Delray Beach SEO – Web Traffic Expert

An ecommerce entrepreneur has a million different things to work on: setting up the store, working with wholesalers, and dealing with customer service problems can eat up so many hours.

But if there’s one aspect of your store that you need to get right, it’s SEO. If you’re not getting traffic from search engines, you’re going to have a hard time getting the customers you need.

If you’d like to learn how to set up your SEO the right way, check out these tips!

Before You Open an Ecommerce Store

1. Your Domain Name is Important

When it comes to domain names, you want something that’s memorable and easy to spell. Simplicity is key.

That said, there’s also a small SEO advantage if your domain name has an important keyword in it. These can get expensive in many cases. However, new URLs are getting released all the time.

So while you may not be able to get luxurypillows.com, you may be able to get a slightly more esoteric URL, like luxurypillows.morning.

(Yes, you’re not just limited to URLs ending with .com, .org, or .net. I’ll let Wikipedia explain.)

2. Research Your Options, Then Choose Shopify

WooCommerce, Volusion, BigCommerce. There are a lot of ecommerce platforms out there, but none of them beat Shopify.

As a business owner, you really should do your research, so don’t trust my word for it. Look around, see what people have to say.

Once you’ve done that, I really think Shopify is going to be your platform of choice.

3. Work to Make Your “About Us” Page Sing

About Us pages are hard, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore them. In fact, it’s one of the most frequently-visited pages on your site, which makes it one of the most important pages on your site.

Of course, it’s hard to briefly sum up the reason for a business you’ve put serious time into. Working on the same thing for awhile can easily lead to tunnel vision. How do you combat that?

Try focusing on your story. Answer simple questions like, why are you opening this online store? What is it about the product that interests you?

It’s also a good idea to turn some of the spotlight towards the customer. That takes some of the pressure off you, and it allows you to frame your brand in an interesting way.

So, if your ecommerce store sold bedding, you might talk about how you were an insomniac who always wanted to find the perfect night’s rest. Or you could talk about the customers who are likely to use your store: discerning sleepers who won’t settle for anything less than the best.

The bottom line is: pay attention to your About Us page. It’s a great tool to earn trust and build a good sense of community.

4. Know Your USP and Emphasize It

There are so many ecommerce sites out there, and the big guys like Amazon will always win on pricing. So how do you differentiate your business?

This is the question you should be asking yourself while creating your store. The question’s answer, your business’s Unique Selling Proposition, will be what helps you get sales hat your competitors don’t.

Your USP could be anything. Free shipping is a little too common in ecommerce to classify as unique, but you could offer great customer service, particular expertise, a 60-day return policy, or something else that makes you uniquely qualified to serve your customers’ needs.

So far as SEO is concerned, it doesn’t matter what your USP is. But it’s good to keep the USP in mind when implementing your SEO strategy, because then you’ll know what to emphasize when attracting your customers.

Plaster the USP all over your site. Put it in the About Us page, write a blog post about it, write it in the meta description (check out tip six for more on meta descriptions). Make sure people know it.

5. Don’t Forget These Three Pages: Contact Us, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policy

The Contact Us page is important for obvious reasons. It engenders a sense of trust while simultaneously allowing the customer to contact you if they really need to.

The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy are a little harder to appreciate. After all, how many people read them? Surely you’re not going to rank for them.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if these pages end up being an open secret between you and your lawyer; they set the terms that could save you if there are any legal troubles.

So, yeah, when you’re first starting out, you can probably use one of the million free TOS and Privacy Policy page generators that are available with a single Google search. But once your business starts making real money? Do yourself a favor and hire a lawyer.

6. Attach Meta Descriptions to Your Pages

When people search for a term like “lawn mowers,” Google shows them a page of search results (the search engine results page, SERP for short). It looks a little something like this:

Each result consists of a title, a URL, and a meta description. The meta description is the block of text that Google takes from your website and shows to searchers.

It’s an ad of sorts, giving people a small, tweet-like glimpse at what they can expect from your site.

Want to know something beautiful? The meta description is customizable. If searchers keep finding a page of yours by using the same keyword, it can be useful to tweak the meta description so that it features that word and entices the reader to click onto your site.

For pages that people are finding via a variety of keywords, you might be better off just letting Google pull the meta description. At less than 160 characters, the meta description is too small to be optimized for more than one keyword.

7. Get the Shopify Show Recent Orders App

One of the most important things an ecommerce store needs from its customers is trust. After all, they’re giving you important credit card information without seeing the product beforehand.

There are a lot of ways to overcome this problem, and I’ll mention a number of them throughout this article. A particularly useful one is by showing social proof.

Before ecommerce, customers figured out a store’s social proof by using their senses. If Old Josie’s General Store was well-kept and constantly filled with people, a customer could safely assume the place was a good store. If the place was empty and had some shingles falling off, a customer could assume the opposite was true.

How do you get social proof today? A Shopify app called ‘Show Recent Orders.’

Like I’ve said before, Shopify is a treasure, and that’s in part thanks to apps like this one. It shows customers who has bought what from your store. That might seem small, but it’s not. That information tells people you’re not a fly-by-night, that they aren’t going to have to take a chance on a non-entity.

And don’t worry: you’re not required to show the time or date the product was purchased on, so you won’t be punished for slow sales.

8. Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

This is a pretty simple one. In 2015, Google changed their algorithm so that it ranked Mobile-Friendly sites above ones that weren’t mobile friendly. Because the tech crowd loves drama, this algorithm update was referred to as Mobilegeddon.

The best way to make sure your site is ranking well is to put your URL into Google’s Mobile Friendly Test. This algorithm change took place years ago, so most web designers worth their salt should automatically be creating sites that work on mobile devices.

If you do happen to have trouble with your site, Moz has a good guide that’ll help you mobile-optimize your site.

9. Set Up Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the bread and butter of any online business. It allows you to track how visitors are getting to your site, as well as what they do when they get there.

Installing it requires you to register your website with your Google account. Then it’ll give you a snippet of code, which you put on your website. The process is somewhat involved, but the method for getting Google Analytics on Shopify is explained here.

Site Structure, Categories, and URLs

10. Make Your URLs User- and Google-Friendly

When it comes to URLs, you want to keep things simple. So, if we were running a shoe store our domain might be zapatos.com. Then, we might set up a category for converse, the URL for which would be zapatos.com/converse. For a specific shoe, the URL would be something like zapatos.com/converse/chuck-taylor-all-star-high-top-unisex-shoe.

See how that works? It’s simple and intuitive. That makes it good for the user, who’ll immediately know what they’re clicking on when they see the URL. This is much better than a URL like zapatos.com/product/1947903?cm_mmc=feeds-_-adlucent-_-google-_-pla&utm_source=feeds, which seems intimidating and potentially spammy.

ecommerce stores in particular are notorious for bad URLs. This isn’t the end of the world, but Google has come out and said that sites with complex, unintuitive URLs may not get fully indexed. This means they’re not going to rank as highly for as many terms.

That makes URL structure a bigger deal than you might expect it to be!

11. Use Subfolders, Not Subdomains

If you want to add a new section of your site, there are two ways to do so: subfolders and subdomains. Subfolders are pretty standard, and you’ll find them on most websites.

To use the shoe site from above as an example again, zapatos.com/converse has a subfolder, with the subfolder being /converse. You can have subfolders within subfolders, too. In zapatos.com/converse/chuck-taylor-all-star-high-top-unisex-shoe, the subfolders are /converse and /chuck-taylor-all-star-high-top-unisex-shoe.

Generally speaking, these are best for SEO purposes. Your other option is to create a subdomain, which would look like converse.zapatos.com. But this is mostly an outdated way of doing things, so my advice is to stick to subfolders and not worry about subdomains.

The only exception is if you want to create a site that gets localized for different areas, perhaps being written in several different languages. In that case, a subdomain like esp.zapatos.com might be appropriate.

If you feel you need to use a subdomain, check out GoDaddy for more information.

12. Figure Out Your Shopping Categories

In ecommerce, you want store navigation to be as simple and intuitive as possible. You want shopping to be so easy, your customer doesn’t stop and think, “Do I really need this? And if I do, could I get it somewhere else more quickly?”

Proper categorization is a good way to keep your store design simple.

You should therefore sort your products into a couple categories — preferably less than ten. This will help with navigation.

Ecommerce Product Pages

13. Watch QVC

It sounds like a joke, but I’m serious! In this section you’re going to learn how important it is to master the art of selling through copywriting (if you decide to do this yourself, instead of hiring a handsome freelance SEO copywriter with ecommerce experience).

And the people on QVC? They know how to sell! If you’re the sort of person who likes to work with TV on in the background, this is the channel you’re going to want to turn to.

14. Write Unique Product Descriptions

If you aren’t creating your own products, chances are your supplier will provide you with a product description. Given the amount of work business requires, it can be tempting to cut corners instead of writing your own descriptions.

Resist this temptation. For one thing, the product descriptions often aren’t well-written. These pieces of text should sell the products; they shouldn’t leave potential customers scratching their heads.

Supplier descriptions are also often repeated across various websites. This is bad, because Google doesn’t like to show searchers multiple sites containing the same content. That means one of your competitors might rank well for a product, while you don’t rank in Google for that page at all.

Even worse, if many of your pages contain written material you can also find on other sites, Google may choose not to let your page rank in any search results.

So how do you write product descriptions? Write about the product truthfully, while emphasizing the ways it can improve a buyer’s life. Good descriptions tend to focus on the customer, bad ones focus too much on the physical details of the product.

Another thing to keep in mind is article length. Some people recommend writing 1,000 word descriptions because longer pages often rank higher than shorter ones. At the same time, users aren’t always going to want to read long descriptions while browsing, so you’ll have to balance your preferences and the needs of the store before deciding the right length to shoot for.

There is one good rule for the minimum amount of original content you want on each page. Count all the words on your site that repeat from page to page: words in the footer, the menus, and so on. You want to make sure the words original to that page make up over 50% of the content on the page, while the words that repeat from page to page make up less than 50% of the content on that page.

15. Research Competitor Product Descriptions

If you do write your own descriptions, it’ll be useful to read other product descriptions used by competitors in your industry. This is important because it’ll give you ideas of what works and what doesn’t.

Before I write for a new ecommerce company, I often like to look at its competitors and write out some of their product descriptions by hand.

In the cologne industry, for instance, I learned that most product descriptions have an incredibly regimented structure. They talk about the top note, middle note, and base note, which are the three scents that make up colognes.

I realized that boring descriptions stuck to just that, whereas the good descriptions would talk about the history of the cologne, where the scents come from, and what sort of reactions a buyer might get when wearing the cologne.

In this way, I was able to take the best methods various copywriters had used, knowing which to use and when, based on the situation.

16. Optimize for YouTube

Remember that search engine results page (SERP) we mentioned before?

That’s just a snapshot of the organic listings. These are what people tend to think of as ‘normal’ search results: the results that rank highly in Google because they’re informative.

Your goal is to dominate this page as much as possible. A lot of these tips will help you rank in the organic listings, since much of SEO focuses on ranking in those listings. You also might be able to rank well in the PPC (pay per click) listings, if you’ve got deep pockets and a willingness to pay for an ad in that space.

One of the less competitive sections is the videos. Video results don’t show up in every search query (there are in fact a variety of potential search results, which vary based on the term you search. More info on this here), but when they do show up they can be very powerful.

They don’t show up for our “lawn mowers” search query, but they do show up for, “how to mow lawn.”

A great way to rank for your product is to create a video with your products’s specific name and/or model number. As Anton Kraly of Drop Ship Lifestyle explained in his video seminar, “How to Drop Ship Properly in 2017,” It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, and you don’t even need to see the product in person. Just explain on a basic level the dimensions of the product and talk about some of the reasons people are drawn to the object.

Once you’ve ranked for the product names you’re looking to target, it’s also worth looking for “How To” Keywords you want to rank for, as these searches are some of the most likely to feature videos on their pages.

17. Optimize for Google Images

Because they don’t show up in the traditional search engine results page, many people forget how important it is to optimize their images for search engines.

This is a mistake.

Humans are visual creatures, and having your image show up at the top result for an image of your product is great, because you’re probably putting your product in front of people with interest in that very same product!

You optimize images for Google Images by assigning each of them with an alt tag. Luckily this only requires a rudimentary understanding of HTML. For an explanation about image optimization and image alt tags, check this out.

18. Enable Product Reviews

Some ecommerce owners are afraid of putting reviews up on their website.

“What if people don’t like the product?” they think. Speaking bluntly, they’re afraid of losing control.

This fear is understandable, but you have to move past it. For one thing, letting users review your products is a great way to allow feedback. It lets you see which products are providing bad experiences, potentially driving customers away from your store.

It also adds more content to each of your pages, which, as I mentioned earlier, is important in ecommerce.

Finally, it provides that magical force I mentioned earlier: social proof. Reviews allow people to see that you offer a real service. Assuming you get good reviews, it also lets them know they’ll be happy with your products.

And honestly, you shouldn’t even be afraid of bad reviews. After all, people don’t suddenly begin to distrust Amazon when they see a product on there with a low rating. They only distrust the individual product. Bad reviews are fine and in fact healthy, so long as the majority of your products have a rating that’s higher than three stars.

If you’re getting a lot of bad reviews, it’s also worth asking the question. Do you need to sell different products?

19. Keep Most Product Variants on the Same Page (Except Color, Maybe)

Once again: duplicate content is bad for SEO. Therefore, you shouldn’t have different product pages to differentiate size or some similarly surface feature.

The only exception is color, if you’re in an industry where different color keywords are important. Like, say, if you’re trying to rank for “blue t-shirt” and “red t-shirt.”

But for the most part, you should keep all different types of the same product on the same page. Otherwise you’re likely to repeat content and confuse potential buyers.

20. Keep Your Product Pages Up, Even if You’re Out of Stock

Sometimes, when an ecommerce owner runs out of a product, their immediate response is to either hide or delete the page displaying their product. This comes from a user-focused mindset, which is admirable.

Nonetheless, it can be damaging from an SEO perspective. One of the keys to SEO is consistency. When you show search engines you’re going to stay around, they’ll rank you higher in their results. Removing pages only to put them back will prevent a page from getting the traction it needs to rank well on Google.

Depending on the situation, you have a couple options for when you’ve run out of a product.

If you plan on getting more of the product, your best option is to keep the page up and inform your customers that the product isn’t currently available. In fact, you can try to turn the situation into a win, offering them a discount if they sign up to be notified when the product comes back.

If you don’t plan on carrying the product anymore, your best bet is to redirect the page to its closest analogue. So, if you’re running a toy store and you’ve stopped selling stuffed penguins, redirect the stuffed penguin page to the stuffed bear page.

This has SEO value, but it’s also good for customers in the long run. Rather than dealing with the pain of running across a 301 error because the product they’d bookmarked to buy was no longer available, they’ll be able to find a similar product to make them just as happy.

21. Figure Out Which Keywords are Ranking on Page Two

In SEO, one of the fundamental goals is to rank as well as possible for keywords that are going to drive traffic to your site. The more traffic you drive, the more people you can potentially convert to sales.

Thing is, not all keywords are created equal. Some are going to convert better than others, just as some are going to be more difficult to rank for than others.

When determining which keywords you can target to most effectively improve your bottom line, look at the keywords you’re already ranking for. Roughly 90% of traffic comes from being on the first page of results, so it’s worth checking to see if you’re ranking on Page 2 of Google for any keywords.

If you are, it’s worth building links to and raising the rankings of those pages.

Ecommerce Traffic

22. Banner Ads Are Useless For for SEO

Internet marketing can seem alien to people more used to traditional marketing methods: PPC, SEO, Content Marketing are all complex fields.

For this reason, you may want to gravitate towards banner ads on other websites, which are analogous to billboards that people click to get to your website.

If the traffic these ads bring is worth the cost, there’s no harm in using them. Just keep in mind that they provide no SEO value, because Google prohibits paid links from providing SEO value.

23. Google Product Listing Ads

Google Product Listing Ads, which are the listings associated with Google Shopping, can be a great source of traffic for your business.

They’re more expensive than getting listed in the organic search results, but when someone clicks a Google Shopping link to your website, you know they’re a shopper who’s looking for your product specifically. That sort of traffic is hard to ignore.

Content Marketing

24. Find Keywords via Google Keyword Planner

The first step for ranking in Google’s organic search results is to figure out which keywords you want to rank for. Good keywords are the ones your customers use to search for companies in your industry.

So, if you’re selling instruments online, you’ll be able to guess some of the most common terms people will search for: “instruments,” “guitars,” and so on. But these are going to be very competitive terms, since they’ll be the first ones that come to the minds of your competitors.

The best way to get a big list of keywords is to go on Google Keyword Planner. Log into Google AdWords with your Google account (if you don’t already have one, you’re gonna need it), go to the Keyword Planner, and click on the button, “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category.”

Type in the products you’re selling or type in the URL for your landing page. Either way, you’ll see a list of keywords and rough estimates of how many times they’re searched for per month.

25. Experiment with Long Tail Keywords, Including Words Like “Buy,” “Best,” and “Deal”

Of course, a lot of people these days use Google Keyword Planner, which means that the whole list of keywords it gives you may prove difficult to rank for. In that case, you’ll want to look at long-tail keywords, which are search phrases that are 3 words or more.

These usually don’t have the same search volume as shorter, more common keywords. However, if you rank for enough of them, you can combine many small streams of traffic into a big flowing river.

So, if you’re selling instruments and you can’t rank for “instruments,” can you rank for “buy instruments online”? If that’s too competitive can you rank for “buy trumpets online” or even “buy used trumpets online”?

Figure out variants for the keywords you’re targeting, then plug them into a Google Keyword Planner to see how many people search for the variant keywords.

26. Look at the First Page of Google Organic Search Results for Keywords

Go through your list of keywords and begin typing them into Google. Note the sites that are ranking on the first page. How many words are on the site and when was it written? Does the site have the keyword in its heading? Take note of all this, as well as URLs for each of these sites.

To a certain extent, you can eyeball how hard it will be to outrank the sites currently ranking for your keywords of choice. If the sites are big names that’ve been around awhile, it’ll be hard. Same if they have a high word count and if their headings have the keyword in them. The more of these things they don’t have, the easier it’ll be to get your site to rank.

Eyeballing the sites and trying to guess how hard it is to outrank them is a good way to test your knowledge of SEO. At the same time, you’ll probably want a more scientific measure of how hard a site will be to rank for.

In that case, you’ll want to go to Moz or Ahrefs.

(You have to pay for full access, but both also have free versions.)

Type the URLs into either service and you’ll get two numbers: PA and DA in the case of Moz, URL rating and Domain Rating in the case of Ahrefs.

PA and URL rating are the ones to really pay attention to when trying to outrank another site, since these numbers address how “strong” an individual page ranks in Google. The DA and Domain Rating are also important, but they are site-wide numbers that tell you how trustworthy the site as a whole is, not how well an individual page is doing.

27. Create Keyword Map

Once you understand the difficulty of ranking for various keywords, you’ll be able to decide which ones you want to go for.

Once you know the keywords you’re trying to rank for, you’ll want to think hard about the pages you’re going to have on your site. Because each keyword should have a corresponding page and vice-versa.

There are some pages that probably won’t rank for any keywords, like the aforementioned Terms of Service and Privacy Agreement, and if you write long pages you may even try to rank a page for more than one keyword.

But you should never assign the same keyword to multiple pages. This is called keyword cannibalization, and it usually ends with neither of your pages getting ranked.

Understanding that, you’ll want your homepage to rank for either the name of your company or your most important keyword. Any informative pages will have keywords related to your industry, while other pages may rank for no keywords at all.

Setting up your blog will allow you to continue ranking for new keywords. Each new post will be a new page, which will make it yet another opportunity for a searcher to find you via a unique search term.

28. Determine Posting Schedule

When planning your content schedule, you’ll want to keep several factors in mind. The first is that more content provides more keyword opportunities. So a monthly blog schedule would allow you to rank for an extra twelve terms per year, while a weekly one would give you 52 keyword opportunities.

At the same time, it’s important to set a schedule that allows you to post good content. If you’re merely pumping bad articles out there, people aren’t going to want to read it. They’re not going to link to it, and therefore Google isn’t going to rank your content for keywords.

You also want to leave yourself enough time for Link Building, which we’ll explain more in the next section.

29. Continuously Add New Content to Site

Google likes to see sites that are continuously updating. The longer the website is around, the thinking goes, the more likely it is to be an expert on its subject matter.

To a certain extent, you’ll probably be adding new content just by adding new products to your store. You’ll still want a blog though, because it’ll allow you to target any keywords you want, in a steady fashion that doesn’t rely on how many products you can add to your store.

30. Create Content that Only Makes Sense for Your Company

Creating a constant stream of content can be stressful, especially if you don’t ask for help. But one of the best ways to create content is to talk about things in a way that only your business can.

If you’re a suit company, you might do something called newsjacking (which involves writing about a story that’s hot in the media and adding your perspective to it). So, if a political figure like Sean Spicer was getting made fun of for his ill-fitting suit, you might write an article called, “Tailoring Suits: How Sean Spicer Could Fix His Suit Problem.”

This would be a unique perspective on the news story, which means a site hungry for content might very well pick your story up.

You’ll also gain access to more and more data as people visit your store. So, after you’ve been open for a year, you might write an article called “Suits for Men: What They Buy and What They Don’t.”

Only you have access to your sales data. Don’t give away the farm, but don’t be afraid to offer a sneak peak, either.

Ecommerce Link Building

31. Determine Which of Your Posts Are Going to Be Link Magnets

Once you’ve been writing content for a while, you’ll be ready to start building links to it. The first step to begin Link Building is to figure out which pieces of content are going to be the easiest to build links to.

There are several factors that can make content a ‘link magnet’.

In some cases, it may be that you’ve created a piece of content more authoritative than anything else out there. It might be longer, more filled with detail and actionable content that people like to read.

It could also just be stroking people’s’ egos. If you send them an email saying, “I wrote a round-up list of ‘Best Real Estate Brokers’ and put you at number one,” you’re more likely to get a link from that broker than if you’d sent an email saying, ‘I wrote a piece about McMansions, please link to me.”

This one’s about using common sense. Which pieces of content are people going to want to link to?

32. Do Link Outreach

Once you’ve found your link magnets, let people know. This is the slowest, most arduous part of Link Building, but it’s one you can’t afford to skip.

Sharing your content on social media will maybe attract a few links, but unless you have a huge following, you’re going to need to email people and ask, “Will you please link to my post?”

You can’t mass-produce these emails, either. You have to personalize the email to each recipient. Tell them you’re a fan, let them know why the audience for their website is going to want to see what you’ve written.

33. Buy Expired Domains and Redirect Them to Your Site

A more expensive, less time-consuming way of doing Link Building is to find websites from your niche that people have closed down and link them to your site.

You can find these sites, which we call ‘expired domains’, by using tools like, expireddomains.net. Look for sites in your nice that have a number of links pointing at them. When you buy the domain, redirect the website so that it leads to you. In this way, you’ll essentially be taking the links pointing at the expired domain and pointing them at you.

34. Optimize Internal Linking

Getting links from other sites is important, but as you can probably see, it’s very hard to do. Another form of Link Building is to make sure the various pages on your site are pointing at each other.

This does two things. One: if a visitor lands on one page of the site, it makes them more likely to visit others. Two: it’s an easy way of making sure all your pages have links pointing at them.

Your product pages will already have good internal linking due to the “Recently Viewed Products” and “Products Similar to This” sections. So just make sure your various blog posts link to each other.

35. Get On Social Media

Another way to get links is to create social media accounts for your business. Not all of these links will necessarily raise your rankings in Google by themselves.

In fact, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest specifically mark links on their website as “nofollow,” which is a way of telling Google that the links shouldn’t help raise your rankings. However, if your social media accounts grab people’s attention, they may check out your site and link to it with their websites, which would improve your ranking.

Tumblr and Reddit are interesting social media for people looking to build links to their site. Reddit because their links stop being nofollow when you get enough upvotes, Tumblr because none of their links are nofollow.

Nofollow links are a complicated subject that you can read more about here, while you can read more about managing ecommerce social media accounts here.

36. Get Links via PR

Another way to get links is by sending out press releases. This used to be a common, low-quality strategy years ago, before Google had caught on. Link Builders would essentially go to free or cheap PR sites, gaining a ton of links by spamming these sites with irrelevant news.

You don’t want to do that. Instead, you want to send out high-quality press releases when you have something worth talking about. As an ecommerce store, this can be as simple as releasing a new product that isn’t quite like anything else currently on the market. It’s a good idea to hire a PR company for this because many of them are laser-focused on getting attention from press releases.

You can read more about this technique here.

Ecommerce Customer Loyalty

37. Keep an Eye on Your Conversion Optimization Rate

Getting customers to your website is hard, but getting them to buy from you is even harder!

To make sure you’re not wasting time getting visitors who never buy, you should keep an eye on your Conversion Optimization Rate. Or, to put it in simpler terms, the percentage of people who buy from your site once you’ve brought them in.

The average Conversion Optimization Rate for ecommerce websites is 2-3%, but don’t worry if your website has a worse percentage than that. The number is going to vary widely based on your industry and price.

The real thing you want to pay attention to is trends. Has your Conversion Rate been going up? Good, keep doing what you’re doing. If it goes down, you know it’s time to change course.

Working to improve that rate just a little bit will have an oversized impact on your bottom line.

38. Get Their Email

Customer acquisition is five times more expensive than customer retention. After spending all this time, money, and effort to get customers, don’t you want to make sure they keep coming back?

Some of this requires good business fundamentals: you have to provide good products at a good price. If it’s worth it to your customer, they’ll keep coming back.

At the same time, we live in an incredibly chaotic world, and with so much to do online, it’s easy to forget things. The best way to combat this is by getting your customer’s emails.

The specifics of how you do this will vary based on your target customer. If you find yourself selling to professionals of a specific industry, you could try writing a white paper. If you’re selling to bargain hunters, a promo code would do the trick.

At its core, this strategy relies on providing your customers with value in exchange for their email address. Do that, and they’ll be happy to receive your promo emails.

39. Put “Recently Viewed Products” and “Products Similar to This” on Product Pages

After you’ve spent all this time bringing customers to your site, it’s in your best interest to make them as valuable as possible. One way to do this is to make it as easy as possible to purchase multiple items.

This means you’ll want to add two sections on your product pages: Recently Viewed Products and Products Similar to This.

The former will help them navigate. If a customer leaves a product page and wants to go back, you want them to be able to do so as easily as possible.

They could use the back button on their browser, but this is a slightly unwieldy experience. They can’t actually see the product they’re looking for, and the slight extra effort it takes to determine how far back they saw it could dissuade them from the purchase.

The Products Similar to This section is essentially a form of targeted advertising that you control. A customer willing to buy a pair of shoes from you is the most likely person to buy a second pair of shoes from you.

Therefore, you’re going to want to make sure you’re targeting them.

 Ecommerce Success Number One Tip

40. Patience

If you want to run a successful ecommerce business, I believe these are some of the best actions you can take. That said, they won’t mean anything without this final tip: be patient.

In some ways, the internet moves quickly: we’re constantly getting bombarded with news, memes, and innovation.

But in some ways, it moves slowly. Gaining organic search traffic from Google is a process that requires months of effort, not weeks. And the longer you stick with it, the more traffic you’ll get.

Want traffic tomorrow? Your best bet is to focus on PPC and Google Product Listings. But that attention comes at a price, which can quickly eat through your margins.

That’s the advantage of SEO for ecommerce. It takes longer to get going, but the costs are cheaper and the rewards longer-lasting.

Have any more SEO questions, about ecommerce or anything else? Feel free to call at 561-306-4500. That’s actually my personal phone, not an office phone. So make sure to be kind. 😉

And while you’re at it, please give this post a recommend if you liked it. Every little bit helps!