Any ecommerce website owner will know that it’s important to produce a site that is easy to navigate, has clear items, visible buy buttons, and a checkout experience that doesn’t feel like a hassle. But, with so many essential components, besides innovative novel approaches to encourage conversions, how does one choose the best approaches?
Your website is like a storefront, and if your visitors can’t find what they’re looking for or find the information confusing, they’ll go elsewhere. Here are five important areas to optimise for ecommerce sites.
Navigation
Navigation is an important factor that can have a significant impact on your site’s conversion rate. If visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, or if the navigation is unclear, they are likely to leave the site.
Ecommerce websites have several areas where navigation can improve the consumer experience, including:
- Category navigation
Allows customers to gain a better understanding of how the site is organised. - Navigation menus and submenus
Provides quick, easy access to a variety of the site’s products and services. - Product and brand navigation
Helps customers find products when they know what they’re looking for. - Customer reviews
Gives customers more information about products and services. - Social media and websites
Enables customers to connect with the ecommerce site on their favourite social media platforms and other websites. - Payment providers
Helps customers to accept any form of payment.
When creating the navigation for your site, it’s important to ensure that it’s optimised for SEO. This means using keyword-rich titles and descriptions to ensure that your site appears as the top result when potential customers are searching for products or services that you offer. The navigation should be easy to access, search engines should be able to index the links, and it should lead customers to the pages that they need to make a purchase.
Search Engine Optimisation
The goal of a search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign is to make your website more visible in search engine results. When potential customers search for products and services, they should find your site. Optimising your website for search engines is essential, as it’s one of the fundamental ways people will find your site.
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have special software (called “spiders” or “bots”) that crawl and index the pages of millions of websites. For your ecommerce site to get the highest possible visibility, it’s important that the site be well-structured, include relevant, high-quality content and metadata, and have a strong link profile.
Consumer Experience
When shoppers look on a retailer’s website, they typically have a specific item in mind. If they see it or something similar to it, they’re going to purchase it. If they can’t find it, or if they find something else they like better, they’re likely to go somewhere else to search for it.
To ensure that visitors to your ecommerce site have a positive experience, it’s important to focus on the following areas:
– The home page should be clear and concise, with easy access to the main navigation menu.
– Product pages should include high-quality photos, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, and related products.
– The checkout process should be quick and easy, with multiple payment options.
– Customer service should be readily available, through live chat, phone, or email.
It’s also important to keep in mind that mobile commerce is booming. In fact, over 60% of global ecommerce sales come from mobile devices. This means that it’s essential to have a mobile-friendly and a fast website that provides an optimal experience for users.
User Experience and Design
The first thing that your customers will see is your website design. This is your storefront, so it’s important that it looks professional and clean. For example, if you’re selling products, you don’t want your website to feel cluttered with pop-ups and other images that distract from your products.
Aside from aesthetics, it’s also important to keep your website user experience in mind. You want your site to feel intuitive to your visitors and make it easy for them to find what they’re searching for.
Research shows that a good balance of white space and a clean, easy-to-understand layout can make all the difference. This includes not cluttering your site with too many copy blocks, flash animations, and pop-ups.
Mobile Optimisation
Mobile Optimisation is a big deal for ecommerce sites. The vast majority of people search for products on a mobile device. If your site is difficult to use from a mobile device, people are going to go to another site that works better on their devices.
It’s important to keep your mobile-optimised site easy to navigate and easy to search. This means that you should have quick access to links for your most common searches.
Conclusion
Optimising your eCommerce site is important, but it’s hard to keep track of all the different areas that may impact how your site is viewed by potential customers. By focusing on these five areas, your ecommerce site will be more likely to convert visitors into customers.
Web Design Southampton is an ecommerce web design company Southampton that can help you optimise your site for SEO and all the other elements that contribute to a better conversion rate. Let us help you take your ecommerce site to the next level. Contact us today to get started!
