Content
Content is still as important as ever. Feed your website with key word rich content on a regular basis. The key word here is regular. This keeps your website up to date and display’s ‘a behavior pattern of expertise’ in your subject area. This is something Google looks for, incremental data, added over a period of time, with similar characteristics. In other words, people writing about the same topic, multiple times, over an extended timeframe. The basic premise of any search engine is to supply relevant, recent, content to the person looking for the information. Adding fresh content regularly means your website will be the most recent, relevant response to the search query.

Pick Your Battles
Getting your website on page 1 is a lot more achievable if you target a specific location. For example, ‘Ecommerce Websites Auckland’ is a much more realistic goal for OneClick than ‘Ecommerce Websites (everywhere)’. Here are our tips for local SEO:

• Add a Google Map with a marker pin to your Contact Us page.
• Add a company page on Google My Business
• Company name, address and phone number should be visible on every page
• Company name address and Phone Number should be formatted correctly
• Frequently insert your location name in your content
• Add local reviews

Optimise for RankBrain
Due to the fact that there are so many Google searches now (3.5 billion per day), Google uses artificial intelligence (AI) ‘Rank Brain’, to help filter out the right results to the queries. In simple terms, imagine that your target customers are asking questions about your product. Can you integrate my eCommerce website to my ERP system? To anticipate this, you can list these questions and prepare answers for them. FAQ’s are an excellent way to do this. Adding an FAQ page to your website will optimize your website for RankBrain. Case studies of your work and blog content can also be effective here.

Mobile
Most people have heard about this by now but in case you haven’t, mobile sites are prioritised in search results. The reason for this is that there are now more Google searches on mobile devices than desktops. All other factors being equal, then mobile friendly sites will display first. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, then organic rankings will be very difficult to achieve. A mobile friendly or responsive website is no longer optional but necessary.

Page Load Speed
Page loading speed is a ranking factor. Check your website page load time. If you are not sure how to do this then you can test it here or ask your website company to do it for you. If the test highlights speed problems, then ask them to identify these and eliminate them. These can often be easily fixed such as resizing oversized images and suddenly your website is a lot more accessible.

Social Media
Not every business has an active online customer base and social media is not a blanket solution for every company. In saying that, social media can be a great source of new traffic for your website and given that Twitter has a relationship with Google and Tweets are now ranking components it might be worth considering having a Twitter account. Obviously, this would only be of benefit after you have identified that your customer base is active on Twitter and it is worth putting in the effort to develop your hashtags and maintain the account.

These are OneClick’s top tips to increase your organic (free) search engine rankings on Google. For any business paying for expensive Google Adwords, strategic content loading and minor edits on a regular basis can get your website on page 1 for free and result in big savings for your business.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR//
Sharron Martin is an Account Director & Digital Strategist at website and ecommerce integrator OneClick. Sharron has an extensive background in technology and has been the project lead in many successful digital projects. Sharron has experience in delivering websites, eCommerce, and digital marketing strategy plans for different sized projects for local and international organisations.

The post Digitoil: Get on page one of Google appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

After spending significant company resources on your ecommerce website, you want to make sure you get the best return on your investment. There are some common ecommerce mistakes that can kill your conversion rates. It is important to be aware of these, find them on your website and fix them as soon as you can. The purpose of this white paper is to provide you with a practical guide to help do exactly that.

[DOWNLOAD NOW]  (no registration required)

Overview
On an existing ecommerce website, this paper will tell you what to look out for. If you are in the process of building a new website, then this can be used as a guide for what not to do. The caveat to this is that every business is different and each of these points needs to be assessed within the context of your individual scenario. Depending on the nature of the products being sold, there may be a case to be argued in favour of some of the things mentioned in this paper. If the current settings are working for your business, then we are not suggesting you change them, but only that you consider the effectiveness for your individual website.

You probably already know it but if you don’t, the first thing to do is find out your abandoned cart rate. Google Analytics will tell you how many site visitors have abandoned carts or bounced out of the checkout page. You need to know this number of course, as painful as it is but once you know it then what can you do to reduce it? What changes can you make to prevent these last-minute abandonments and increase your online sales? Based on our experience and research we have identified the 6 top conversions killers and provided suggestions for how to fix them.

The Six Killers are summarised below, or you can view the full whitepaper (no registration required) here: Ecommerce Conversion Killers and how to fix them.

The Six Ecommerce Conversion Killers

1)   Nasty Surprises
Be upfront about shipping, handling or any other costs associated with the purchase. Don’t try and slip them in at the end.

Figure 1: Reasons for abandoned carts

Figure 2: Shipping a tope reason for abandoned carts

Figure 3: What’s important for online shoppers

2)   Compulsory Account Creation
Forcing users to create accounts can be a barrier to purchase.

Figure 4: Login example

3)   Design Confusion
If the path to purchase is unclear and the user doesn’t know where to go then they will quickly bounce out of the site and on to your competitors.

4)   Poor Customer Service
Customer service is important before, during and after the sales process. If you want them to come back, then it is important to ensure the customer has a positive experience.

Figure 5: Example of great online service

Figure 6: “Sand cone” model of e-service

5)   Insufficient Information or Assurances
There are many different consumer purchasing models and the reasons why consumers buy certain products and not others, have been widely studied since the 1960’s. These studies are equally applicable to online retailers.

Figure 7: The 5 stages of the customer buying cycle

6)   One size fits all – (Not Really)
One size definitely does not fit all. Your online customers are unique and need to treated as such. Everybody likes to be recognized and to feel special. So how do you personalize a website users online experience?

References:
Multiple references are cited and linked for further research.

[DOWNLOAD NOW]  (no registration required)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR//
Sharron Martin is an Account Director & Digital Strategist at website and ecommerce integrator OneClick. Sharron has an extensive background in technology and has been the project lead in many successful digital projects. Sharron has experience in delivering websites, eCommerce, and digital marketing strategy plans for different sized projects for local and international organisations.

The post Whitepaper: Ecommerce Conversion Killers appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..