Keep your site updated to please customers and Google
March is here and Easter is almost upon us but it’s not just your home or office that deserves a spring clean. When was the last time you gave your ecommerce site the update it deserves?
Keeping a site looking vibrant and dynamic is essential when it comes to building a loyal customer base. If returning shoppers constantly come across the same thing when they visit your site they will become bored and look elsewhere.
Consumers aren’t the only ones that like to see change on a site. Google, the hardened SEO taskmaster itself, likes to see dynamism too and rewards it.
“The key to the success of any ecommerce website is performance in search engines,” says Martin Dinham, Director at web development and marketing agency Channel Digital.
“Google is regularly updating its algorithm to encourage freshness of content and sites that invest in continually updating themselves and their content will be rewarded by Google in terms of their search engine positioning.”
It’s best to get into a routine of regularly giving your site the once over – like with your living room, an annual spring clean just doesn’t cut it.
Here’s some tips on giving your site the vibrancy it needs to grow your customer base and increase regular traffic.
1. Feature new and popular products
New products keep your itinerary fresh and updated but there’s no point in hiding them away among the other products, shout about them. Feature them on the home page, push them out on social media or write a blog post about them.
Also you should allow customers to leave reviews of your products. “This not only provides potential customers with additional, impartial information about your merchandise, but also generates fresh content for users. You can also use these reviews to feature a ‘product of the week/month’ on your homepage,” says Rob Durkin, CEO of FusePump.
2. Change your promotions
There is nothing worse than finding a Mothers’ Day promotion on a site a week after Mothering Sunday has passed. Make sure you are constantly changing your promotions and keeping on top of seasonal events that can be used to plug and promote certain ranges.
Also if you have a sale section – these are often one of the most popular sections on an ecommerce site – make sure it is up to date. Is the sale still on? Are all items featured in-stock?
3. Create fresh editorial content
Editorial content adds a lot of value to an ecommerce site but you have to stay on top of it and keep it fresh. If you have a blog update it as regularly as possible and give people a reason to keep coming back. Write about trends, industry events, news etc.
It might not be for everyone but video can be used effectively to keep a site looking dynamic. “Video is a highly effective way of freshening up your ecommerce site and also provides other benefits to you and to your customers,” says Russ Zack, General Manager and Vice President, EMEA, at video platform vendor, Kaltura.
“In the US, we have been working with Zappos, a leading online apparel and footwear retailer with annual gross merchandise sales of more than $1 billion, for about a year. Zappos has found that having videos on its product pages have not only increased purchases, but have also lowered product churn and returns. They consequently decided to step-up their use of video by adding more videos and new interactive features.”
4. Use an image gallery
If the images on the front page of your site aren’t new your site will start to look stale. A good way of getting updated imagery – as well as promoting products – is creating user-generated images.
“If you’re a fashion retailer you could incorporate a gallery and encourage people to send photos of themselves in pieces from the latest collection,” says Durkin.
5. Use dynamic social media widgets
Constantly updating your social media platforms and keeping activity up is essential. It’s a good idea to highlight this action on your site by having a real time feed displaying the conversations and actions you are creating on social media.
6. Hide out of stock items
Constantly seeing “out of stock” on your site will turn people off, more so that a reduced collection. If you know that an item is going to be out of stock for more than a few days, just take it down off the site until it is back.
7. Switch your navigation
Before you launched the site you probably spent ages deciding on the order of the navigation on the site. Have you looked at it since? Use Google analytics to see which options are most popular with visitors, it might be the case that it needs a rejig, putting the most popular links first.
8. Keep abreast of trends and re-design
Trends in website design change all of the time – that’s not to say that you have to always be using the most en vogue style on your site but you should be aware of what your competitors are doing and if big changes come about in style and design, maybe it’s time to give your site face-lift.
Visual appearance of an ecommerce is all important,” says Dinham. “Website usability experts will tell you about how visuals can affect site performance, whilst a look at old websites on a service such as www.archive.org will remind you just how dated websites built a few years ago now look. There are particular reasons though why a site should keep evolving, even once you have found a visually attractive layout that performs well.”
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