Websites are the new storefront in the era of e-commerce. They create that first impression, cement brand identity, and provoke shoppers to hang around and explore everything your store has to offer. Despite their importance, however, few online retailers understand how to make their website a revenue-generating asset. To help in this regard, keep reading to discover 5 pro tips on how to optimize your website to increase online sales.
Improve Your Onsite SEO
As its name implies, onsite SEO is the practice of enhancing elements on your website–as opposed to links and advertisements found elsewhere on the web–to help your website rank for SEO. While this used to involve matching keywords on your site with those trending on search engines, the practice has become far more nuanced as search engines have become more sophisticated. Today, your content must include the appropriate keywords, but it must do so in a way that matches user intent for a given topic. Some ways to ensure that your onsite content is optimized for SEO include:
- Depth – the content on your site must be sufficiently thorough and substantive to a given query or trending topic
- Digestible – your content should be professional but not too academic. Shoot for middle-school readability, short sentences, and friendly language
- Relevant – your keywords must match user intent for their searches. Don’t stuff unrelated keywords into content when they don’t enhance the natural flow of the discourse
- Unique – in the old days of SEO, “spinning” was a popular way to get articles to rank. Using this dubious technique, websites would take previously posted content, rearrange some sentences/paragraphs, and re-post, hoping to overtake the original poster’s ranking. Fortunately, this practice is no longer effective, as search engines can quickly identify plagiarized and/or unoriginal content. Therefore, keep your content as fresh and unique as possible to give it the best chance to rank
As most searchers never make it past the first page of the search engine results, improving onsite SEO is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site.
Perform a Technical Audit
Sometimes, you have to get “under the hood” of your website to get it functioning at optimal levels. Improving the content and design of your website won’t be enough if there are underlying technical issues that are causing the site to bog down. A few general maintenance tips to perform during the technical audit include:
- Resizing and compressing images to improve the page loading speed
- Check your site for any broken, suspicious, or dead links
- Updating website code and templates
- Scanning for any 404 error pages
- Removing unnecessary plugins
If this type of web maintenance is outside your field of expertise, it is worthwhile to contact a web development professional to iron out the kinks in your website and get it functioning properly.
Employ a Marketing Management Tool
As you probably gathered from the section about onsite SEO, content is king in the era of digital marketing. The more quality content that you post to your site, the more likely you are to be a trusted source of information in your niche and see an explosion of visitors.
The keyword, though, is “quality.” In the era of remote work, your marketing team may never meet in person to hammer out the next big advertising campaign, resulting in an effort that is disjointed and inconsistent. Therefore, to ensure that the content posted to your site is of the highest quality, it is worthwhile to invest in a marketing asset management tool. The best marketing management platforms will allow all of your remote team members to collaborate on projects, communicate as campaigns develop, and quickly access all marketing content, ensuring that everything posted to your site is of the most cohesive, tightly-focused quality possible.
Tactfully Deploy Calls to Action (CTAs)
Although it is undoubtedly important for your website to be a source of information, you will never see an increase in revenue unless this information prompts visitors to take action. Therefore, it is critical that your website contain effective CTAs to compel visitors to take the logical next step along the sales journey. Whether this involves providing their contact information, using store locator software, requesting sample products, watching a how-to video, or clicking through to the product page, professionally placed CTAs get your visitors more invested in your business and increase the likelihood of a future sale.
Optimize Your Website and Watch Online Sales Soar
Optimizing your website involves getting in the mind of your customer and creating an experience that they want to be a part of. By improving your onsite SEO, adding where to buy software, performing a technical audit, using a marketing management tool, and tactfully deploying CTAs, you can create the ideal website experience that leads to increased online sales.
George is a freelance writer that loves sharing his experience and knowledge on website development and SEO. His work can be found on Building Product Advisor, a new construction industry resource.