Creating an engaging and user friendly website that converts, and is found in search engines

Transcription

1 Creating an engaging and user friendly website that converts, and is found in search engines by Ann Stanley May 2012

2

3 Introduction

4 How to double your sales? Multi-channel management: sell through other channels eg Amazon, ebay, Play etc. Increase traffic to your website: Buy more traffic eg PPC or ad serving Improve your search traffic through SEO, Google Merchant Centre, Google Places Use other marketing techniques eg Affiliate marketing Make your site is mobile friendly to take advantage of 20-30% users using mobile

5 How to double your sales? Improve your conversion rate: Reduce your bounce rate Give buyers the confidence to buy from you Provide the information to make the buying decision easy especially if it is endorsed by other customers or social connections Personalise the user experience so your site is more relevant Improve the buying process so you reduce shopping cart abandonment Increase sales from each customer: Increase average order value Encourage customers to buy again or more often ( , loyalty, promotions, social media) Build a community of advocates (sharing, social and incentives

6 Ecommerce landscape Sales from Search marketing (PPC, SEO, Merchant Centre) Shopping platforms & market places (Amazon, ebay) On-site Sales Conversion optimisation On-site sales from other sources ( , affiliates, display ads, social, mobile, shopping comparison, voucher sites) Other off-site sales (Social, Mobile, drop shipping, daily deals sites) Off-site Sales

7 Part 1: Changes to your site to increase search traffic

8 Top UK sites by visits and where consumers start shopping Source: Hitwise week ending 19/05/ Website-2011-Consumer- Survey.html?ls=Website

9 Panda? LSI Latent semantic indexing People-Baffled

10 Google s Panda update and the need for good quality content In February 2011, Google implemented a rolling algorithm update known as Panda, which penalises sites that host poor quality content and/or provide a poor user experience With every update, Google becomes more sophisticated at judging the quality of content on a site Many ecommerce websites were badly affected

11 This was followed by the Penguin update on the 24 th April 2012? Designed to penalise search spam! Keyword stuffing Link schemes Cloaking, sneaky redirects or doorway pages Purposeful duplicate content

12 Optimise for the user not search engines Making sure a site is optimised to provide a rich, relevant and rewarding experience for visitors is the best way to avoid penalties, which means: No duplicate content - use Canonical tag and Webmaster tools (plus other technical ways) to ensure Google only indexes pages once (eg. when products are listed in >1 categories, pagination issues, repeated content in tabs etc.) All pages should have unique, relevant and useful content (including the 1000s of category, sub-category and product pages on ecommerce sites!)

13 Optimise for the user not search engines Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce rates, inbound links to deep pages, social mentions etc.) No spam (keyword stuffing) Avoid link schemes and develop Natural links eg. a higher proportion of links should have anchor text with your brand name or URL (not just your keyphrase)

14 Ecommerce optimisation unique content on category pages

15 User-generated content User-generated content, or UGC, is still a great way to add unique and relevant content to web pages especially product pages in the post-panda search environment.

16 Video integrated with product pages

17 Ongoing Fresh content (blogging with social plug-ins)

18 Google s Search, Plus Your World

19 Pinterest is a social platform that allows users to pin images and videos they like into pre-determined categories or boards. Since it s launch last year Pinterest has become the fastest site ever to reach over 10 million monthly unique visits. Therefore, if Pinterest is not part of your social strategy it should be! There are many social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious that are currently enjoying record traffic (Reddit recently announced it has tripled in size over the past year and now serves 1.6 billion pageviews per month). Again, with these kind of figures, if these sites are not part of your social strategy then perhaps they should be!

20 Pinterest

21 Part 2: Good design (and other ways) to improve conversion rates

22 The key to getting the best website Design first impressions counts Content what the site says to the user and search engines Functionality what the site does for the user and your business We need to get a balance between these elements

23 Is your Bounce rate over 30%? 2/10 seconds to make the right impression: Load speed Also impacts Google rankings Platform issues Images/file size Servers/technical issues (often blamed?) Do I like what I see (design/layout/images/colours) or do I have the yuck response? Am I on the right page (relevancy)? Are things in the right place (conventional design) and does this site look trustworthy? Can I be bothered? Is it worth me spending more time reviewing this page/site?

24 Komodo old design vs new design

25 Analytics results Bounce rates Page views

26 Homepage designs

27 Common homepage themes Above the fold: Conventional layout and sandwich design Header with additional menu, search, basket Top mega-menus Delivery messages Billboard image with great photography Rotating sales message 2-3 offers or calls for action (often on side of main image) Carousel of brands Below the fold Images of each category Text?

28 Branding lifestyle & aspirations

29 Similar homepage layout

30 Different homepage styles

31 Category and search results

32 Burburry uses magazine or catalogue approach

33 Next use a horizontal scroll or carousel approach for product listing

34 John Lewis show colour options

35 My-Wardrobe has 2 versions of each image

36 Example of landing page A:B test using Google Optimiser Using models for the product photos raised purchases by 44% and increased the average order value by 67%.

37 Product pages

38 asos use drop downs for options and display recommended products on the side-panel

39 Selecting variants or options Table to select variants (where availability is displayed for each option) Drop down to select variants for simple choices like colour and size (this approach of parent and child is also used by Amazon)

40 Variant issues Parent-child relationships have to work for both your website and any marketplaces you want to sell on Smaller websites may prefer each colour to be treated as a separate product Amazon and larger websites will treat product/style as parent and colours and sizes and children If you want to sell on Amazon you may have to aggregate your products/variants into a pseudo-grandparent Only have a separate variant page if you have unique content but link back to other variants eg for alternative colours

41 Shopping cart optimisation

42 Shopping cart abandonment

43 Calls for action the blur test Ref: Dr Mike Baxter Contrast may be more important than colour?

44 Shopping Cart Example

45 Shopping Cart checklist Clear form/cart design simple & easy to use Strong calls to action and button Repeat your offer/benefits on the first page Thumbnail images of products in cart Single page checkout or Progress bar to see the steps Isolate the checkout no navigation bar to encourage them to leave No compulsory registration

46 Shopping Cart checklist Minimise the information input required Avoid losing information already entered have a summary always displayed Stock management and delivery no nasty surprises Checks for errors and validation eg correct address Reassurance and Trust (anti-spam, security, guarantees, returns, credit cards taken)

47 Mobile and the effect of different devices

48 Activities differ by device (Data from AdMob ) Report can be found at

49 Designing for mobiles The growth of SmartPhones now means that around 30% of all internet visits are currently made on a SmartPhones. The use of mobile devices to access the internet is due to overtake desktops in So it is essential that your website is optimised for mobile devices.

50 Designing for mobiles Mobile devices such as iphones and Android phones will display the standard version of your website, by letting you zoom in and out of certain sections of the page, with the different elements of page in miniature (i.e. they will be in the same position as if you were viewing the page on a desktop). However it is possible for your site to be built with a separate CSS specifically designed to work on different size screens we call this device responsive design

51 Device responsive design Same url for all devices rather than a separate mobile site or sub-domain User detection agent (distinguishes device) Liquid or responsive design suitable for each size device/operating system/browser Mobile design often has a single column with most important content/features moved to the top and in some cases some content hidden

52 Amazon.co.uk responsive design or Amazon.co.uk App Main site with adaptive CSS Amazon App

53 Key take-aways There are 4 main ways of increasing sales but increasing organic traffic (from all devices) and improving website conversion rates are the most cost-effective! Panda and Penguin may have affected your organic traffic: Deal with duplicate content issues Add unique content (category and product pages, user-generated content, multi-media content) Use of blogs and social sharing Avoid spam (keyword stuffing and dodgy links) Site interaction and social signals now influence your search rankings

54 Key take-aways Improve on-site conversions with good design: Reduce bounce rate (load times and first impression) What s hot in homepage design? Product page and variant page design Calls for action blur test Test new ideas/designs using Google Optimiser Shopping cart optimisation

55 Thank You Ann Stanley