Basic Things to Keep In Mind While Optimizing Your E-Commerce Website to Be Successful
It is not a cake walk to get an e-commerce website established in the market. Just coming up with the idea of an e-commerce website and creating it is not sufficient. One cannot just sit back and wish that people will come and visit the site to buy stuff. But, if we take a look at the market, it is not at all easy. There is some additional effort needed to invoke people to visit your website. But again, a visitor to the website will not necessarily buy things. So, to make people shop from your website, it is essential to make some more efforts to push people to make a purchase.
Running an e-commerce website on WordPress is very popular these days. There are various tools available which assist you to optimize the website to increase sales in the best possible way and to pick the right set of tools is important and challenging. Most people, who step into the e-commerce website realm for the first time, find it a little tricky.
So, here I would like to share some useful piece of information which will be helpful when an e-commerce website on WordPress has to undertake conversion optimization.
Layout and the use of images
These are some key items on every website. Now, the size and location of such key items play a significant role in the conversion numbers. As per the study conducted by the Visual Website Optimizer, it was stated that the use of large product images increases the conversion rate by 9% approximately. So, we can say that this technique is quite effective when implemented.
Images have always proved to be better when we talk of engaging people and attracting them rather than plain text. And for an e-commerce website, such images tend to attract customers. Too much of clutter can be confusing for the viewers and distract them. This happens when there are a lot of products available for selling on a single page. According to Shopify, too many promotional offers or product images makes the site look full and has a negative impact on the conversion rate.
These days the approach followed is, less is more. A large descriptive image will surely capture the attention of the viewer. The description of the product is also important. Make sure it is to-the-point written in an interesting manner. The customer today is a lot informed with tremendous knowledge, so writing too much will make them believe that nothing is true out there.
The extra information should be limited such that the visitor should not feel bored with it. Related offers and products can be shown by nothing else should be written just to make the visitors happy. The goal should be clear as you want to sell the items nothing more than that. So, avoid getting into anything which will distract the visitors.
Keywords and SEO
Choosing the correct keyword for the product pages is of utmost importance. Keywords helps the customers to find the website while searching for a particular product on the major search engines. Although, too much use of the keywords is not at all advisable.
The keywords chosen should be included in the product pages, tags and Meta description. You can also install an SEO plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast as it will inform the creator of the website whether the new pages which are created are optimized properly based on the chosen keyword or not.
One of the most important thing here is the slug. This is a part of the URL of a particular page which contains the primary keyword so as to enhance the visibility of the page. The keywords should never be used frequently as it degrades the quality of the content and doing that will not be a good option. Using too many keywords will not provide the required information to the visitor and he or she will not be prompted to buy the product. The clutter of keywords can also annoy Google, so don’t do it.
Conversion Tools
It is important to keep a check on the number of conversions made by the current site so that the improvement and further optimization can be planned accordingly. In WordPress, it is possible to add these optimization tools using just a plugin. Let’s take a look at some of the popular tools which will make the site user friendly and also increase the sale of the products.
Review for discount extension by WooCommerce
To drive conversions and improve the overall user experience, Review for Discount Extension is a helpful tool. The customers who visit the website are asked to leave a review after they are offered a discount. This increases the chances that the visitor will complete the checkout process and also increase the count of reviews on the website. More reviews will be helpful for all those people who will shop in future. Offering discounts is a very popular method to increase sales and is a proven technique from the past many years.
Olark Chat
Customers look for support in case they have some query about the product. And if such an assistance is available, this is likely to create a good image about the e-commerce website. These days live chat is used on many websites and the most popular tool to implement this is Olark Chat. When the visitors browse an e-commerce website, they are offered to chat with the representatives. A visitor can initiate the chat if required and get the desired information.
This prevents the user from visiting any other website for information and increase the probability of sales on your website. So, in this way you can add to your conversion rate. This feature can be added on WordPress websites using a plugin or by pasting a chunk of code into the text widget. The plugin is not official, therefore no assistance will be provided by Olark Chat.
Optimizely
The service of Optimizely does not come under WordPress but there is an option to use the plugin so that you can manage it from your website. It is an efficient way to incorporate the A/B testing techniques to improve the sales and also everything is visible on a single dashboard. This saves a lot of effort, as the site owner does not have to switch between tabs and other websites.
Once the plugin is installed, you can start using Optimizely website after creating an account. Then you can further proceed with the optimization of your e-commerce website. Plan out different strategies and see what works best for your website.
Conclusion
Creating an e-commerce website on WordPress is a great idea as it is the best affordable method available today. A lot of tools are available which can be used as per your requirement. Not only this, a lot of customizations can be made to the website with the available options. The tools are easy to use as all of them come as plugins or extension to plugins.
These are some of the essential aspects which will boost sales and will create a good ranking for your e-commerce website. You can get in touch with me for more information and I will soon share some more valuable information regarding various other aspects of WordPress which can be utilized. Please feel free to ask questions by replying to this email.
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