e-commerce (chapter 1): common e-commerce mistakes by tim capper

The first in the E-commerce series, looks at common mistakes made by businesses venturing into the online world and how you can avoid them.

Common E-Commerce Mistakes

Tim Capper at Online Ownership

onlineownership.com plus.google.com/+TimCapper

▪ The Competition

▪ Trust

▪ Social Proof

▪ The Product

▪ Marketing

▪ SEO

▪ Focus

E-Commerce Mistakes


Understand The Competition


The goals of big brands and smaller businesses aren’t so different. They both want to establish brand identity, improve recognition and become a leader within their respective bubble.

With over 60 Trillion individual pages indexed, how are people going to find you. The days of “build it and they will come” are over.

Understanding The Competition


▪ Have a clear marketing and SEO strategy in place that compliment each other.

▪ Understand where your customers are online and how to engage them, and on what social channel.

▪ Build brand recognition. Branded traffic to large e-commerce sites ranges from 40 – 60% of their traffic.

▪ Don’t copy large established e-commerce sites. Their SEO sucks, but they have 10yrs worth of brand recognition and links.

▪ Content is the best friend you will ever have in e-commerce, from Landing pages to Product pages to your Blog pages. Provide meaningful, engaging content that will enlighten, advise, builds trust, authority or tells a story to your customers.

▪ Don’t get hung up on short tail vanity keywords, 7 out of 10 searches performed are long tail.

Trust


Customers:

▪ Full contact details: Address, Tel number, Fax number, Social contact

▪ Entire website should be served via HTTPS

▪ Manage all customer feedback and reviews

Google:

Manual reviewers as well as algorithms look for:

▪ Business details

▪ Reviews about the business and site

▪ Secure e-commerce site in HTTPS

▪ Misleading information, reviews

▪ Sign Up for the Google Trusted Stores

Trust : Customers & Google


Social Proof


If a user happens to land on your product page and they don’t know the brand or business, can’t find any social proof or product reviews, the chances of a sale have evaporated.

▪ Social proof builds credibility.

▪ Don’t have empty social accounts that you can’t manage. Start with one and create more as you grow.

▪ Reviews have shown to increase conversion rates by up to 28%. Create a review strategy and build it into your customer feedback journey.

▪ Allow reviews on site and monitor, respond to reviews off site.

▪ Be seen to be accessible on your social channels.

Social Proof and Reviews


The Product


This is your one shot to sell your product. Provide unique and descriptive information about your sites Pages, especially your products.

You have 7 sec to make an impression to the customer, don’t blow it by not taking the time to sell the product.

If a customer walked into a shop and you could not say anything else apart from reading out your Product description that you have on your product page …. Would it make the Sale?

If you sell a product that hundreds of other sites do to, think about how you can add value to that product page:

▪ YouTube video of the product in action.

▪ Could you provide better images then any other site?

▪ Could you provide a FAQ, tutorial for the product?

▪ How will the product enrich the users life?

▪ Why should the user buy from you?

The Product


Marketing


The simple truth is that an e-commerce site, any site needs to be marketed. There are a wide array of marketing channels available from Adwords to Facebook ads, YouTube ads to Sponsored ads. As the site builds its database there are other opportunities such as email and direct mail marketing.

▪ Create a yearly marketing calendar, based on season and products. This allows you to fine tune and carefully target your marketing rather then the a scattergun approach. ( Are you really paying for Bikini ads in Winter? )

▪ Be realistic with your marketing budget, 50 bucks a month won’t cut the mustard.

▪ Pick one channel at time, start with the most logical choice and give it time to fine tune the campaign, test variances, seasonality and audience before moving onto another channel.

▪ Make sure you can track the performance, are the campaigns tracked in analytics?

▪ Social media marketing does not mean spamming every community you can find … be engaged.

▪ If you use sponsored articles and press outreach, be sure to understand Google’s guidelines on links.

▪ Whatever you do, get creative, be engaging and build your brand affinity.

Marketing Channels


SEO


Developers inherently do not understand SEO, get your site in order either with a competent SEO or conduct a site audit and learn the basic yourself.

Watch our second series for E-commerce site audit.

Basic E-Commerce SEO:

▪ Site served in Https▪ Correct domain and internal page canonicolisation▪ Mobile responsive ( Google mobile friendly test )▪ Get your page speed in order ( Google page speed test)▪ Proper canonicolisation of parameter pages, duplicate product pages▪ Submit an xml sitemap to Google search console▪ Check your robots.txt file for errors▪ Image file sizes and SEO friendly file name▪ Organisation and product structured data ( schema )

▪ Category page and Product page content▪ Make sure your SEO is working in harmony with your marketing plan▪ Make sure the content you create and publish follows best practice▪ Check any crawl errors and redirects

E-Commerce SEO


Focus


Focus your efforts, scattergun will not work against 60 trillion pages and big brand e-commerce that spends millions every year in marketing.

Your Focus for the next month / season:

▪ Pick your next 10 ( or more ) products based on marketing plane, this could be season or by genre based upon perceived need.

▪ Create your social channel, brand it, start engaging

▪ Pick your first marketing channel and start promoting those products. Fine tune and revise

▪ Look at those 10 product pages in terms of their content, usefulness, trust, engagement

▪ Create blog / news content around the products, market this via your social channel and new engagers. Create a story that users can buy into

▪ Make sure the product pages are SEO friendly

▪ Find the authority influencers who speak about the same types of products, genre. Follow them, observe and engage

▪ Move onto the next section, based on your marketing plan

Focus Your Efforts



Brought to you by:

Tim Capper

Online Ownership