Your ecommerce site is the heart of your business. Mistreat it and, much like your heart, it will fail you. However, if you treat it well, it might just exceed all your expectations.
Here are several ways you can show your ecommerce site some love:
1. Complete your product listings.
It’s not enough to simply populate your ecommerce site with products – you need to create complete listings around them to support them. This means crafting creative, unique product descriptions and adding beautiful accompanying images, at the very least.
2. Support it with a social presence.
Social profiles on relevant platforms are like vacation homes and getaways for your ecommerce site, without having to move or drop what it’s doing. Your site will get lonely if no one visits, but even it gets tired out from the tourists. By giving it another way to interact, you keep things fresh and attract fresh visitors back to it. An additional benefit is that each of these profiles becomes another entity that’s controlled by your brand and can show up in search listings for your brand.
3. Check your server’s capabilities.
Seriously – check your server. With all those visitors flowing in, your site needs to have the necessary backup to handle it. And, in case you have an influx of unexpected visitors, your server needs to be able to keep your site up and running. Make sure you are prepared for spikes in traffic, especially around the holidays and during other peak shopping seasons.
4. Give it an outlet for its feelings.
This means your blog; consider it your site’s diary, where it (you) can talk about relevant industry topics and news. Maintaining a blog on your site means fresh, relevant content on a regular basis. You can establish your brand as an authority in your industry simply by answering your customers’ questions and providing information they’ll find valuable.
5. Make it feel pretty.
Don’t be afraid to dress your site up for fancy events – this could be anything from small design tweaks to a full-out makeover. Make sure whatever you do is responsive; that way, your site will look great on any device.
6. Make it easy to understand.
This means making sure your product categories make sense and are easy to navigate. Also, your navigation menus need to be simple and clear. If you want the visitors coming to your site to stick around, you need to make it easy for them to see what’s there and find what they want.
7. Don’t forget about lead generation.
Once you have people visiting your site, you want to make sure you have some kind of plan for them when they get there, preferably various conversion pathways. With your ecommerce site, the biggest conversion pathway should be your products; but, what about the people who visit and don’t buy right away? Do you have a plan for them? That’s where your CTAs (calls-to-action) and forms come in. It could be something as simple as signing up for a newsletter, but any visitor that signs up is one more visitor you have available for building relationships.
8. Make it discoverable.
Organic traffic is still a traffic source worth pursuing and good SEO can help you get it. SEO can seem like a big, scary undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. A good marketing strategy will make all the difference in the world for you and your site. Stick to best practices, set your site up to be easily discoverable, and let the traffic roll in.
It’s simple – if you want your site to send you some love (boost your business), then you have to put some love into it to make it work.