Ecommerce is a fierce business and everyone publishes the same ways to increase conversions. That’s why I want to share 5 different and unique ways to help drive more conversions for your store or website that you have the capabilities to implement, but probably aren’t. These are things that are within your control and may help to grow your business without having to make drastic changes.
How to Increase Your Website Sales:
- Comparison size charts (not what you’re thinking)
- Product Q&A boxes with research (SEO tip inside)
- Get rid of “we, we” syndrome
- Mobile input fields
- Fix speed issues
Comparison Size Charts
The first tip is having comparison charts and information on the product page. Many of us use a size or standard chart that opens in a small window or in an HTML table for SEO, but if you’re a small brand showing chest sizes in inches, that doesn’t help solve anything for a tshirt shopper. This also applies to electronics, car parts, mobile phone chargers and almost always leaves questions with your potential customer. That’s why this is a brilliant idea I’ve only come across twice so far.
If you’re a tshirt shop, have size chart as a link next to the size options field or drop down. As they click the link, instead of just showing the chart, show a drop down widget or another chart with a list of major brands and compare your size to theirs. If you go with a widget, make the first field the size the visitor normally wears, the second field is the brand (banana republic, lacoste, etc…). Now have them click submit or automatically show the size they should choose at your store for that specific product.
You’re now taking brands they know and that have a standard fit and using that to build confidence in your customer so they can hit add to cart. The same goes for electronics, etc… You can show compatibility for printer ink, plugs and wires, etc…
Product Q&A Boxes With Research
Product Q&A is an interesting one. Many sites do not use this or use it effectively. The first thing to do when creating a product question and answer block is to go to your customer support team and have them tally up the most common questions about the product. You can also go to amazon and other sites and see what people are asking and responding to their. Another way to research what people are asking is to use Google’s keyword planner, auto suggest or the similar/other results at the bottom of Google search results.
Next go into the page and begin adding the Q&A. After it’s been added, link to it from somewhere by the “add to cart” button. This not only helps to answer questions and build confidence that the product will work for the visitor’s needs, but you’ll now be optimizing that product page for numerous queries and answer boxes in Google. This can help to build traffic with highly qualified visitors who are in the product shopping process so it is a double win for your store.
SEO tip – if you’re allowing user generated content on the page for this or you’ll have very similar content on other pages, you may want to place it in an iframe and noindex the iframe. It is situational but you don’t want duplicate sections for similar products eating away at the authenticity of the other content or devaluing both pages.
Get rid of “We, We” syndrome
Your content is vital for defining what is on a page for SEO, but you should consider your consumer a lot more than the search engines. Unless it is an about us page or a personal column on a blog, you should rarely ever use “We”, “I”, “Me” or “Our”. Instead replace it with “You”, “Yours”, “You’ll”, etc… That is called “we, we” syndrome.
We, we syndrome occurs because we like to talk about ourselves, but our website and store visitors are there for solutions. It could be buying a dress, fixing a subpump in a basement or even finding a printable table for a tradeshow booth. Don’t say “Our tablecloths are used at 1,000’s of shows….” “Say your booth will look incredible with XYZ tablecloth…”.
Next use the tone and voice that will match the needs of your website visitor. This alone can help to increase website conversions quickly and is something that is within your control. If you do it right, you can also attract more organic customers from SEO by getting featured snippets and answer boxes. In the tradeshow table cloth example you can talk about the spaces, size tables, etc… that it will fit and what color options work great with the cloth and ink.
Mobile Input Fields
This one is one of the most often overlooked conversion increasing strategies. Take out your phone (like right now) and go to your site. Get to the checkout or lead form and see what shows up when you start filling things out.
- Do you prompt for auto fill
- Are visitors required to type everything out or do you offer spinning wheels with numbers, words and dates
- Can they scan a credit card instead of having to type everything in
- etc…
Now go find someone and give them a few dollars and ask them to add something to their cart and try to checkout. As they get there, ask what would make it easier for you to shop on their phone? Do they want January, February, etc… or 01, 02, 03 for the month. These are all things you can do (for the most part) with input fields on mobile forms. The best part is you don’t need to learn to code. Look for it in the code, do a google search for the right one to use and replace it. Then save and see if it worked. That’s it.
Speed
Site speed isn’t only important for SEO, if your users have to keep waiting for a page to load to shop, they’re probably going to get frustrated and leave if it is more than one item. That’s why it is important to begin optimizing for speed instead of branding.
Some ways to increase product page site speed include:
- Change the order in which the page loads so that anything being done before the site starts to render and paint begins after
- Lowering image file sizes
- Deleting excess images that don’t get used, viewed or add to the actual sale
- Taking off excessive backgrounds and background images
- Lazy loading images (if image SEO isn’t important)
- Getting rid of excess scripts, plugins and code that isn’t being used
Those are just a few places to start and look. You can always contact me if you’d like help getting your site faster. It’s also something I help with when hired for SEO projects, as an affiliate management company and when creating monetization strategies for content sites and companies.
If you’re looking for help increasing conversions on your website and are out of ideas, use the thoughts above and see if they can apply to you. If not, you’re welcome to write to me and maybe we can come up with some creative ideas together.
