Anyone involved in the e-commerce industry agree that paid online campaigns cost an arm and leg. In particular, new online retailers just don’t have the financial capacity to leverage paid ads.
Fortunately, there are ways around it for you to achieve the same conversion results without paid ads. The answer is driving organic traffic with great SEO strategies, leading to drive higher conversions for E-Commerce
The fact of the matter is, every online retailer’s dream is to build organic web traffic. The reason is simple: because organic traffic means potential customers are looking at your products for free.
So whether you’re looking to start driving organic traffic to your e-commerce site or just hit a roadblock with driving organic traffic, this following discussion is for you.
Highlight customer reviews
What’s the first thing you do after you’ve decide you need to purchase a product? Are you looking to compare prices? Looking for coupons? Or checking out real reviews?
Like you, most online consumers are doing lots of research before making purchases from online retailers. And checking these reviews is often the make or break point for many of us.
“Nearly 9 in 10 consumers have read online reviews to determine the quality of a local business, and 39% do so on a regular basis” (Search Engine Land)
Almost 90% of customers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends or family members, which means a few reviews can go a long way to boost your conversion rate.
Offering your customers the opportunity to review your product adds valuable information to your product page that you may otherwise no think of. For instance, your customers might have new value propositions for why they purchased your product.
So by providing an the forum for them to express how they feel about their purchase, you’re only improving the quality of your content for SEO rankings. You’re also learning how to improve your products and purchasing experience for customers. By taking care of this, you should drive higher conversions for E-Commerce.
Optimize meta descriptions
First of all, if you aren’t already familiar, these descriptions are what appear under the title of your typical search result.
While the quality of your meta description doesn’t impact how well Google ranks your e-commerce site, it doesn’t influence how searchers feel about your brand.
Your meta description’s influence
When your webpage gets pulled as part of many search results, it’s up to your meta title and meta description to convince searchers to visit your website. It’s in fact, the first step to optimizing your website for more conversions.
What’s important to know here is, if you don’t customize the meta description yourself, your website will pull random content from that webpage as a placeholder.
Unfortunately, that means you might not be sending the message that you want to potential customers.
What a good meta description looks like
Let me give you a quick example of what a strong meta description might look like for a product page:
Shop for Satiny Blue Bomber Jacket for Women at Nettle’s Fashion. Nettle’s Fashion provides Women’s, Men’s and Children’s fashion wear for all your family’s fashion needs.
As you probably noticed, the meta description includes the name of the product, your brand’s name and who your customer is in a strong meta description.
So go ahead, fix up your own to convert more visitors.
Leverage social signals
Many smaller online retailers believe that there’s not space left on saturated social media platforms for them to make an impact. To this I say, this statement is both true and false.
True because it is incredibly difficult for new brands to gain an impactful social following. However, false because e-commerce sites can still benefit from the social signals being generated from social posts.
Twitter, for instance, is a great platform that will help build up your content SEO rankings through the social signals of shared links.
Social commerce leading to higher conversions for E-Commerce
Let’s assume for a moment that you’re an online retailer that sells electric bikes.
For the month of July, you’re running a promotion that is providing new customers with a 20% discount. Now, when you share this promotion on Twitter on multiple occasions, it may only garner 20 link clicks to your website. That being said, something impactful you don’t see is happening.
With every click, like, retweet, search engines are gaining more recognition that your brand puts out. Ultimately, this means the webpage that’s being link will rank higher.
Add video content
Did you know? Bright Cove found that, when coupled with great content, videos drive a staggering 157% increase in organic traffic from SERPs. With “…65% of consumers actually making a purchase after watching branded social videos,” according to Tubular Insights.
These statistics alone, single-handedly makes videos one of the most effective ways to convert customers that visits your e-commerce site.
While most online retailers already have videos on their sites, this doesn’t mean it can’t further leveraged to drive SEO and customer conversions.
Mistakes you should avoid to drive higher conversions for E-Commerce
One of the most common mistakes is when we forget to provide a transcript along with video content.
When transcribed, search engines like Google can better understand the context of your videos and index it for those looking for relevant content. Hence, better SEO rankings for the webpage your videos is on.
So much like the remarkably transcribed content of TEDtalks, your ecommerce site can also benefit from additional organic traffic generated and therefore, more conversions in the long run.
Improve website speed
At the beginning of 2018, Google made an announcement that will impact the SEO rankings of many websites. Effective July 2018, mobile site rankings and search results will be impacted by how fast or slow your ecommerce site is.
Before now, we’ve all known that a slow loading website will only risk visitors abandoning the page altogether. Now, improving website speed is becoming more important as it now impacts SEO rankings.
Now you might be thinking, it’s no simple task to speed up a whole e-commerce site.
This is true. That’s why I recommend improving the speed of your website page by page.
You can do so by removing any clucky HTML that you don’t need from your most popular webpages first and foremost. Of course, for most online retailers, the homepage is worth spending the most time on perfecting.
According to Google, a webpage should ideally take less than 4 seconds to load. Trying to drive higher conversions for E-Commerce relies on it. That being said, we all know that 4 seconds feels way too long for impatient visitors!
If you’re not sure where to start, there are free tools like Web Page Test that will help you identify webpages that need more work to improve than others.
Conclusion
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all SEO strategy when it comes to driving more e-commerce conversions. That’s why it’s so important for online retailers to continue experimenting and refining their current strategies.
Once you’ve been able to identify SEO strategies that are effective for your e-commerce site, you’ll have a repeatable process. Adding video content and meta descriptions for instance, are ongoing efforts that need to be made as your business evolve and product selection changes.
Which of the above SEO strategies have you already used? If so, which have been the most effective for you? Share your thoughts and comments below, let us know how you do to drive higher conversions for E-Commerce.