity to draw attention to your site and products with promotions and news. Keeping a steady flow of marketing opportunities and content to pull traffic in (without becoming an annoyance) will help boost your sites rankings. The key to finding this balance is through managing your metrics and traffic flow to understand the patterns over time.
