Increasing sales to website

[JacoStore]

Hi everyone

Thanks for taking the time to read my post - firstly I hope I am in the right place for this question and secondly, apologies if I am not in the right place!

We have a shop on eBay and we have set up our own website as well. Traffic to eBay is good, but we really want to be able to increase sales to our own website and get away from the constant restrictions of selling through a 3rd party.

I've tried to do as much as I can to advertise the website, but when it comes to SEO I am at a total loss and this is where I would really appreciate some advice. I want to make sure that I go in the right direction and not end up paying a lot of money for a scam etc.

With each sale we send out a professionally printed leaflet about our products with a discount voucher on, we are on twitter and face book and have registered on various trade directories, such as hotfrog and BT TradeSpace. I work very hard to research our product prices to make sure that they are competitive and we offer free UK postage and free gift wrapping as well - to try and make us as attractive as possible to customers.

But we know that in order to move forward we now need to get some professional help - which is why I am posting.

I would be most grateful for any ideas, advice, etc as to what the best type of SEO would be for us, and how I should go about finding someone that can do this for us that knows their stuff!

Thanks for reading and for any advice given - most grateful to you all.

Samm

 

[MartCactus]

With each sale we send out a professionally printed leaflet about our products with a discount voucher on, we are on twitter and face book and have registered on various trade directories, such as hotfrog and BT TradeSpace.

The discount voucher is a good idea, but it depends on what type of product it is (is it something that customers will return to buy again and again?)

Recently for example I bought some prescription sunglasses on ebay. With the glasses I got a discount voucher, which was nice, but prescription sunglasses aren't something I buy very often, so I'm unlikely to use the voucher before it expires. But on a site selling consumables (eg printer ink) it might have more impact.

As to SEO, the basic rules are fairly simple (there are caveats and exceptions to all of these of course, but for brevity....)
1) get good links to your site - you may have to develop good content on it to achieve this, especially if there are many other people in your market
2) make sure the pages are optimized, with your critical keywords in the page title, h1 tag, etc. Don't over do it (ie don't spam it up).
3) google for good info about ways to build traffic with blogs and social media etc (can depend what you sell - eg its easier to write interesting reviews of laptops or mobile phones than printer cartridges in my opinion).

Remember that if you have competitors (I assume you do) they probably want to rank well for the same searches as well. Not everyone can be top, so you've got to do it better than them. Analyse why they are above you (is it that they have better page rank, or is their page rank lower, in which case you need to focus more on the site itself).

 

[fisicx]

Number 1 priority should be to get a decent UK hosting. The godaddy hosting is hurting your ranking and your load times. move to a UK company today.

As to increasing sales, what is is your conversion rate? Do any of the people who buy return to claim their discount? Do you have a high bounce rate?

 

[AndyP]

As fisicx has said, your page loading times are way too slow so you need to address this.

I also found your checkout process somewhat tedious and I am sure that your basket abandonment at this stage must be fairly high (IMO of course). Is there a way to slim it down a bit? Simple and straightforward with as much on one page as possible is the way to go.....having this continual "next" to go through especially when you have no clue as to how many "nexts" there will be will put people off.

Edit: Just spotted that you do actually have a breadcrumb through the checkout process which I didn't notice before (so maybe customers are missing this as well?)....but either way, four screens to complete a purchase is too much in my opinion.

 

[JacoStore]

Hi everyone

Thank you so much for taking the time to view our site and give me your feedback.

As you can probably tell, this is all very new stuff to me and I only know the very basic of basics, I'm surprised that I have gotten the site as far as we have! But I am determined to learn and develop my 'baby' as much as I can, so thank you for your patience with my questions.

One thing you have mentioned is "1) get good links to your site - you may have to develop good content on it to achieve this, especially if there are many other people in your market" - can you explain how I would go about this, I have heard mention of links before but I have no idea what they are and how I would go about putting them in - but will definatley give it a go.

Also, I do not know what a breadcrumb is - could you explain a bit more, if you have time?

We used a cart software called webassyt to put together our website, we chose it because it was easy touse and seem to incorporate a lot of what we were hoping to acheive, but I am not sure if we can change the checkout procedure, but I do agree that 4 pages is a lot to complete and may put people off. This is something that I will look into and see if there is any way of changing this to make it more user friendly.

I would also like to look into increasing the page loading times, have you any suggestions how I should tackle this? Is this because we are hosted by an american company?

I am most grateful to you all for your help, thank you all so much,

Samm

 

[steve81london]

The breadcrumb trail indicates the path that the users have taken in your web site to reach a specific page. They are links that are placed at the top of the page bellow the top navigation. It looks like that :

link > link > current location

Example: Home > Cars > Used Cars

There is a great post about breadcrumb navigation from smashing magazine and one from Jacob Nielsen. I suggest you Google it.

For search engine optimization the breadcrumb is good because i) it improves the web sites crawling ii) counts a a link from one pages to another and reinforces the main category pages


I hope I helped a little bit with that.

 

[Locksmith London]

Having looked at your website I would make the following changes:

1) Optimize or completely remove the flash banner. If it's not possible to reduce the load time of it then replace it with a web optimized JPEG/GIF. It leaves a horrible white space above the fold which may be the only thing most people can see when they first hit your website. Do you have a high bounce rate? If so then this could be the reason why.

2) Make sure all your prices are visible on the home screen as some of them appear to be cut off (I'm using Google Chrome browser). This will be a web design/CSS issue.

3) Remove or 'fade out' the repeating gift box wallpaper. It is very distracting to the eye. Faded to approximately 20% of it's current opacity may work. Don't put things on the page that take the viewers attention away from what you are trying to sell!

4) Put the search box at the top, just above the category box as most people are unlikely to find it halfway down the page.

5) The 'Thank You For Your Order' message actually appears before the customer has paid while they are being redirected to PayPal. Consider changing this.

 

[JacoStore]

Hi there

Many thanks for explaining that to me, it makes a lot of sense now I know what it means!

Can anyone recommend a good UK hosting company that we could move our website to? Be most grateful for any suggestions

Samm

 

[wdltd]

You may be doing this already, but if not, a cheap and effective way of getting your products in front of people on Google is to create a Google Shopping feed.