Ecommerce Website Optimization

In today’s world, e-commerce has increasingly importance in everyone’s life. We can easily say, offline trade is abated by e-commerce.

Both buyers and traders have to harmonize themselves to this new atmosphere. Bigger part of this change ‘work’ belongs to e-commerce traders. Customers want to meet the proper product or service.

Most important part of this ‘meet’ is e-commerce website optimization. Overwhelming ecommerce optimization increases e-commerce owners’ conversion rates.

Of course, It is harder than saying. I will focus on some crucial points of e-commerce website optimization. I distinguish e-commerce act to two main sections.

The first section is customer´s accessibility to products. Second is making purchase decision. Let’s start!

Ecommerce Website Optimization for Accessibility

1) SEO

Probably, you will spend most of your time and effort to SEO on your e-commerce website optimization. Most important part of accessibility is search engine optimization.

A customer’s first place to look is a search engine. The main job of a search engine is providing most proper results to searcher.

Actually, proving you are the most ‘proper’ to a search engine is a very hard thing.

Search engines like Google don’t tell us each factor they take into account. But if you pay attention to some facts it is possible to be at top of the results.

Choosing correct keywords is the heart of this challenge. On the results page, the searchers see your title and meta descriptions.

If you don’t adjust meta description, Google will do it for you from your website randomly. Leaving this job to Google is a hazardous big deal, actually.

So don’t do that. Also, images and videos in a website are crucial for both screen readers and Google. To tell ‘what is in the image’ to Google use Alt tags. (Don’t forget we are trying to present ‘proper’ content.)

Also screen readers like videos and images. They really effect purchase decision. There are a lot of other factors for search engine optimization. But I will mention it in another post or blog.

2) Social Media Links

Social media is a ‘shopfront’ of your brand and products. You should use it properly. Social media links increase both your visibility on social media and search engines.

If you have so many likes, retweets etc. Google will put you at the top of the results page. (We ignore the any other factor for a moment)

3) Website Page Errors

To be accessible, first, your website has to be accessible. Keep out from 404 and 302 errors. These will hesitate not only for your traffic but also reputation at the end of the day.

You should convert any 302 errors to 301s. This makes your website easier to handle for search engines and serchers.

Making Purchase Decision

1) Product Page

This page is the place you present your product. It has to be well designed. For a product page, maybe the most important thing is containing enough information.

Technical attributes, color options, images of different sides of product etc. are very important. On product page, generally, we use cross-selling. But do it carefully.

Adding extra lots of recommendations can cause customer to distract. You can lose your one purchase when you try to make more.

2) Design and UX

One of the most important parts of an e-commerce website optimization is design and UX. Each section of your website’s design should be coherent.

In addition, load speed is very important. If your load time is a little long, it can cause to lose many customers.

Try to look your website through your customer’s eyes. That entails to see most of your design and UX problems.

 3) Trust

I think, this is the main decision effecting part of purchasing. Simply, the potential customers won’t purchase if they don’t trust you.

You should put ‘contact us’ on your website. That will have a really influence on your customers. The customer should be able to contact you if he/she has a question.

You have to provide the trust of ‘you will not regret of you purchase’.

4) Shopping Experience

If a customer is satisfied his/her shopping experience, he/she will come again.

You should provide the best experience to the customer so that he/she will not try to find a new place to be ‘satisfied’ from his/her shopping experience.

Adding customer feedbacks to product page will increase the conversion rates. You can find some good tips about this is here.