Your ecommerce website must be a living, breathing content channel to drive meaningful success. Why? Business goals, audience preferences, digital capabilities and best practices are all constantly evolving, and your site must reflect these changing expectations.
In fact, it’s a general rule of thumb for businesses to rebuild their ecommerce website every three to five years to maximize technology advances. With 75% of consumers making judgements based on website design according to web credibility research by Stanford, you truly can’t afford not to continuously optimize your site.
We’re going to review three areas of your website to continuously optimize to improve results.
Performance
When you’re browsing an ecommerce website, what factors into a positive user impression? It’s probably speed, content, and ease of use, right?
Unbounce found that page speed alone impacts as much as 70% of consumers’ willingness to buy. With median landing page conversion rates at a steady 4.6%, there’s a lot of room for improvement on most websites. Your ecommerce website must be fast, easy to navigate, compelling, and visually appealing.
A solid foundation makes it easy to build and optimize content, and gain important clarity into your customers’ UX. At a minimum, you should be investing in tools or services like:
- A comprehensive CMS or digital experience platform (DXP) to easily create new, fresh content.
- Quality, on-brand creative design and thoughtful UX to build credibility and brand recognition.
- Google Analytics to track traffic, site speed, mobile use and audience demographics.
- Tools to monitor heat maps and understand where users are spending their time or getting frustrated.
- Experimentation tools to test variations in content, design, etc. to increase conversion across your site, specifically on under-performing pages.
Together, these tools make it easy for you to know what’s working and iterate on what’s not, to continuously up your ecommerce website game.
Content Reigns Supreme
It’s true: Content is king/queen. Website copywriting informs and persuades users on what action to take, while photography, video, and visual cues work together to capture interest and guide users through your site.
Additionally, longer-form content, like blog posts or thought leadership, helps users engage deeper with your products or brand and fuels marketing efforts across search, email, PPC, and social.
Ultimately, fresh content keeps your audience engaged, gives reasons for repeat visits, and powers your marketing engine. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute found that 62% of successful B2B marketers and 59% of successful B2C marketers have a content marketing strategy in place.
Content marketing strategies should begin with a comprehensive audit to take a holistic look at what content is getting engagement and what isn’t. Identify topics, themes, audience segments, media types, and publishing cadences to build into a solid content plan. Finally, the fun part: Creating and marketing the content.
Just as the digital marketing landscape is constantly evolving, so is your business. Your ecommerce website content is a critical part of sharing these updates with your audience and giving them reason to engage with you.
Get Discovered: SEO
A fast, attractive, content-rich website needs a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to grow. SEO is a combination of art and science – like most aspects of digital marketing – and widens your audience reach, drives sales, and fuels your lead generation goals.
In fact, BrightEdge found that organic search drives 53% of all website traffic – no surprise, when you consider how frequently you turn to Google.
SEO should be regularly evaluated to align with changing user expectations, algorithm updates, and your overall content strategy.
Leverage tools like Moz and Google Search Console to receive feedback on areas to improve (especially any technical issues or site errors). Update keywords, page titles, meta descriptions, URLs and even alt-text and revisit any pages that are underperforming to identify weaknesses. Perhaps your content needs to be boosted up or you’re on-page SEO needs to be refreshed to reflect current changes.
SEO doesn’t have to be intimidating, instead, it’s another opportunity to level up your website success and capture a larger audience.
Iterate + Optimize Always
Consistently improving and modernizing your ecommerce website is investing in your business, empowering your teams (developers, designers, marketers – even sales!) and delivering a better user experience for your customers.
Randi Mohr is Vice President of Customer Success and Marketing for Whereoware