10 Ways to Increase Your E-Commerce Revenue

Andy Kinsey — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:19:35 +0000

E-commerce SEO is something of a hardship for many, long hours more often than not leading to little if any reward and return on investment. However marketing your e-commerce site correctly and making a few minor changes to your site / coding and you will soon see your ROI improve by a huge margin.

Avoid Manufacturer Descriptions – we all know it’s so tempting to copy and paste what you are given from the distributor or from some other website but don’t! If you really can’t think of anything to write at least rewrite the text enough to make it unique … but make sure it still flows and isn’t full of jargon! – Product descriptions should compel the user to want to buy your product.
SEO Friendly URL’s – although not always easy to implement having user and machine friendly url’s can make the difference between someone remembering your site (or linking to it) or not. Either way this can mean you get a sale or conversion of some kind or not! – and if you really must pass parameters in the URL ensure that they are at the end and it doesn’t effect browsing if they are missed off!
Create a product RSS feed – so your a website owner/manager or just someone who’s used the internet and you think an RSS feed is just the subscription to your favourite blog … well you are wrong. An RSS feed is simply an XML script which can contain anything from latest blog posts on SEO to a product feed, including images and links! (then go and submit the feed to Google Base).
Tag your products – With the advent of social media, customers have become accustomed with the concept of tagging. Allow your customers to tag products with their own keywords. When you allow users to tag your products, you’ll likely start ranking for slang keywords that you would have never thought of on your own.
Link within product descriptions - Create keyword heavy links from within the product descriptions of one product linking to another. I’ve found this is a very effective strategy for targeting long-tail keywords.
NB: make these absolute aka use http://
Don’t use “view” and “more” type links - ok, so that has your attention you wondering what you should use… well the answer is I lied do use them they are expected and you are there to feed but also defy expectation of your user … everyone has these and so should you but go further make sure any images link to the product page as with the title of the product! - all links should also include title tags.
Optimise your images - if you can make the file size small without destroying quality do so – every second spent loading your site is a second wasted and second you are closer to loosing a conversion! Also include alt tags to all images these are vital for search engines… after all this is how they index them.
Embed User Tracking - tracking your user is easy with cookies and javascript – do a quick search and you will find many tools that can record what your users are doing and where they click … or if you don’t want all that trouble use Google Analytics and after a while view the overlap map to see what people have been clicking. Also keep tabs on your statistics, but don’t expect miracles remember SEO is a journey and not a destination!
Don’t Use Flash (ahhhhhh saviour of the universe NOT!) - most search engines have no capability to index flash, google and yahoo have little but more often than not don’t pass the first thing they see (meaning they don’t click the links!). With this in mind keep flash to a minimum and definitely don’t use it for your primary navigation.
Make Checkout Simple – many people using the internet will trust paypal and google checkout but linking across to them sometimes makes users feel unsafe and insecure, using integration to your site such that the user doesn’t leave your site keeps these people a little happier. Further to this keep checkout to a minimum don’t force users to register to use your checkout, have a guest checkout and if you can keep checkout to 2 or less pages… who wants to go through 5 pages before you have a confirmed purchase… and with mobile internet growing rapidly a single page checkout means a single load and users are more likely to convert.

All fairly simple ideas as you can see but each one will bring you closer and closer to success and those huge conversion numbers you are driving for, not just one or two a week! (if your lucky)

Finally if you are wanting a cheaper gateway than google and paypal can offer then hop over to Crystals Merchant Services and ask about the online gateway system we can offer. Going further if you own a shop or two also ask about the reduced merchant service costings and rates on credit and debit card terminals.

A Year in Review

Andy Kinsey — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 19:50:03 +0000

Last year saw what must be considered the real launch of AK Designs (andykinsey.com). For many years I had fiddled with the likes of flash websites, wholey graphical websites, but then last year I made a change. I decided that rather than jump into a hole and dig it by doing everything myself I would take on a CMS engine, or two …now three. These engines mean I can now run websites with minimal effort, I can let the “site manager” actually manage! Before they would email be changes, normally in such a manner I couldn’t understand fully, but this means they can use a word processor type input and actually manage the site. One such website is Brettargh Holt. This includes blogs, e-commerce stores, and more.

Also 2008 saw me tackle something of great importance. I took on the challenge of Search Engine Optimisation, which this site is based on (so take a snoop around for more SEO info). Through the likes of Social Networking, Social Media and general Search Engine Optimising, I can bring almost any site from being a dead traffic zone to being amongst the alexa ranking sites (generally considered to be the top 1% of website rankings), improve a websites pagerank (googles ranking method) and much more (trade secrets hush ). I also now offer adwords packages as well as a range of general SEO/SEM packages.

Newsletters (otherwise known as E-Mail Shots) have also become a large part of the AK Designs business, in december alone reaching 50K openings! (and we are approaching 150K since the opening of this site and our e-newsletter service). We offer services to any company from the little market trader to the largest companies (including government agencies!).

So what for 2009?
Well to be honest, the future is bright, AK Designs is in such a place it can take off quite soon. We can no longer be considered a small nominal entity, rather a medium sized specialist company. We have much to offer, and with many innovations coming soon, AK Designs can offer both its current and its perspective clients more than ever before.

Finally I would like to give special thanks to:
Leanne – Imran M. – Aaron I. – Mike Phillips – Derek Harvie – Sr Val – UniqueBlogger – Tim (TSLUK) – Paul Boag – Shaun Barnes – Leo Laporte
and many many more!

Search Engine Optimisation » cms

10 Ways to Increase Your E-Commerce Revenue

A Year in Review