Being a business owner is a hurdle of its own. You have to think about managing cash flow, taxes, hiring employees, and a million other things simultaneously. And with the Coronavirus pandemic still around the corner, the challenges keep mounting. In fact, a report from Statista shows that 29 percent of respondents highlighted the impact of the global pandemic on their business as their most significant threat, among several others.
Unfortunately, not many businesses survive these hurdles. About twenty percent of start-ups fail in their first year of establishment, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And at the tenth year of opening, only 35 percent of these franchises survived. How did they do that? By studying the market, understanding their customers, and producing a solid plan to turn the tables in their favor.
However, while they struggle to stay afloat, many business owners often forget some basic lessons, such as SEO and making sure they have excellent web user experience. These strategies help to build a high-performing webshop.
A webshop performance measures how much time a website’s pages take to load. It also asks questions like How smooth is the interface, are there glitches and delays as customers navigate between pages and categories, and so on.
Getting a smooth web interface is an essential step to increase engagements and sales. According to a study commissioned by Google, online retail shops experienced an 8.4 percent increase in conversion after improving their mobile site speed by 0.1 seconds. But, loading time is one out of several other elements that influence higher engagement on a website. Some of these other factors discussed below include:
1. SEO optimization
2. Appropriate use of multimedia
3. Mobile-friendliness
4. Color psychology
5. Smooth payment process
6. Brand trust
The hierarchy is simple: get traffic, convert leads, and close sales.
For an online store to succeed, it must have a decent amount of traffic and conversion rates. However, to get considerable amounts of visits, the shop must be visible to people online. That is where search engine optimization comes in.
SEO is indispensable for business growth. It is an effective way of reaching customers in moments that matter. Primarily, it involves the use of several techniques. The goal is to make it to the top of the search results page, as visibility reduces from top to bottom. You know the joke: “The best place to hide a body is on page 2 of Google.”
Keywords are words or phrases that give an idea of what your content is about. In a general sense, keywords are the words or phrases that searchers mostly use when looking for a particular product, service, or answer. So, when a site’s content matches the query’s theme, it is preferentially selected to show up on Google.
In other words, by applying relevant keywords to your website, you automatically position the site to compete for first-page search results. Generally, and especially for eCommerce sites, using relevant keywords in the following sections will help to boost the website’s rank and visibility:
1. Homepage
2. Promotion page
3. Naming category
4. Product description
5. Meta tags and page links
6. Blog posts and other on-page content
7. Page links
Websites may only benefit from keywords if they use the right words and phrases and at an appropriate density. To find relevant keywords and to determine their quality, you can employ tools like Amazon, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, among others.
Infographic vector created by katemangostar
The site’s structure refers to the arrangement of pages and categories on the site. To a large extent, it dictates how easy to navigate the shop will be. With excellent architecture comes a better Google ranking.
Also crucial for ranking is the quality of the user experience that a good architecture facilitates. It helps increase the amount of time customers spend on the site, as well as their tendency to buy.
For better performance, the structure of the website should look like a food web (or a triangle) rather than a chain-like arrangement. Your homepage should link to all your product categories and promotions. Also, you should use proper internal linking to improve link equity and ensure you do not have pages with zero internal links (which essentially means nobody can navigate to them and can only be reached by typing in the exact URL).
Images, videos, and infographics are powerful marketing tools. They increase the viewer’s attention and engagement. Likewise, they create an impression in the customers’ minds about the credibility of the brand and the product.
Applying this knowledge to the webshop will require that you primarily display all your products in high-quality pictures. Using infographics or videos to show the item’s features will also help to drive engagement and improve your webshop’s performance.
Google recommends that a website loads within two seconds at most, especially for eCommerce sites. Any second more than that benchmark could cost valuable leads. Not only that, it also reduces the shop’s ranking and authority on search engines.
Slow page loading is often a result of using the wrong web host, heavy files, and unoptimized images on the website. Optimizing images means reducing their size considerably without lowering their quality. It helps the site to load faster.
Likewise, your website must be responsive. That means it must be able to shrink or expand to fit any screen size. That way your customers can get the best user experience in your shop whatever device they are using.
Sometimes, the proper color orientation of your webshop or product may just be the thing that influences people to buy. More than the aesthetic appeal, the right combination can influence human thoughts and behavior. According to a study by WebFx, about 85 percent of people buy a product primarily because of its color.
The proper use of hues helps to create an appealing first impression for your visitors. It also improves readability and understanding of content, compared to monochrome or poorly combined colors. Having an appealing webshop can also help to increase the average time visitors spend on a page. A deeper understanding and application of this concept can influence higher conversions and sales.
For example, restaurants often use red color themes in their space. The reason behind that is that red stimulates appetite and creates a sense of urgency. That is one of many applications and benefits of color psychology. To maximize this strategy, business owners may follow the steps below:
1. Understand the meaning and emotions evoked by each color.
2. Use a shade associated with your industry. For example, Healthcare industries use a blue theme on their website. In contrast, niches such as cosmetics, food, and pediatrics may commonly use pink.
3. Consider your audience’s taste before choosing a color.
4. Combine shades MODERATELY. Although it is essential to have a color scheme, lacing it with other hues makes it more appealing. You may stick to the 60-30-10 rule in web designing to get a perfect combination for your webshop.
Statistics reveal that the global cart abandonment rate is 88.05 percent. Baymard Institute conducted further studies and discovered that high extra costs (shipping fee and taxes) were the most popular reason (49%) for abandoning a purchase. Some other causes include:
1. The site required customers to open an account first before completing a purchase (24 percent).
2. Slow deliveries (19 percent)
3. Complicated checkout process (18 percent)
4. Not trusting the site with credit card information (17 percent)
5. Inability to see total order price upfront (17 percent)
6. Unfavorable return policy (11 percent), etc.
Thus, business owners may provide several options for payment. That way, customers can choose from several other alternatives if they encounter any issue in the process. They should also optimize their policies, deliveries, and payment processes to meet their audience’s demands.
Trust? Yes, it is easy to overlook, but its impact on a business cannot be overemphasized. It helps to improve customer retention stats. Also, customers that trust you will refer your business to their friends and family. And research shows that it’s the best kind of marketing – it is free and highly effective.
How can you improve your brand trust?
1. Use brand storytelling techniques to share your values with the audience.
2. Provide quality and consistent customer service
3. Use social media and email marketing to build relationships and to connect with your customers.
4. Provide a feedback or chat section for customers to share their views and opinions
5. Be transparent. Provide honest customer reviews and testimonials.
6. Provide leads with recommendations on products they should get.
As you work on getting a better performance for your brand, it is essential to measure its growth. However, to get the overall performance, you should monitor various indicators that reveal the shop’s different strengths and weaknesses.
Total revenue is the total amount of sales and services that a business gets. It can be calculated by multiplying the number of goods sold by the price of the goods.
It represents the amount of money a company gets from selling a unit of its product. To calculate it, divide the value of the single product by the business’s total revenue.
It measures how valuable the product is to the customers, compared to competitors’ products. When determining the market penetration value for your product, divide the total number of sales by the total volumes of sales for other similar products in the market.
Win rate measures the efficiency of an advert promotion by determining the percentage of the impressions won against the lost opportunities.
Businesses use this metric to determine how willing their customers will be to refer them to friends and family. To get your performance in this metric, subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters.
Average Order Value tracks the average amount of money spent on every order a customer places. It measures sales per order. To calculate a business’s AOV, divide the total revenue by the number of orders.
Or you can call it the effectiveness of advertisements. It measures the number of ads against the number of leads over a period of time.
The shopping cart abandonment rate measures how often leads abandon their shopping cart without completing the purchase. Having high figures here is something you will want to avoid.
Bounce rate is the percentage of those single-page visits and it monitors the behavior of visitors. A high-performing website typically has a low bounce rate. That is, people visit two or more pages before leaving the site.
Another crucial indicator is the customer lifetime value, which provides insight into the cost of acquiring and retaining a valuable customer.
With the competitive nature of the eCommerce industry, businesses must measure their performance versus their competitors. Using several available tools, business owners can measure how well their business is doing and discern areas that require attention. Another significant benefit you can enjoy from using these tools is understanding your customers’ behavior and attending to their desires.
There are myriads of tools that businesses can use for analysis. Some are available on subscription, while others are free. Of all them, here are a few that you may need:
1. Google Analytics is a free tool that helps give a broad view of customer behavior on your website. It measures KPIs like page views, bounce rates, etc.
2. Crazy Egg helps you know which section of your website gets the most attention and which pages are ignored. That gives you an idea of what your customers prefer to see and where to place your focus on.
3. Optimizely helps users to test and compare two variants of your web design. They can use the tool to experiment with colors, arrangements, and layouts until they get the best combination.
4. WHSR Tool helps you to analyze competitor sites. That way, you can discover what makes them thrive. As you know, such insight is valuable for gaining an advantage in your niche.
5. Google My Business is a free advertising tool that showcases your business profile when people do relevant searches. It displays pictures, products, office hours, and reviews.
As stated before, 65 percent of businesses crash within ten years of founding. Yet, the statistics for online-based franchises is much worse. Statistics show that 90 percent of e-commerce start-ups pack up within the first three months. Of that number, 70 percent failed because of the bad usability of their retail platforms.
Take a look at the top online stores: they all have top-notch load speed, web interface and architecture. Their color orientation, visuals, and general web design help to create an engaging user interface.
The bottom line is: to thrive in this online retail market, your web shop’s performance must be top-quality. Only after that, you can move on to ensure you have the products on stock, an effective payment and delivery system, and user-friendly customer policies.
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Author Bio
Jerry Low has years of experience in SEO and web hosting business. He owns and operates various successful sites, adapting quickly to ever-changing Google updates.
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