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Hot Tips For Boosting Your Ecommerce Conversions By 200%

Have you been struggling to get more conversions for your business website? Gaining conversions can be a challenge, as you’ve got plenty of traffic to manage and competitions to differentiate yourself.

The good news is you can use a few tips to help you boost your ecommerce conversions. Just because you’re competing with millions of other ecommerce websites doesn’t mean you have to struggle to find customers who can support your business. Here’s a look at some things you can do to boost your conversions.

Keep Your Site Running Fast

Your website must keep running fast if you want to bring in more potential customers. You can use a few points to ensure your website stays fast and operational:

  • Use a speed-testing program or website like Google PageSpeed to see how fast your site is running.
  • Review how fast your hosting plan can go. You might need a hosting solution that works a little faster, depending on your needs.
  • Optimize your images to ensure they don’t take a while to load.
  • Keep your page map under control. Don’t use more paths than necessary, as a more streamlined site that doesn’t go in as many directions may be easier to load.

SEO Is Critical

Search engine optimization efforts are vital to your website. Most people will find your website through an online search. You can improve your chances to be found by doing a few things:

  • Target keywords that are specific to your business.
  • Be sure the quality of content on your page is positive. Search engines value pages with top-quality content more than others.
  • Look at how your URLs work. You can adjust the URLs for your websites to incorporate keywords. A search engine can look through these URLs first.

Create a Mobile-Responsive Website

People are becoming increasingly likely to use mobile devices when searching for things online. You can create a mobile-ready website that is easy to read on all devices.

Your website can be programmed with a separate interface that displays icons and sections in a streamlined environment. The mobile edition should be thorough and crisp without taking a while to load.

Create Small Conversions

Don’t assume you’re going to land the biggest fish in the sea the first time around. Start with small conversions, like collecting an email address or asking for a phone number for texts. You can attract people who want to learn more about your work and then market yourself surrounding whatever you want to share.

Offer Social Proof

Customers are more likely to trust your business if they see other people also trust your work. You can provide social proof to people who are interested in your content. You can post social media reviews and listings from your clients to show that there are people who have been using your work and are enjoying what you are providing.

Allow For Guests

It is easier to get conversions when you don’t ask people for lots of details. You can allow people to shop on your site as guests if they prefer. A guest account will allow someone to make a purchase and send one’s payment and delivery information as necessary. That guest can then get what one wants without all the hassle. The effort can eventually lead to that guest creating an official account, thus becoming more likely to do business with you.

Keep the Displays Simple

Anything you display on your ecommerce website should be easy for customers to read. You can use a few steps for keeping your displays simple:

  • Don’t plaster your website with lots of pictures. Keep the listings streamlined, and let the customer focus on a few things.
  • Allow for search parameters where people can enter information on the products they want to buy. They can sort through the results through the page.
  • Don’t use complicated pictures of your items. Keep the pictures clean while focusing on whatever you are selling. Don’t add complex backgrounds or flourishes that would distract the viewer and potentially make it longer for the site to load.

Keep the Product Copy Personal

Don’t repeat the same details on each product. Keep the product copy unique for each item. Add personal touches surrounding everything you offer, and let the reader know what makes something you are promoting so interesting.

Add Social Media Links

You can get in touch with your customers more if you add social media links. You can post links on your website to your Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages, and anything else you utilize. Your customers can click these links to access your site and learn more about your work.

Focus On Your Guarantees or Returns

Customers might not be willing to convert if they aren’t certain the places they shop at are looking out for them. You can present a focus on whatever guarantees or returns you wish to manage. Let your customers see they can return their purchases if necessary, or that you can replace something if a product doesn’t work as well. You can give your customers confidence in knowing they’ll be making the right call when buying from you.

Focus on Value and Scarcity

The last tip is to highlight the value of your work, but to also let people know it won’t be there forever. You can promote something as a one-time deal, including a sale where someone can get a significant discount. You could also provide a time limit on when you’re going to give out something or make a product available for sale. Your limit can help people see what you’re providing and that you aren’t going to be rough in promoting your work.

Each of these points is essential for your success in bringing in more commerce conversions. Be certain when running your website that you have a plan for making your work more effective. You will bring in more customers when you use the right points for work.

Merchant Website SEO [2023 Update]

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Practicing Good Merchant Website SEO

Most business owners know by know that the Internet isn’t going away, and if you want to succeed in business you need to have an online presence. Having a website is only the start, however. Without good merchant website SEO, chances are that the business website will never rank high enough in the search engines to make it worthwhile. Good search engine optimization practices can help stack the deck so even small business owners will have the ability to have their sites compete with the big boys.

Formatting for ideal on page SEO

The way an article or web page is formatted on the site can make a big difference when it comes to ranking in the search engines. One of the worst kept secrets is that Google has hired human quality readers, and formatting a webpage to be well organized and easy to read makes a big difference now when it comes to ranking well for keywords.

This means several things for how a website owner needs to design how their page looks. Informational pages need to include plenty of subheadings, bullet points, lists, and short paragraphs. Think “reader friendly.” Pages should be easy to scan and never appear as block paragraphs.

When looking at a retail page that’s mostly products, merchant website SEO work can be a little bit more challenging. It’s a good idea to stay away from iframes, which lead to outgoing link saturation and also isn’t the best way to present a large number of products. All products should have varied descriptions to add in as much relevant and original text as possible.

Carefully using keywords

Keywords remain a very important aspect of SEO for any website. The key is to walk that fine line between making sure to use enough keywords and a good variety of related keywords versus not using too many. While the numbers vary from one expert to another, it’s generally agreed that it’s not good to go above 2% of text on any page being one keyword.

The other important way that keywords on a page of text can help increase rankings is where they appear. The main keyword the site owner wants to rank for should be located in the title of the page or article. In the text itself that means a well optimized page will have the keyword in the first paragraph, often in the very first sentence. One or two variations of that keyword phrase should be used in the middle of the text and then once again in the last paragraph.

Do backlinks still matter?

One of the strongest ways to boost website rankings is still to get backlinks from related websites. Good merchant site SEO means finding specialty blogs or related sites that might naturally link to the site. There is some controversy with the practice of backlinking because intentionally manipulating backlinks can result in the website actually losing rank.

The best way to boost SEO with backlinks is to offer a good guest blog post to a related site. Give them some quality writing, and link back just using your URL or the actual name of the website. Doing this keeps it legitimate, gives an SEO boost to the merchant site, and helps avoid any search engine ranking penalties.

Merchant Services: Defining Tech Talk

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For merchants navigating their business through the e-commerce industry, there’s quite a lot of technical jargon to be aware of. It’s now more important than ever to stay on top of the latest buzz words that go along with the technology that is at the heart of e-commerce. It can sometimes be a hassle to figure out what tech trends are important to business and what’s just a passing fad. The Official Merchant Services Blog offers some insight and explanation for some of the most important technologies that are affecting businesses today:

1. Virtualization.

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources. Cloud Hosting is essentially an extension of virtualization. But it goes way deeper than that.

Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines is separated from the underlying hardware resources.

Virtualization is something businesses can use to improve their workflow as well as their performance. You can pretty much “virtualize” just about any hardware or software that you need. One of the classic examples of Virtualization is an operating system. Mac users who run Windows on their Mac, are using Virtualization.

2. The Cloud.

The phrase “the cloud” is getting tossed around everywhere today. From television ads that boldly utter “To the cloud!” to web hosting companies offering cloud hosting, it’s a pervasive bit of tech jargon. But what exactly is the cloud?

Cloud Computing is a model of computer use based on sharing computing resources stored in an online environment rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle the applications. Cloud computing is obtaining mass appeal in corporate data centers because it enables the data center to operate like the Internet.  Cloud solutions for businesses are often more efficient and less expensive than maintaining software and servers on local machines. This can apply to everything a business needs to function, from financial software to document and file storage. A cloud solution can take all of that online, allowing a business (from many locations even) to access the application remotely.

A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services.

3. Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a specific topic we’ve covered before in The Official Merchant Services Blog. But it is extremely important and worth adding to this list. SEO is about maximizing the potential of your website to attract online customers. What it boils down to is a series of tactics and actions that you take to improve your web site’s page ranking on internet search engines. The higher your site is on searches, the easier it is for potential online customers to find your site. This drives potential business to your web site.

4. Unified Communications.

Unified Communications (UC) is a really basic concept with that can sometimes be presented to people in a complicated manner. What it essentially is: The merging of multiple communications tools, such as web conferencing and instant messing, into a single interface or integrated system.  Much like Search Engine Optimization, UC can be very helpful to businesses. On even a basic level, a business can make itself more efficient by maximizing their communication tools. This could be something as easy as integrating BlackBerry with Outlook.

5. Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing, a phrase coined by Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired article, is the act of outsourcing tasks usually performed by specific individuals instead to a group of people or a specific online community through an open call. Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. The way it works is problems are broadcast to an unknown group of solvers in the form of an open call for solutions. A “crowd” of users typically forms into an online community, and the crowd submits solutions. The crowd also sorts through the solutions, finding the best ones. These best solutions are then owned by the entity that broadcast the problem in the first place –– the crowdsourcer –– and the winning individuals in the crowd are sometimes rewarded.

The typical activities that crowdourcing gets use for are design tasks, the refining or carrying out of an algorithm’s steps, or help in capturing or analyzing large amounts of data. Because it can handle functions like those, crowdsourcing has become popular with businesses. Essentially it can be used leverage mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies and then help businesses achieve their goals.

It All Ties Together

This is just a short list of tech terms that merchants will encounter while trying to get their e-commerce solution running smoothly. Remember that value to your business is the cornerstone for evaluating technologies that can enhance your business. So don’t be confused or deceived by the buzz. Gimmicks can seem tempting and attractive, but always keep in mind that the product or service needs to bring something to the table that specifically improves your business. In the five examples provided here, there is one underlying theme to take note of: They all connect.

Virtualization ties into Cloud Computing, as one is an extension of the other. SEO and UC share the same goal of optimizing the way your business does a specific function –– search engine results of your businesses’ web site for SEO, and efficient communications within your business for UC. It’s also worth noting that many SEO tactics hinge on using Social Networking tools to improve your SEO, and those same Social Networking tools can be made more efficient with UC concepts and tactics. It’s all about improving your business and the tech presented here today by Host Merchant Services can be linked together in a concerted effort to enhance what your business can do online.

Google+ is Here for Businesses [2023 Update]

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The Official Merchant Services Blog has been following Google+ and its beta for awhile now. We previously detailed the potential upside of Google+ for small businesses in this blog entry. The major setback to Google+ for businesses at that point time was that Google hadn’t fully allowed businesses to function in Google+.

That changed three days ago. On November 7 Google announced that businesses were fully allowed to add pages and started accepting submissions. No longer restricted to just personal accounts and no longer tied to strictly Gmail, Google+ gave users the ability to utilize their fledgling social networking tool.

Host Merchant Services jumped on the offer, and you can find our Business Page here. You can also find our local small business page here.

So now that Google has opened the flood gates to businesses, what is the impact going to be? Should you jump right in feet first? What will this do to help your business and its marketing?

The Nuts and Bolts

First let’s review what Google+ Pages can functionally do for businesses:

Google+ Pages are different from regular use profiles. They have some limitations, such as Pages can’t add people to circles unless the page is added first or mentioned. Pages default privacy settings are public, they can’t +1 other pages nor can they +1 stuff on the web. Pages don’t have the option to share to “extended circles,” they don’t receive notifications via e-mail, text or in the Google bar. Pages can’t initiate a hangout on a mobile devices.

Google+ Pages also have advantages, such as they can be made for a variety of different purposes (brands, shops, celebrity figures, sports teams). They have the +1 button and can +1 certain things. Local pages include information about a business’ physical location (map, address, business hours and contact details).

The Pros

One  big factor for Google+ Pages right now is the functionality of circles. It’s more flexible and offers merchants more abilities than its Facebook equivalent. G+ Pages can use circles to segment different groups of connections, better organizing a business’ connections with its customers. The default settings already demonstrate the power of this over Facebook, as it sets up the circles for “customers,” “VIPs,” and “team members,” making it easy to target how you share information with your followers.

Another big plus for Google+ is the Hangouts feature –– which allows users to set up one-click video conversations with other users, fans or colleagues. The potential for your business from Hangouts is quite robust and Facebook offers nothing like that. You can utilize this as standard customer service, or instant face-to-face feedback from customers; you could also utilize it for marketing services, or running mini-workshops or webinars. That’s just a few off the cuff ideas on how to utilize this feature.

And then there’s the as yet unrealized potential of Direct Connect –– the feature that lets you quickly navigate to a Google+ page (and add that page to your circles) directly from a Google search bar. And that’s the real strength of Direct Connect: The Google search bar. This feature is still being worked on so it only works for a handful of big brand name pages, such as Pepsi. But this is definitely something that will shape businesses and what they can do, because it ties the social media extension into the Google searching functionality. Which is the bread and butter of Google.

The Cons

What are the cons of Google+? It’s still new, still in testing so there are some very noticeable drawbacks to Google+. Right up front, one of the biggest ones is G+ Pages do not currently allow multiple page administrators. So while with your Facebook page you can have multiple people in your business accessing the page and managing the content, G+ still only has its Pages as an extension from a single account. That needs to change. And Google is aware of the issue and is working on it. But for now it does create a bottleneck in terms of usage and is an obstacle for businesses in terms of utilizing Pages as powerfully as other social media options.

Another drawback is that Google+ does not allow contests. This TechCrunch article reveals that there’s explicit language in the Google+ Pages terms of service prohibiting businesses from running contests, promotions, sweepstakes, offers, or coupons. That’s a big blow for businesses, as all of those activities are popular with other social media outlets. From Facebook to Groupon, businesses are extensively using Social Media to promote and market through coupons and contests.

And another problem for Google+ Pages stems from the difference between a Page and a Local Business Page. The Local pages include your business’ location, and is tied into Google Maps and the Google Local features. But it is separate in some of its functions from a page setup based on the other list of purposes. Google explains the difference as: “Currently, Place pages and Google+ Pages must be managed separately. A Place page provides information about a business and makes it easy for customers to find local businesses on Google Maps and local search; while a Google+ page provides business owners with additional ways to engage, build relationships and interact directly with customers.”

Many businesses already have their Local entry set up through Google maps. So this raises some concerns and issues with compatibility that Google itself opened up by making the Local entry available in the Google+ Pages signup.

The Verdict

Google+ Pages have revitalized the Google+ project. It launched with a lot of buzz and then it tapered off. It comes storming back into peoples’ attention with this new development. And even with the few obstacles and issues it currently has, it’s definitely worth getting your business involved in it. From the start it benefits your e-commerce presence. Right now Google+ may not overtake the established juggernauts, like Facebook. But it’s really quick and easy to create your G+ Page and get it set up. Tying it into other social media outlets and continuing what you were already doing is what The Official Merchant Services Blog would advise.

Keeping it fresh and active will help you in the long run, because in terms of marketing your business, the potential that Google+ has over all the other social media tools is that it’s going to be able to impact the Google search engine more directly. And that’s the bottom line for businesses: Page ranking. The value to be had in the long term is too great to not get started now. As Direct Connection gets worked on and improved and as Google+ begins to ramp up its efforts to compete with Facebook and profit off of the investment in its social media tool, the strength of the search engine is what everything will hinge on. Including your business and its online presence.

So give Google+ a try, get your Page going and prepare yourself for more SEO opportunities.