When Heskins decided to expand their online business in the US they were aware that whilst SEO and rankings were important, this was just one aspect of a wider marketing position they had to get right.
We’ll share with you what they did. In fact over the next couple of months we’ll share several examples of our customers who have re-positioned their web business for success. You’ll see that SEO, which of course is our speciality, is inextricably interwined with other digital marketing aspects such as:-
1. Having a great website which converts visitors to customers
2. Increasing your web reach – ie ensuring you are represented in the right places on the web
3. Engaging more digital marketing methods – social media, blogging, pay per click, content distribution and others.
It’s a similar process to any conventional re-positioning – balancing an offer to your target customers in the most effective way, taking into consideration their needs, your capabilities and the existing competitive landscape.
Assuming you have a good offer (based on pricing, delivery, customer service etc – ie all the normal features of an online value proposition) then it’s a matter of then of addressing the three components above the best way you can.
In this post we’ll focus on the first component:-
1. Having a great website which converts visitors to customers
Their current website isn’t at all bad www.antisliptapeshop.com. Its been generating reasonable sales for the past couple of years, but can be improved, particularly in the area of user experience and conversion/checkout optimisation.
In order to come up with a plan for improvement it was necessary to conduct analysis/auditing in three areas:-
Website audit
Analytics audit
Competitive audit
Website Audit
Specifically the areas under observation were – Navigation, Design, Usability, Content and Visibility.
We’ll look at visibility in a later post when we look at online marketing but some of the shortcomings in the other areas included..
-too many categories – 32 for only 76 products making it difficult for users to make a choice
-duplicate products under the multiple categories
– 20% of users are return customers but no differentiation between these and new visitors
– some messaging on the right hand side may be mistaken for ads
-lack of prominence of ‘trust panel’ about delivery, returns and also of ‘add to’ cart.
-lack of clarity in shipping costs
But the main issue is in the checkout area – it was felt this could be improved substantially thereby maximising sales. Once this is complete we’ll show you what a perfect ‘check out’ process looks like.
Analytics audit
This also yielded some important information for improvement potential.
In particular it emphasised the need for checkout optimisation – almost 9500 orders we placed in the shopping basket but only 2500 orders were completed. This represents an abandonment rate of 75% – (whereas the industry norm is around 67%).
Interestingly the analytics also showed that mobile and tablet traffic increased from around 15% in 2012 to over 20% in 2013. A massive increase and a strong cry towards ensuring the site was ‘mobile optimised’ and ‘responsive’ – that is renders effectively regardless of the device being used.
Competitive audit
Identifying online competitors through keyword searches is straightforward – and we focussed on the top three.
Some interesting observations were made including good use of testimonials, particularly on landing pages, and the use of filters to simplify product selection.
Online reviews are becoming best practice now – it helps conversions and also has an SEO impact – and this was a feature of the major competitive sites. Rich content – including videos – and fast checkout options were also prominent.
All this analysis resulted in five action main areas for improvement:-
The expectation is that this will generate a substantial return on investment with a payback which will be measurable in months. We’ll share the results with you and show you the new site once its in place.
The process discussed above is part of our ‘expert review’ service which is designed to improve the performance of ecommerce sites very substantially – so please call if you may be interested in us applying this treatment to your web business.
Next time we’ll focus on the other two items above, that is :-
Increasing the reach of the website – making sure its represented in the right places on the web
Review and improve digital marketing methods to expand the sites visibility – SEO, Social Media, etc
