You Know Your e-Commerce Web Store is Bad if…
Dunn Solutions Group
You’re responsible for an e-commerce website and that isn’t an easy job. You have sales to track, shipping options to communicate, and payment options to manage. And that’s all after customers have found their way to your site because you’ve designed and executed an at least partially effective search marketing or social media strategy. It’s actually difficult to say which is harder, building an e-commerce site, successfully marketing that website, or managing its consumer interactions day to day. It is certainly true, that there is no universally true answer to the question: What’s best way to handle … well, either of the first two items. There is no one universal list of design elements or digital marketing tactics which, if employed, will ensure the success but there are a few essential features that your online store would certainly be operating at a disadvantage without. The first things on the list are related to the simple fact that it’s easier to market an e-commerce site that was built to be easily marketed. That sounds like an overly obvious statement and could refer a variety of things, so let me explain. You see, your average e-commerce website is not unlike your average home—at least in one specific way. If you buy a home with a pool, it’s pretty easy to throw pool parties but adding a pool is an enormous hassle. Similarly, if you say built an e-commerce site with a search-friendly “speaking” URL structure, it’s a lot easier to adapt those URLs to your search marking campaign than to build an entirely new URL structure.
Your e-Commerce Shop Should Have Rich Snippets Of course SEO friendly URLs are an easy item that virtually every e-commerce platform is capable of giving your site and that you were probably already aware of the need for but have you heard of Rich Snippets? Regardless of what you’re selling, it would be more attractive in search results if your site automatically wrapped your products, product reviews, prices, availability and special/limited offers in structured data. It’s safe to say every e-commerce site should be equipped with the tools they need to create Rich Snippets. Why? Glad you asked. You see, “Rich Snippets” (aka Structured Data) refers to a collection of html tags ecommerce site managers can use to add extra details about their products so that search engines will do a better job of interpreting and displaying those products in search results … extra details like say how well they’ve been reviewed, whether you currently have them in stock or if they’ll be on sale for the next week. In other words, once properly equipped, your site could be drawing in visitors with results like these:
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… or similarly engage customers before they’ve even reached your web store with a search result like this:
Even the sponsored Google Shopping image results you’ve seen are dependent on enabled Rich Snippets:
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Having an e-commerce store that’s been equipped with the tools you’ll need to create rich snippets when you enter product info, literally gives you the power to reach into search results and begin converting shoppers into satisfied customers a step earlier. I could exaggerate the benefits of that, but not by much. Rich snippets allows you to visually dominate search results and thereby grab the attention of shoppers. Yes, it is a lot easier to develop an e-commerce store with structured data tools than to add them to a an existing online shop, but the value of making your product listings stand out on search results pages with star ratings, current pricing, special offers or easier to find with a search box makes either worth the effort. Your e-Commerce Store Needs Social Meta Tags Before I explain, what social Meta Tags are, how they work or why your e-commerce website should have them, there’s something you should know. Research has shown that 78% of online consumers say their purchase decisions are influenced by what they’ve seen on social media. Yes, you read that correctly, 78%. In other words, it should go without saying that if you’re an e-commerce shop owner, you should want your website to have an optimized capacity to interact with social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. Now onto what and how … Social Media Tags aren’t too different from the Page Titles and Descriptions you’re already familiar with and though they have different effects, they work in basically the same way. So just as the tags below tells Google to display the result below, Social Meta tells Facebook what to display:
The OG’s in the code snippet below are short for Open Graph and it’s Facebooks Social Meta Tag protocol.
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Deploying them (along with Twitter’s Cards and Google+’s Snippets) on product pages, will allow you to control both the text and images displayed in shares from your site; which is useful in at least three ways. First, if you’re also running an SEO campaign (and you absolutely should be), the Titles and Descriptions on your e-commerce site have been phrased to improve their search results rankings, which is not always synonymous with improving their CTRs (click thru rates). You see, your SEO consultant only had 50-55 characters to work with, so he or she probably omitted sales oriented language in favor of product oriented language—or Custom e-Commerce Website Design and Development rather than Do You Need a Liferay Partner You Can Trust? One’s designed to rank, the other to earn clicks and without both, you’re missing out on shoppers from one channel or the other. Second, in the same way that Google has Title and Description character limits, Facebook has an image dimension preference (a 1080 x 1080 square) that tends to conflict with the rectangular images on most websites. Using Open Graph tags lets you designate a proper image that will create a more attractive post which will earn more clicks as a result. Third, using social Meta tags will allow you to squeeze more rankings juice out of the Back Links in those shares. It works like this, unless you’re using Social Meta, sites like Facebook will pull the content in every share from your site at random. Sometimes that might be Title and Description others it might be just the name of your business. That’s a problem because the text anchoring a back link either boosts or lowers the impact that link will have on your rankings. For example, a link back to our site anchored by “eCommerce Developers You Can Trust” is more value (SEO-wise) than one that reads Dunn Solutions Group. Just as with Rich Snippets, it’s easier to build an e-commerce shop with the tools you need to create Twitter Cards and Open Graph Tags than is to enable on your site as an add on; but in an environment where a substantial portion your site traffic can come from social they’re just as essential to your store’s success.
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