9 reasons why you should revamp your ecommerce website
Your business website is the face of your product and services. It represents your business at global level. If website design and digital marketing done correctly, you can make millions from your website sales. But if it is not done in proper way, you may end up loosing your time and money.
Website always proves to be an asset for one man shops, small businesses and even fortune companies. Often you come across terms like revamp your website for better conversions and increase in sales.
What exactly is revamping your ecommerce website?
It is often thought revamping a website is to redesign the website. But a website revamp is beyond just changing the design of your website.
Revamp website meaning
Revamping a website means finding ideas to increase your sales, generate more subscribers, giving an over all boost to your website conversions.
There are a lot of things to consider for a website revamp. It is not just the redesign alone. You should think about the improvements in website functionality in conjunction with a solid marketing plan. When you have an ecommerce store the job becomes a little difficult.
Should you revamp your ecommerce website?
Often small business owners keep the website revamps on the back burner. They keep on doing with the existing ecommerce website because they never check the overall website performance and just track orders from their website.
They are not aware of the technical stuff involved in website performance. It is obvious because it is not their niche. For example how would a restaurant owner know about the CSS of the web page or the Google search console.
Below are the important reasons for website revamp
1) Your ecommerce website loads slowly
Earlier this year Google announced the ranking factors for website for mobile. Website load speed is one of the major factors. Relevant and meaningful content still will be the most important factor for ranking of the websites but page speed will also boost the website rankings is also true.
Moreover it is not just about Google ranking factors. How often do you wait for a website to load if it is slow. Even if your website ranks on first page of Google due to amazing content visitors will go away in seconds if it loads slow.
There is no point doing all the hard work to bring users to your website and they leave in a very short time without doing anything on your website.
However, if your website loads fast then there is every chance that you get a sale. Page speed also improves the overall user experience of your website. It is very important you do page speed optimization of your website.
You can check your website page speed using a free tool provided by Google for page speed test.
2) Your website has a clumsy and cluttered navigation
You should never confuse your customers. Navigation is another important part of your ecommerce website. There should be a smooth experience for your website users to browse through your products and different products categories.
They could very easily jump to the shopping cart, account settings, use filters on product pages, add and remove products from your website. They should also be able to access your website’s privacy policy and terms and conditions page easily.
With so many ecommerce companies around, you can’t expect your customers that they will fill up a complain form on your website letting you know about the poor navigation issue. They will switch you another ecommerce website with a blink of an eye.
This is because they are not bothered about how your website functions. They just need to buy a product at that moment. The ecommerce websites which provide a smooth experience those will get credit in terms of sales.
Also read our Ecommerce FAQs
3) Your website design is out of date
You may also be loosing sales because you have an outdated design. As I said in the beginning of this article that redesign alone is not website revamping. But no doubts that it is also a very important factor to consider when you plan a website revamp.
You can also read about a separate article on how to increase sales by redesigning your website.
The design of your website should represent your brand and should be done after a research of the buying habits, color psychology and market trends of your target market.
It is important that your website designer and your marketing experts should sit together with you and discuss about how and why redesign the complete website or maybe you just need to redesign certain pages your you ecommerce website.
4) Your website is not SEO friendly
Along with your customers, your ecommerce website should also equally impress search engines especially Google.
Ecommerce SEO is not just about strong product descriptions and meta descriptions. For that matter no SEO is just about that. SEO also involves a lot of other important things than content and meta content.
A few things to mention are, checking broken links, sitemaps, search engine submissions, link building, image optimizations and many others. Even website security also plays an important role in your website’s search engine rankings.
It is often assumed that SEO is done post your website launch but the fact is SEO starts right from stage of wireframes. If you haven’t taken care of the SEO in the beginning then you must do it now.
You can read our complete beginners guide for ecommerce SEO
If you want you can contact us for a SEO audit of your ecommerce website.
5) Your website has a high bounce rate
Another reason you should consider website revamp for your ecommerce website is the high bounce rate. In technical language bounce rate can be defined as percentage of all sessions made on your website in which your customers spent time on a single page and sends a single request to Google analytics.
In simple words bounce rate is the rate at which users spend time on your website pages or leave your website. You can get the bounce rate report of your website from free Google analytics tool.
If the bounce rate shows a high value then it is a matter of concern. High bounce rate shows that your website visitors are leaving your website pages without giving you anything.
This is of high importance as people leave a website either because slow speed, bad user experience or bad content. You need to analyse everything about your website in order to decrease the bounce rate.
You can read all about bounce rate in this comprehensive bounce rate guide.
6) Your website is not optimized for mobile phones
Mobile searches have increase by more than 500% in last few years. From 2009 till now that is 2018 50.2% of internet traffic is generated via mobile phone. According to a report from Google more than 50% of search queries comes from mobile phones.
So it is extremely important to optimize your website for mobile phones and tablets also in order to remain in competition. Your website should provide the same shopping experience to mobile phone users as it does for desktop users.
The UX design, website security, user experience, website flow and brand trust should be excellent on mobile phones. Only then you can reap the benefits of increasing mobile phone searches.
A report from Salesforce and Demandware gives you insights on how customers behave on ecommerce websites on mobile phones.
To retain your customers you can also get an iOS and Android application developed for your ecommerce website. For this you can talk to your existing website designing company or you can also hire dedicated mobile phone application developer
7) Website content is not presented properly
Content on your ecommerce website is a combination of images, products names, category names, products descriptions etc. If all this information is presented in a haphazard way on your website. Or the images looks unevenly chopped off or they appear blurry then there are chances your customers might leave your website.
Make sure the the content is presented systematically. Include multiple descriptive images of products, products names and description should be prominent. Include a short description too. Call to actions should not be annoying to customers and should be strategically placed.
Not only presentation but the content should also be written good. You can take the help of a professional content writing company for your ecommerce website content or it will be wise to hire a dedicated content writer with experience in ecommerce content writing.
8) You might be on the wrong ecommerce platform
It is very important which ecommerce platform you choose for your ecommerce website. If fixing all of the above things doesn’t work then you might need to change your ecommerce platform.
There could be many limitations of different ecommerce platforms.
It may not provide flexible customization features.
It may not provide easy CMS pr doen’t provides CMS at all.
It doesn’t provides SEO features.
It is not upgradable as per the latest technology changes.
It is not able to handle large number of user data.
Keeping all these in mind you may need to talk to your ecommerce development company about which ecommerce platform to use.
9) Your website doesn’t works for your business objectives
This one is the most important of all. If your websites doesn’t works for your business objectives and goals then there is every reason to revamp it and give it complete overhaul.
Your website should reduce your marketing costs and always act as your most trusted sales person. If it is not attracting your target customers then you should immediately consider a revamp.
How to revamp your existing ecommerce website?
After reading the above points, you must be thinking about working on all of them. There may be so many website revamp ideas popping up in your mind.
But you may not need to work on all of them. Revamp process for your ecommerce website starts with analyzing your website. You can check all these points one by one and fix only what is required.
If you start changing things without testing, you may end up messing up with those part which are already working fine. It is better to hire an ecommerce specialist or consult a leading ecommerce website development company in India or wherever you are comfortable with.
How much does it costs to revamp a website?
Website revamp cost may vary depending upon the experts you hire and amount of work needed to fix the website.
A complete revamp might cost you as much as building a new website from scratch. But if you need to fix a few parts then it may cost less.
Hiring an in house ecommerce expert is anytime an expensive deal as you may incur many other management costs apart from paying salary. You may also need to hire a project manager to check the work done.
If you hire an ecommerce website development company then you can save a lot of cost and mental stress of managing the resource.
You can save more than 50% of your cost if you decide to outsource your ecommerce development overseas. You can hire dedicate web developers and web designers at a fraction of a cost. You also get a project manager as a bonus.
Read more about outsourcing
FAQs On Offshore Outsourcing Of Web Designing Work To ICO Webtech
How To Choose Your Website Design Outsourcing Partner
How Will Outsourcing Help Your Business?
Benefits Of Outsourcing
SEO Outsourcing Offshore Will Get Your Website Penalized By Google: Really??
Ecommerce SEO: Beginners Guide
Ecommerce SEO Guide
Ecommerce SEO is often ignored by the owners. This may be because of the ignorance towards the importance of SEO.
Or
Because they are not acquainted well with “how to do SEO for ecommerce website”.
To learn the general SEO FAQs read the post here.
And, to learn the advantages and steps of ecommerce SEO continue reading.
But before digging in deep, let us first refresh ourselves about ecommerce definition.
Ecommerce or Electronic Commerce means:
commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet
This means that when you buy or sell services or products, or, transfer data or funds through an electronic medium, mainly internet. Then it means you are on an ecommerce platform.
The basic mantra to remember for high ranking and visibility in organic searches on the search engines is that
“Ethical SEO will definitely take time for most competitive search queries”
But if you do not want to wait and want quick results then…
…paid marketing is the done deal for you.
Although if…
You are not in a rush and have time for organic SEO, then it can reward you greatly. Infact as per MarketingCharts 39% of the customers for the online merchants are driven from search engines.
This is huge.
As an ecommerce website design company in Delhi-India we have listed the checkpoints for your consideration to achieve best results for organic search engine optimization.
Ecommerce SEO Checklist
First thing first.
Since SEO is mainly for the search engines so do not miss to set up the leading search engines webmasters tools.
To mention a few:
Why?
Although there are many uses of installing a webmaster tool in SEO.
But to mention a few:
- Keyword searching
- Site errors
- 404 errors identification
- Duplicate content
- Knowing the search traffic, and many more
Do not forget to:
Create and submit an xml sitemap of your ecommerce site to the search engines. Make sure to check the account from which you are submitting.
Keyword Research for Ecommerce SEO
This is the main step to establish any SEO strategy. Do a thorough research to find the most searched for keywords for the products on your ecommerce website.
There are many tools which can help you identify and choose depending on the search volume of the keywords and phrases.
Some tools which can be of great help are:
And many more such tools can be found on the internet.
You can also use Amazon for keyword research.
Just type in a word related to the product you want to search.
And boom…
…you will see multiple suggestions related to that keyword.
Whatever method, whichever tool you use to find the right keyword for you. Just remember it’s a no-rush episode and even if it consumes time, it is worth it.
On-Page Optimization
As an ecommerce service provider we have noticed that some eCommerce companies do not pay much attention to their site’s on-page optimization.
This is not right.
The standard page optimization strategy should be followed for ecommerce websites also.
Header tags
The header tags are used to distinguish the <headings> from the rest of the content on the page.
The most used header tags in SEO are h1, h2 and h3.
The <h1> tag designates the main heading of the product page or any other page.
Important: a page should have only one <h1> tag. And it should be used before the other header tags i.e. <h2> <h3>…
After all it has been given the number 1 for some reason.
If you are using a woo commerce to develop your ecommerce website then learn how to use WordPress here
Meta Content
The meta content on any given page includes meta title and meta description about that page.
This is a very useful information for the search engines as they display the meta title and description when your product page is displayed in the search results.
You can install SEO plugin like Yoast to get a sorted place to add the meta content.
It will also warn you about the length of the meta content, and the page slug or page URL.
Meta Title: under 70 characters
Meta Description: under 150 characters
Product Page URL: make sure it has the targeted keyword and is not very long. Avoid using _ (underscore) in the url.
If you are using images in your ecommerce site then do not forget to optimize them by adding alt-text and description.
Also try to include the keyword in the image title, alt-text and description for result oriented ecommerce SEO.
Link Building Strategy
Link building is the process of getting quality and authoritative websites to link back to your website.
In other words
Search engines like Google see them as votes for confirming your ecommerce site’s authority.
So for ecommerce optimization,
…the higher the number of backlinks, the higher is the percentage of a search engine to rank it above other ecommerce sites with lower backlinks.
As a part of your ecommerce SEO strategy, competitor analysis cannot be ignored. Use tools like Open Link Profiler to research about the websites who are linking to your competition stores/websites.
Contact these sites and get a link to your ecommerce website as well.
Get high quality backlinks from the media. Shopify explains the details to get the links from press here.
Read the complete guide to off-page SEO.
Content Strategy
As an experienced ecommerce SEO agency we would second the very famous and well known saying…
“Content is the king”
It was, is and will always remain true.
Keyword Research is great.
But what if you are not using it wisely in your content. You need to have a well-developed content strategy to optimize your ecommerce website for SEO.
Maintain atleast 250 word length as a product description. But if you are writing an informative page like a Blog post then it should be atleast 500 words long.
For an effective SEO strategy never stuff your page with keywords.
This is bad, just bad.
Use LSI keywords in your content for search engines to find an attaching description about your page’s content.
Duplicity in content is a strict no-no for ecommerce SEO services. Write original content for the description of the products on your ecommerce website.
Do not straight away copy the product description from the manufacturer’s site. This is also considered as duplicate content. Even if you are displaying the manufacturer’s product on your site.
If you have to use similar content on more than one product page…
…then using Canonical tag will be a good idea.
When strategizing SEO for ecommerce websites, product reviews are also an important input.
Consider adding some genuine reviews to your product page. This way not only increase the weightage of the page but also add more content to your page.
Hence, a win-win situation.
Being in ecommerce business you must have crossed a situation where the product is no longer available.
In this scenario, do not straightway delete the product.
But first set up a 301 redirect for that product to either the parent page or the homepage. So that any indexed page gets redirected to a working page.
Add Blog Posts
It’s a good SEO practice to add blog posts related to the products listed on your ecommerce website.
For instance:
If one of the product on your ecommerce site is bicycle. Then you can write about “Health benefits of riding a bicycle” or “Go green with bicycle riding” and more such topics.
Set up Business Profiles
Create your business profile on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and LinkedIn. If possible consider using your brand’s name such that it appears in the URL.
For instance:
www.example.com/yourcompanyname
Also create business profiles on sites where reviews can be posted. A few such sites to mention are:
Amazon, Google Business, Yelp, FourSquare, TrustPilot, and Epinions
Not only do they benefit your ecommerce website by backlinking to it. But also ranks better for search queries like “your company name Reviews”.
Responsive Ecommerce websites
It’s a must these days to make your store responsive.
That means it should give a clean, easy to navigate and user friendly look on all the devices.
If you are not sure how your website looks on all devices, you can test it here.
Speed test
Page speed test is one of the Google ranking factors for ecommerce optimization. Check your store’s speed on search engines using various tools available online.
SSL Certificate
Making your website https is imperative for e commerce websites. This is because critical information like credit or debit card number or account number is used for completing the transactions.
For better search engine rankings and to gain users trust making you ecommerce website secured is extremely important.
Concluding Ecommerce SEO
This post has covered the answer to the commonly asked question “how to optimize ecommerce website”.
As already mentioned gaining organic results by optimizing your website is a slow process. So wait patiently, especially if your brand is new in the market, for the results to show up.
Keep getting quality backlinks, create keyword oriented content, build relationships, and start writing blog posts.
For any further information or for getting your website’s SEO a kick start contact our ecommerce SEO expert.
