Tips On Turning Your Brick & Mortar Store Into An Online Success

If you’re a retail store owner that hasn’t made the leap into eCommerce yet, it might be considerably more straightforward than you think. The barriers to entry for starting an online store have become considerably lower in recent years, especially with powerful platforms like Shopify. 

As you probably know, the retail industry has been rapidly changing over the past decade due to online shopping, big box stores, and mobile technology. So if you’ve been thinking about bringing your business online, now is as good a time as any to take the plunge.

To help you get started, we’ve compiled some helpful tips to help first-time eCommerce store owners. 

Do Some Market Research

Before you start building your store, it’s good to do a little market research.  Look closely at what the top online retailers in your space are doing. Focus on how they are organizing their websites, what the websites look like, and any areas where you feel you may have a competitive advantage.

You should also spend some time researching different eCommerce platforms, digital marketing platforms, and digital marketing case studies in your industry. The eCommerce platform you choose must work well with the third-party services you intend to utilize once your site is live.

One of the reasons that so many website owners choose Shopify as their eCommerce platform is because of how easily it integrates with services like Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and eBay, to name a few. 

Once you better understand the eCommerce landscape, the next thing you’ll want to do is pick an eCommerce platform. 

Pick An eCommerce Platform

There are a few popular eCommerce platforms available today.  The top 4 platforms are Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce. However, when it comes to launching your first website, the Shopify platform is one of the easiest to get up and running quickly.

When choosing a platform, you should consider your need for product organization, eCommerce capabilities, and any special features you may need on your website. Read reviews on the platforms, watch review videos on YouTube, and schedule platform demos. 

If you’re unsure of the right platform for your needs, you can also reach out to a few website design companies to discuss your project. Typically, web designers offer free consultations and can make helpful suggestions for your project planning. 

While you may not realize it, changing between eCommerce platforms is no easy task. Make sure that the platform you choose meets your long-term needs and will be capable of growing with your business. 

Create A Website Hierarchy

Once you’ve decided on the eCommerce platform you’ll be using, the next thing you should do is develop your website hierarchy.  Plan out a category structure that logically breaks down your product catalog.  

You can use programs like Microsoft Excel, Mac Numbers, or even Google Sheets to make your category planning a little easier. It also helps to use industry-leading websites as inspiration for organizing your site.

Depending on the size of your catalog, you may want to have one or even two levels of sub-categories beneath your top-level categories. It’s good to segment out categories with more than 100 products to ensure that no products get buried too deep within any category group.

Once you’ve finished establishing your category structure, you can start building your product content and data feed.

Compile Product Content  

No matter what kind of products you’re selling, it’s important to provide your potential customers with plenty of product information to help them make purchasing decisions. This means that at a bare minimum, you should have well-written product descriptions, product features, product specs (when applicable), and excellent product photos. 

Write Website Content

The first thing you should do is create all of the content you will need for your website. This includes any text content you’ll need for your home page, about page, category pages, and product pages.   

Whether you realize it or not, having all of your website content written ahead of time will streamline the website creation and product creation process. When writing the text for pages like your home page or about page, it’s good to aim for about 400 – 500 words minimum. Product descriptions and category descriptions can be shorter but should still be at least 250 to 300 words.  

Compile Product Photos

You’ll also want to make sure you have all of your product photos shot, edited, and optimized before getting too far into the web design process. Great product photos are integral to eCommerce success, so it’s important to have this piece of the puzzle figured out ahead of time.

If you have the budget for it, it’s always best to hire a professional photographer to shoot your photos. This will save you time and ensure you end up with a great final product. However, if a professional photographer doesn’t fit into your budget, here’s an article to help you shoot quality photos yourself.

Create Product Spreadsheet

Now that you’ve compiled your product details, photos, and other relevant information, it’s time to build your product data feed. 

No matter what eCommerce platform you end up moving forward with, it’s a good idea to build out a product data feed in a spreadsheet. Most modern eCommerce platforms have easy-to-use import and export features and will provide you with a spreadsheet template to make things easy.  

Here are import templates for a few of the more popular eCommerce platforms.

Shopify Import Template

BigCommerce Import Template

Your product data feed should include data points like product title, product description, product price, page title, page description, product image file name references, product inventory, and any other relevant product information.

After completing your initial import, it’s good practice to create a new export file from within your eCommerce platform any time you plan to do a new product import. This will ensure that no product details or inventory counts are overwritten with incorrect information. 

It’s also a good idea to use product information management tools and catalog-management tools to better control your products. These types of applications will also allow you to synchronize your product data across multiple channels, saving you time as your online business expands.

Build Your Website

So by now, you’ve done your market research, sourced your website content, and created your product data feed. Now it’s time to get down to business and build your website. 

Like with your product photos, it’s always best to hire a professional to build your website if you have the budget. However, if you’re looking for a low-cost way to get up and running, plenty of excellent commercial theme options are available. 

Choosing A Theme

No matter what eCommerce platform you choose to build your site on, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of commercial themes available for you to choose from. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a theme is a pre-built website layout that you can populate with your products and information.

You’ll have the ability to set custom images, your branding, custom navigation items, and display all of your products; however, further customization can sometimes be tricky. When choosing a theme, it’s best to pick something as close to “perfect” as possible so that you don’t spend too much time or money on website customization. 

There are several great places to find themes for an eCommerce website. Here are a few of the more popular options.

1. Shopify Theme Store
2. BigCommerce Theme Store
3. ThemeForest
4. Magento Themes
5. Template Monster

Setting up a theme is usually pretty straightforward. Still, if you’re not very tech-savvy or just want some professional assistance, you can typically have the theme professionally set up for a low, flat fee. 

It’s always good to set up your theme using demo data or demo product information when you’re just getting started. This will make it a bit more efficient to get all of the theme settings and options configured how you’d like them to be without spending too much time worrying about importing your data. 

Importing Product Content

Once you’ve finished setting up your theme with the demo data, it’s time to get your actual product data imported into the website. Before getting started, it’s usually a good idea to delete all of the demo product content first, so you’re starting with a fresh slate.

Depending on the size of your catalog, the process can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes.  After you do your initial import, take some time to browse through the front and backend of the website.

Ensure that all category assignments are correct, the images assigned to the products are accurate, and there are no strange characters or formatting in your product descriptions. It may take trial and error to ensure your import file is perfect, but it’s crucial to ensure your product information is correct before launching your website. 

Website Testing

Once you’ve finished importing and verifying your product content, you’re almost ready to launch your eCommerce store. Before you open your digital doors to the world, it’s essential to do some testing first. 

The first thing you should do is go through every step of the customer journey yourself. Search for products, filter through your categories, add products to the cart, and go through checkout. 

Try to identify bugs, bottlenecks, or anything else that may make it complicated for everyday customers to find and check out what they’re looking for. If you’re using a commercial theme, it’s less likely that there will be any significant bugs, but it’s always a good idea to test anyways. 

Once you’ve finished doing some testing on your own, you should bring in a few other people to perform some testing.  Having friends, family, and colleagues perform their testing will help uncover any user experience pain points, bottlenecks, and website bugs you may have missed in your testing.  

Build Brand Visibility

Once you’ve finished testing your website, it’s time to push your website live!  Unlike physical retail businesses, opening your doors does not mean that anyone will come to your website. You’ll need to build some brand visibility online to get people on your site. 

Be Active On Social Media

The first thing you should do is create profiles on the top social media channels if you haven’t already. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Depending on your specific customer base, there may also be a few industry-specific social media channels worth signing up for. 

Getting attention on social media takes more work than simply setting up a profile, though.  Do a little research into the content your competitors and industry leaders are publishing.  Think about ways to promote your products while still keeping the content engaging. 

It’s also important to stay consistent with your posts. You don’t need to post something new every single day, but it’s essential to set a reasonable schedule for yourself and stick to it.  If it’s easier for you to create a bunch of content at once, several tools are available like Hubspot, Hootsuite, and SocialHP that will help you schedule posts in advance.  

As you grow your audience on social media, give your audience a mix of different content. In addition to sharing your products and promotions, share relevant articles, videos, and other content that they may find interesting or valuable. 

Reach Out To Industry Influencers

Another great way to bring attention to your online store is to have industry influencers talk about your products or brand. 

Start by identifying bloggers, Instagram personalities, and video content creators with an audience similar to your ideal customer. For example, if you sell jewelry and accessories, reaching out to content creators in the fashion and beauty space would make sense.

It’s usually a good idea to do your influencer outreach in a few steps. Start by building a spreadsheet of ‘target’ influencers. Make sure to include things like the influencer’s name, website or social media profile address, the size of their audience, and any other relevant metrics that you may have. 

Once you’ve finished building your outreach list, the next thing you’ll want to do is write a couple of email variations to use for your outreach. Include a little information about your brand, products, and what you’re expecting from the influencer. If you’re willing to send out free products or samples, include that in your email. 

Now it’s time to start reaching out to influencers. Remember, influencer outreach is a numbers game, so reach out to plenty of content creators. If you send out 100 emails and get 10-20 responses, you’re ahead of the curve. 

Keep in mind that depending on the influencer and the size of their audience, they may ask you to pay sponsorship fees or advertising fees and send them a free product. It’s a good idea to have a mix of influencers with small, medium, and large audiences to ensure many feasible opportunities. 

Invest In Digital Marketing

In addition to being active on social media and reaching out to industry influencers, you may also want to invest in digital marketing for your website.  Digital marketing is a term that encompasses a wide range of strategies and tactics. 

When developing a digital marketing strategy, it’s good to diversify as much as your budget allows. 

First and foremost, spend a little time optimizing your website for search engines. Ranking well in Google and other search engines is an excellent way to keep a steady stream of qualified traffic coming to your website. There are also no direct costs associated with ranking in Google, making SEO one of the most profitable and cost-effective ways to build an eCommerce store.

Even when you’ve done everything right, it can take anywhere from 6 months to a year to start ranking for your target keywords. If you don’t want to wait for your site to start ranking, there are several other ways to get qualified customers on your website more quickly.

One of the more popular ways to drive new customers to an eCommerce store is Facebook and Instagram advertising.  Facebook and Instagram offer a relatively low-cost way to share your content and product advertising with a broader audience you may not be able to reach with your organic social media posts. 

It’s important to solidify your sales pitch before you start paying for ads. Figure out your competitive advantage: low prices, fast shipping, exclusive products, or some other angle. 

Ensure that your ads are clear and concise when communicating the message with your audience. The typical attention span of someone scrolling through a Facebook or Instagram feed is pretty minimal. Hence, it’s important to put the offer in front of them as quickly as possible to maximize your ad spend. 

The Benefits Of Launching An eCommerce Store

Launching an eCommerce website can transform a traditional retail business. Doing business online allows you to promote your products to customers well outside your geographical location, operate with lower overhead, and move a lot more of your inventory if all goes according to plan.

If you’re thinking about bringing your retail store online, you should consider content marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can attract thousands of new customers to your website every month with content, click here to contact us today.

10 Effective Ways To Grow A B2B eCommerce Website

As buyers and business owners are becoming younger and more comfortable shopping online, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage if you do not have an eCommerce presence for your brick-and-mortar B2B business.

Market research company Forrester projects that B2B eCommerce sales will reach $1.8 trillion per year by 2023. This would account for about 17% of all B2B sales in the United States.

With most B2B buyers doing their research online and 93% of B2B buyers preferring to do their purchasing through an online portal, can your business afford to stay in the stone age?

While the overall user experience for a B2B website will be similar to a standard B2C website, there are a few significant differences you will need to consider. Unlike traditional B2C eCommerce websites, a B2B website needs to be designed and developed with more strategy intent.

To help you with your website development journey, we’ve compiled the 10 Commandments of B2B eCommerce to give you the best chance at success.

1: Make Your User Experience Clean & Efficient

Pretty much the most crucial factor for any website is user experience. If the website has a poor user experience, chances are its visitors will end up going elsewhere to purchase goods or consume content.

While every website may be different, there are a few key user experience factors that every website should pay attention to.

Website Page Speed

No matter what industry you’re in or the types of products you’re selling, it’s imperative that your website loads quickly.

Primarily, if your website is slow to load, users will become frustrated and leave. However, many new website owners don’t realize how much page speed impacts search rankings.

In 2010, Google began factoring page speed into its ranking algorithm and has continued to add more value to it over the years. This doesn’t only include desktop browsers but also includes mobile browsers.

You can use online tools like GTMetrix and Google Page Speed Insights to test your current website load times.  If your website is fully loaded in  3 to 4 seconds, you’re in pretty good shape. However, if your website takes more than 4 seconds to load fully, you may want to consider spending some page speed optimization.

Logical Website Navigation & Hierarchy

Having a logical, easy-to-navigate website is essential no matter what products you are selling. To start, make sure your navigation is well segmented and covers all of the primary sections of your website.

Depending on the products you’re selling, you can break down the navigation by category and subcategory, by the brand, or even by shopper characteristics like gender.

What’s important is that you consider what your primary products are, who your direct customers are, and how your customers prefer to shop.   Design your navigation to make it most accessible for your customers to find what they’re looking for efficiently, and they’ll keep coming back for repeat purchases.

You should also make sure to link as deep as you can into your site as possible, especially if you have a more extensive catalog. Utilize dropdown menus to include links to 2nd and 3rd-level subcategories.

While linking deeply into your site from your main navigation helps customers get from start to finish more quickly, it also has search ranking benefits. The deeper a page’s crawl depth, or how many clicks away it is from the home page, the less priority a search engine crawler will assign.

Intuitive Search Functionality

Another critical factor for any eCommerce website is that it must have intuitive search capabilities. This means that your search should consider more than just the title or product description when returning results.

Make sure that when your customers submit a search query, things like product specs, product features, product tags, and any other product attributes you might be using are being considered in the results.

If you have an extensive product catalog, you should also include filters with your search results. Let your customers refine their search results by price, brand, product type, and other attributes that can help them find what they’re looking for more easily.

Search autocomplete is another excellent feature to offer your customers when you can. This feature returns the top 10 or so results to a search query before the customer submits the query. This way, if they see what they’re looking for, they can bypass the search results and go right to the product they’re looking for.

2: Consider Customer Purchasing Behaviors

When structuring your website and designing the pages and the functionality, it’s vital to consider your customer’s purchasing behavior.  Think about how your customers shop both on and offline.

Make sure to build plenty of ‘funnels’ into your most popular products and categories. Don’t just include links in your navigation, but build links to your top website sections by creating content blocks on your homepage and other informational pages.

You should also make sure to include cross-sells, up-sells, and related products whenever possible. At the very least, you should display these types of blocks on your product pages, blog posts, and shopping cart page.

By understanding your customer’s purchasing behaviors and then designing the shopping experience for them, you will likely see higher average order values and conversion rates.

3: Provide A Wealth Of Useful Information

Your website should not only sell products, but it should also be an informational resource for potential buyers. According to eCommerce platform 3dCart, 74% of B2B buyers research most of their purchasing options online before deciding on a vendor.

When creating your product content, think about all of the potential questions that your customers have had previously.  Design the content to provide detailed information about the product and answer the questions.

You should also create comprehensive breakdowns of your product specs and list these on your product pages. In many cases, buyers will look at whether your products meet specific specs or requirements.

If applicable, it’s also helpful to include product tutorial videos on your product pages. When potential customers can watch your product being used in real-time, it creates a lot more trust in the product itself.

The more information you can provide to your prospective customers, the greater the likelihood of becoming repeat customers.

4: Enhance Your Sales Team, Don’t Replace Them

In business-to-business commerce, personal relationships will be important. Customers and sales representatives will likely have regular conversations about new products, promotions, pricing, and any number of other topics.

So when building a B2B eCommerce store, your goal should not be to replace your sales team but to build something that will make them more efficient and their lives easier.

Several website features, functions, and enhancements have been conceptualized over the years to help improve a B2B sales operation.

One example of this would be an auto-reordering feature for your website. An auto-reordering feature allows customers to set up an order or multiple orders that will repeat on a specific frequency.

So let’s say a customer has one set of products that they need to be delivered weekly and another set of products that need to be delivered on the first of every month. With an auto-reorder feature, the customer can set up these orders one time and then let the website handle the rest.

Another great B2B eCommerce feature is offering a price match guarantee.  First, you’ll need to develop the general terms and conditions for your price match guarantee and share this with your sales reps.

Next, you’ll need to build a form into your website that allows customers and potential customers to insert product information and upload a picture or advertisement with the price they’d like you to match. The more flexible and easy-to-use that you can make this form. For example, you can offer a search autocomplete field that will let users quickly find the products they’re looking for.

The important thing to remember is that the features and functionality that you build into your website should simplify your sales process and make your sales team more efficient. It’s usually not worth implementing features just for the sake of having the features if they don’t fit into your existing sales model. This will usually end up complicating things and creating unnecessary bottlenecks in your sales process.

5: Create Easy To Manage Pricing Structures

One thing that every buyer will consider before making a purchasing decision is pricing. So when you can give your customers flexible, custom pricing rules, you’re likely to close more new customers.

First and foremost, you should have a variety of customer pricing groups set up.  For example, you can have a group for new customers, one for customers that order more than $10,000 per month, customers that order more than $25,000 per month, and so on.

You could then offer different wholesale pricing discounts to each group to encourage larger orders from your customers. For example, the customers in the ‘$10,000 per month’ group may receive a 10% discount on the list price, and however, the customers in the ‘$25,000 per month’ group may receive a 16.5% discount on the list price. These types of pricing structures incentivize your customers to buy more and consolidate their buying with your business.

Another effective strategy is offering product-specific pricing to your customers. For example, a customer is in the ‘$10,000 per month’ pricing group. They may be happy with the pricing they receive on most of your products, but there’s a specific product that they can buy at a lower price from another vendor.

Instead of moving this customer to a different pricing group or losing their business, you can simply assign that customer a special price for that one product so that you can win their additional business but still maintain your margins.

Have an eCommerce platform that lets you experiment with your pricing: schedule flash sales, product-specific discounts, close-outs, and other promotions. Stay flexible and make sure to A/B test your offers so that you can offer the pricing strategies that are most attractive to your current and potential customers.

6: Use Great Media Assets

All shoppers are visual shoppers, whether it’s a B2B shopper or a B2C shopper. Even if a customer eventually makes their way to your product description and product specs, the first thing that they will look at will be your product photos and videos.

So it goes without saying that without high-quality media assets for your products, your chances for success in the eCommerce space go down considerably.

Make sure that your website features plenty of high-quality photos and videos of your product. It’s important to show what your product looks like and show how it looks when being used. If your product comes in various colors or other variable options, make sure to include media for every choice.

Creating Website Photos

If it fits into your budget, it’s always best to hire a professional photographer to shoot your product photos for you. Shooting and editing photos is an acquired skill, so it’s best to use a professional if you want that truly professional look.

If you don’t have it in the budget to hire a photographer, you can typically buy a decent camera, lenses, some lights, and photo accessories for under $1000. If you’re going to take the DIY route, make sure to get a camera that shoots both high-quality photos and videos.

There are a few photo accessories you’ll want to make sure to pick up. First, you’ll need a lightbox so you can take shots of your products on a flat white background.  Always start by placing your lights wherever the lightbox manufacturer suggests you do. Once you take a few photos, though, it might be worth experimenting with light placement just to see how the picture quality changes.

Another excellent photo accessory to buy is a motorized turntable to place your products on. For one, this will save you a lot of time and effort when it comes to repositioning your products for additional photos.

You can also switch your camera into video mode and create videos that show a full 360-degree view of each one of your products. These videos can be beneficial when selling clothing and clothing accessories.

7: Consider Your Integrations Before Choosing A Platform

Depending on your business and current business strategy, you may already integrate several platforms and services.

For example, even if you don’t already have your eCommerce website, you may be selling your products on Amazon, eBay, and other shopping platforms. Many B2B and B2C retailers also use shipping and fulfillment services like ShipStation, Shippo, and ShipBob to handle their order fulfillment.

When building an eCommerce website, you should first audit all of the different services you currently use or that you plan to use. When choosing the eCommerce platform, you will use for your website, ensure that they have integrations available for each service.

While all eCommerce platforms may not offer native integrations with every service right out of the box, most platforms do have plugins, applications, or extensions that will help to fill in the gaps.

You’ll also want to make sure that the integrations are bi-directional. The last thing that you will want to do is manage your inventory on each of your sales channels individually, so make sure that your eCommerce platform integrates with the channels and sync your inventory across your channels.

One of the reasons that Shopify is such a popular platform for B2B and B2C eCommerce websites is how many 3rd party integrations they offer.

8: Online Customer Service Is Key

Just like in real-world sales, customer service will still be an integral part of your online sales. If you don’t offer fast, efficient customer service options for your customers, chances are they will move their business to a website that does. Even if you don’t have enough staff on hand to handle incoming phone calls, there are still several ways to offer excellent customer service online.

Contact Forms

These days, just about every website will have some sort of contact form on it. Contact forms make it easy for customers and prospective customers to submit questions about products, orders, shipping concerns, and just about anything else they may have an inquiry about.

Instead of just offering a single ‘catch-all’ form for your clients to fill out, though, create different forms for each of the different needs your customers may have.

For example, you can have a specific form for new customer inquiries, a specific form for returns and refunds, a specific form for price match requests, and so on.

Each of these forms can then route to different people on your sales team or your customer service team to improve your team’s overall efficiency.

This also allows you to keep your forms as efficient as possible and collect only the information you need from your customers on each form.  For example, having an “order number” field just adds one additional step to the process for a prospective customer that’s just looking to submit a general inquiry.

Website Chat

Another great feature found on many modern websites is a website chat feature. Website chat applications are often inexpensive, if not free, and allow you to provide your customers with more immediate feedback.

Website chat tools are often simple to install, no matter what eCommerce platform you’re on. So when choosing the chat application, you plan to use, consider the chat features that look best for your needs, not the eCommerce platform your website is hosted on.

When it comes to managing your incoming chat requests, you will usually have the ability to have one or multiple “chat operators” who can accept chats depending on the chat request volume. You will also be able to set an “away message” during the hours that your chat operators are offline.

Resource Library

Another great feature to add to your website to assist with customer service is a resource library. Compile resources like product brochures, PDFs, product tutorials, and anything else your customers may find helpful when researching or purchasing your products.

Once you’ve compiled your materials, put together a logical organization system for your resource library. For example, grouping items under a category like “PDFs” may be too broad. Splitting your PDFs into smaller groupings like product guides, assembly guides, and product brochures may make more sense.

Make sure that you use a flexible system to manage your resource library so that you can add new resource categories and subcategories as they are needed.

Website FAQs

Website FAQs, or frequently asked questions, are another great way to provide your customers with the answers to the questions they may have about your products.

Think about the questions that new customers typically ask in your conversations. Ask your customer service and sales representatives for common questions and requests that they may receive.

Once you have a list of questions, create well-written, informative responses to each question. You should also consider the questions in your list and whether or not any other questions can be included to expand on the answers, you’re providing.

If possible, you should also segment your FAQs into categories to make the answers easier to find. For example, you may want to break down your FAQs into sections for “new customers,” “ordering,” “shipping and returns,” and “general.”

Continue to grow your FAQ library every month. These will not only make an excellent resource for your customers, but they also are great for search engine rankings. Since your existing customers are asking these questions, it’s likely that many other people have these same questions and are typing them right into Google.

By providing clear, informative answers to the exact questions that searchers are looking for, you’ll be giving your website several new opportunities to be found in search engines.

9: Reward Customer Loyalty

In addition to providing excellent customer service, it’s also a good idea to reward customer loyalty. You must build relationships with your customers and show them that they mean more to you than their average order value.

There are many great ways to reward your customers both on and offline.

One of the best ways to show your customers you care is to provide discounts on future orders. Whether these are customer-specific discounts or sitewide discounts that you announce to your email list, these are typically mutually beneficial situations. Your customers are happy because they’re saving money, and you’ll likely end up seeing a spike in sales due to the promotion.

Another great way to reward your customers is to include a free product or two with one of their orders. Regardless of what the product is or how much it costs, everyone loves to get free stuff. By including a complimentary item or an extra unit of the product they’ve ordered, your customers will appreciate the gesture and continue to do business with you.

10: Adapt To Your Customers Needs

The most important thing to remember when building a B2B eCommerce website for B2B is that you should always be ready to adapt to your customer’s needs.

Listen to the pain points and requests that your customers talk to you about. Send occasional user experience surveys to your customers and offer a small discount on their next order to encourage participation.

Collect as much website feedback from your customers as you can and compile everything to a list.  While there will undoubtedly be plenty of “dud” suggestions, there should also be plenty of constructive feedback that you can take action on.

Develop a list of changes and updates that you plan to implement based on the feedback and pay close attention to any repeat suggestions or critiques. Assess these items first, figure out what is required to implement the changes, and prioritize these changes before any others.

Remember – the more user-friendly you can make your website, the more likely you are to increase average order values, improve conversion rates, and attract new users.

Learn More About E-Commerce Growth With Proper Noun

Proper Noun is a content marketing agency specializing in e-commerce growth through various content and SEO strategies. We’ve worked with e-commerce companies of all sizes to grow visibility in the search engines and drive more sales. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help your e-commerce store with an effective e-commerce SEO campaign, contact us today to get started.

The Ultimate Shopify eCommerce SEO Growth Blueprint

If you are one of the countless B2B eCommerce website owners that are looking to grab their piece of a $7.6 trillion online industry, then one thing that is undoubtedly always on your mind is growth.

How can I grow my online sales? How can I grow my customer base? How can I grow my online visibility? How can I grow my eCommerce business?

If these questions sound familiar to you, that’s a great thing! That means you have officially caught the eCommerce bug. So without further ado, here are some tactics, strategies, and platforms that you can use to grow your B2B Shopify store.

Perform A SWOT Analysis

The first thing that you will want to do is perform an up-to-date SWOT analysis for your website. If you’re unfamiliar, SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis will help you to formulate an efficient strategy for the rest of your growth.

When performing your analysis, it’s important to first prepare a list of competitors. When choosing your competitors, it’s good to have a mix of “close” competitors and “reach” competitors.

Website strengths will be the aspects of your website that create the most value for you. For example, you can list bestselling products, specific pages that rank high in the search engines, exclusive or limited products or brands, and any special functionality that is custom to your website.

Website weaknesses will be the aspects of your website that are most detrimental to growth.  For example, a slow-loading website, poor website organization, clunky navigation, and low-quality product photos would all be considered weaknesses.

When considering growth opportunities, look at both your website and your competitor’s websites.  Consider the products and categories that are top performers and identify if there are similar products that you can add to your store.  Implement curated related products, upsells, and cross-sells to improve average order values.

Identify any areas of your competitor’s websites that may be difficult to use or products that they may not carry. One great way to attract new customers is by giving them something they can’t find with their current supplier.  These types of opportunities can also make for great content in digital marketing campaigns.

Finally, carefully analyze both your website and your competitors’ websites for any threats to your bottom line. For instance, find out if your competitors offer considerably lower prices, faster shipping times, or special website features that you do not. Go through existing negative customer feedback and identify any issues that come up frequently. Implement changes to address these issues before attempting further growth.

Once you’ve completed your SWOT analysis, you’re ready to start planning a growth strategy.

Identify & Resolve Website Bottlenecks

Once you’ve finished your initial analysis, the first thing you’ll want to do is take a look through your weaknesses and threats and create a list of bottlenecks to address. In simplest terms, a bottleneck is really anything that slows down a user’s ability to complete a transaction. Here are a few examples of common bottlenecks.

Website Page Speed

One of the most common bottlenecks on eCommerce websites is having slow loading pages. According to all-around digital marketing guru, Neil Patel, a store will lose about 25% of its visitors if its site takes more than 4 seconds to load.

So even if you’re selling a product that no one else carries, or you have rock-bottom prices that can’t be beaten, you’re still compromising your bottom line if your website loads slowly.

Luckily for Shopify store owners, websites built on the Shopify platform will be pretty fast by default. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t a number of ways that you can accidentally slow your load time to a crawl.

Here are a few of the more common things to watch out for when approaching website page speed optimization.

Use Optimized Images

One of the most common reasons that a Shopify website will load slowly is oversized, uncompressed images. Many website owners don’t realize just how important it is to check the image dimensions and image file size before uploading and will use images that can really slow down page speed.

As a rule of thumb, images should typically be no wider than 1800px – 2000px and no larger than 200kb – 300kb. If you only have images in a large format, your best bet is to use a tool like Photoshop or Sketch to resize them.

While many Shopify themes are built to resize the dimensions of specific images, this feature will not actually optimize the images.  One easy solution for image optimization is to use TinyPNG.com before uploading anything to your store. If you’re looking for a more seamless solution you can try a Shopify app like Image Optimizer.

If you’re looking for an even more “high-tech” solution, you can try a cloud-based service called Cloudinary to optimize, resize, and deliver your images. Once you’ve synced your images and videos with Cloudinary, you can deliver optimized versions dependent on the user’s browser, device, and physical location.

Don’t Use Unnecessary Apps

Believe it or not, using too many Shopify applications can also slow your website down. Applications that only run on the backend of your website typically won’t impact your page speed, but take a close look at any applications that are used on the frontend of your site.

These applications will typically load a number of additional CSS and Javascript files in order to deliver the desired functionality. However, each additional file can add a considerable strain on your overall load time.

The first thing you should do is navigate to the Apps tab in your Shopify store and take a look through all of the apps that you have installed. If you see any apps that you’re no longer using or never used in the first place, remove them.

See if any of the apps that you are using are to deliver basic frontend features like sliders, modals, popups, or other user experience components. In most cases, these features can be built right into your theme without the need for excessive CSS and Javascript files.

If you’re unsure of what a specific app does or if you are using it, it’s best to dig a little deeper before deleting it. The last thing you’ll want to do is delete an app that provides an important function for your website.

Load External Scripts With Tag Manager

Just about every Shopify store owner will use at least three third-party services that require placing additional scripts on your website. In many cases, the number may be even higher.

Examples of these third-parties scripts include the Google Analytics tag, the Facebook pixel, HotJar tags, and tags for any other retargeting and user-tracking tools you may be using.

It goes without saying that the vast majority of these third-party tools provide immense value and should be used on your website. However, you can load these scripts in a much more efficient manner when you use Google Tag Manager.

Google Tag Manager is a platform that lets you manage and deploy all of your marketing scripts from one central dashboard. So instead of placing all of your marketing tags on your website individually, you only need to place the one Google Tag Manager script at the bottom of your website.

Simply including your scripts via GTM alone won’t have a major impact on performance, it’s the functions and features within the tool that will help speed up your site.

First, GTM will let you wait until your page has fully loaded before firing the scripts. This powerful feature can have a major impact on your website speed, especially when it comes to loading third-party tracking scripts. In some cases, users can see their page speed scores go from D’s and F’s to A’s and B’s with this one change.

Second, Google Tag Manager can be used to selectively load scripts on specific pages. So if there’s a specific tag that only needs to fire on a product page or a checkout page, you can tell the tag manager to exclude it when it’s not needed.

There are a number of other ways that you can utilize tag managers to improve website performance that you can read about here.

Fixing Page Speed Issues

If you’re concerned about your website speed or just want to get an idea of where your site stands currently, you can use free online tools like GTMetrix or WebPageTest.org.

These tools will take all of the factors mentioned above and then some into consideration, and give your eCommerce site an overall score as well as suggested fixes to improve your score.

While all of the factors are important, there are a few general metrics you should pay more attention to than others. First, take a look at your website’s “fully loaded time”.  Ideally, your website should be fully loaded in no more than 3 to  4 seconds.

Next, look at the website’s time-to-first-byte. If you know how to read the chart, you can look at the Waterfall tab on your GTMetrix report. If you’re having trouble understanding the chart, you can just use a website like ByteCheck to get a more clear answer. Ideally, your time-to-first-byte is between 300ms and 500ms.

The next important factor to consider is your total page size. This number will factor in the HTML files, CSS files, JS files, images, video and any other assets your website may be loading. Ideally, your website should be between 2mb and 3mb.

Finally, look at the overall PageSpeed scores, YSlow scores, and the scores for any other tests you may have run on your website. The scores will definitely give you a good idea of where you stand, but don’t always paint the full picture. It’s best to use them as a relative measurement tool.

Confusing Website Navigation & Organization

Another important thing to analyze for bottlenecks is your website’s organization. If you haven’t already, it helps to create a visual representation of your website hierarchy using basic tools like Google Sheets or Excel.

Go through your top-level categories and make sure that they are the most logical entry points into your full catalog. You should also make sure that your top-level categories cannot be segmented any further than they currently are.

By breaking one top-level category into two or more top-level categories you’re achieving a few things. One, you’re reducing the number of products within the category, reducing the number of pages a potential customer may need to go through to find a product.  Two, you’re reducing the number of subcategories under each top-level category, making it easier to get into the deeper pages.

This also has the added benefit of reducing your product page’s “click depth”, or how many clicks away a page is from the home page. According to Google’s John Mueller, Google’s algorithm considers the click depth when calculating the importance of a page.

You should also make use of tags and filters in your product collections to help customers find what they’re looking for faster. If you have a larger catalog with a wide variety of product tags, you may want to try an app like FIlter Menu by Power Tools to add enhanced filtering options.

Finally, you should also take any customer feedback and employee feedback into consideration while analyzing your website organization.  Has anyone suggested improvements to your website structure? Has anyone complained about any specific difficulties they’ve had while searching for products? This type of feedback can be invaluable when improving a website’s organization.

Make all of your intended changes in your spreadsheet or other visual files before making any changes to your website. It’s important that you roll out your changes all at once or you’ll risk confusing customers and the search engines.

Complicated Checkout Process

One of the most devastating bottlenecks that any website can have is a confusing or complicated checkout process. The last thing that you want to do is make it difficult for a shopper to check out by jumping through unnecessary hoops.

While the native Shopify checkout process is pretty streamlined, sometimes website owners become a bit overzealous on their cart pages and include unnecessary ads and upsells. Avoid any sort of page modifications that will push the “Go To Checkout” button below the first fold.

If you’re looking to further optimize the multi-step Shopify checkout process, there are a number of one-page checkout apps available for integration. These applications will replace your existing checkout process with a more streamlined user experience that reduces the number of fields to fill out and the number of overall clicks.

You should also consider installing PayPal Express Checkout as an option. According to a study by comScore, customers that selected PayPal as their payment method completed their order 88.7% of the time. That number is 60% higher than other digital wallets and 82% higher than all other payment methods.

At the end of the day, your checkout process should be as quick and hassle-free as possible.

Implement Necessary User Experience & User Interface Updates

Now that you’ve successfully removed any bottlenecks that can impact your ability to convert customers, it’s time to focus on improving your website user experience and user interface.

As people become more used to shopping online via desktop and mobile devices, customers have become more particular about their shopping experiences. Users are far less likely to spend their time or money on a website which makes it difficult for them to find what they’re looking for and purchase.

On the converse, when your website does have a great user experience, your customers are likely to tell others about it. When it comes to eCommerce, positive reviews, social proof, and word of mouth are invaluable.

While every website has different features and a different customer base, here are some of the most effective user experience and user interface best practices that you can implement on your Shopify website.

Ajax Add To Cart

When a user adds a product to their shopping cart, many Shopify themes will simply assume their done shopping and take them right to the cart page. For users that planned to continue shopping, browse through related products, or explore product cross-sells, this can be unbelievably frustrating.

To get around this less-than-ideal user experience, you can implement an Ajax-powered add to cart function on your Shopify website. If you’re unfamiliar with Ajax, it is a web development technology that allows the frontend of your website to send and receive data from the server in the background.

In simpler terms, this means that user functions like “add to cart”  that would typically require a page to reload can be done without ever actually leaving the page. So when we talk about an Ajax add to cart feature, this just means that the user will be able to add a product to their cart without ever leaving the product page or reloading the product page.

Shopify does not offer this feature right out of the box, however, it is a fairly simple implementation on most Shopify themes. To learn more about how to add this user experience update to your theme, you can learn more at the official Shopify docs.

Ajax Product Filters

Another great way to improve your eCommerce user experience is to improve the filtering options and navigation options within your product collection pages.

It’s always a safe bet to assume that your customers are short on time and their attention spans are even shorter.  If you expect your customers to spend time going through multiple collection pages to search for the product they’re looking for, your conversion rates will likely suffer.

Shopify themes will typically include category and tag filtering options on their collection pages, but since a page reload is required after each filter is applied, it can really slow down a customer’s shopping experience.

Similarly to the add to cart function, Ajax can also be utilized to speed up your collection filtering and navigation. Instead of waiting for the page to reload every time a new filter is applied, the collection will instantly update the results to only display the products that match the selected filters without requiring a page refresh.

While a custom Ajax filtering implementation may be a bit too complex for the average Shopify store owner, there are a number of Shopify apps that can help implement this feature in just a few clicks.

Some of the more popular apps are Smart Product Filter, Product Filter & Search, and Power Tools Filter Menu.  These apps will allow you to customize which tags you will use as filters, the order of your filters, and even let you implement smart search features into your filters.

Create Product Pages That Convert

At the end of the day, the most important pages on any eCommerce website are going to be the product pages. A product page should showcase your products, provide information and resources, and most importantly, it should encourage your customers to purchase your products.

Use Great Product Photos

The most important aspect of any product page is going to be the product photos. You could have the most perfectly written, informative product description in the world, but if your product photos are of low quality, most customers probably won’t even read it.

People are visual shoppers first and foremost, so it’s important that your product photos do a great job of selling your products.  Make sure that your images are well lit, edited, consistent, and are in a high resolution.  Simply taking a few quick snaps with your iPhone and calling it a day will not help you stand out from the competition.

Whenever possible, include both pictures of your products on display and pictures of your products being used. Customers are more likely to purchase a product when they can visualize themselves using it.

If you sell products that are segmented by variants like color, shape, or material you should include photos for each of the different variants.  The more transparent you can be through your product photos, the more trust that a customer will have when making a purchasing decision.

Provide Detailed Product Information

Your product descriptions should be much more than a couple of sentences that explain what the customer can see for themselves in the photos. Product descriptions should exist to educate your customers, answer their questions, and communicate why your product is valuable.

You should also break up your product information into smaller, more digestible content sections instead of packing all of the details into one long wall of text. Content sections can include product features, product specs, compatible products, and even product-specific customer testimonials.

It’s also good to build navigational links into your product pages to help customers and search engine crawlers find these sections of your product pages more easily.

While the standard Shopify admin panel only provides a single product description text area, you can create additional text inputs for your products using what Shopify calls metafields.

Metafields are perfect for storing your ‘enhanced product information’, such as product features, part numbers, and product specs. They can also be used by your various apps and sales channels for backend and internal purposes.

Include Cross-Sells & Curated Related Products

Another important set of features that should be included on every eCommerce product page is cross-selling and curated related products.  In simplest terms, these two tactics are used to encourage customers to purchase more items.

While the two selling tactics are very similar, there are some basic differences that you should understand before implementing them.

Cross-selling is used to bring attention to products that work in conjunction or supplement the product that they are currently looking at. For example, if the product the customer is looking at is an iPhone, cross-sell products may include headphones, AirPods, iPhone cases, screen protectors, and other accessories.

On the other hand, related products are ones that offer an alternative to the product the customer is looking at. For example, the related products for our iPhone maybe a Samsung Galaxy, an Android, or a standalone MP3 player.

By including both of these product collections within your product page you’re increasing the likelihood that a customer will find something that they’re interested in purchasing and improving your chances of increasing your average order value.

Focus On Mobile Usability

No matter what type of products you’re selling, it should come as no surprise that your eCommerce website needs to be optimized for mobile devices. Shoppers don’t only do their purchasing online – 80% of smartphone users have ordered at least one thing online using their device in the last 6 months.

When it comes to mobile eCommerce though, simply resizing and stacking your page elements usually won’t cut it. It’s important to think about ways to make the shopping experience easier for your customers.

This means doing things like reducing the amount of scrolling required, the number of pages that need to be navigated through to find a product, and making sure your site isn’t loading too many heavy media assets.

Floating Header

Make sure that the header area of your website stays sticky to the top of your screen and floats at the top as the user scrolls.  It’s important to make sure that your website navigation is always accessible, no matter where a user is on the page.

Replace Grids With Sliders

Many Shopify websites have grids of products on their homepage layouts. These grids might be used for featured products, new products, or even sale items. Don’t just turn the products into a stack of products that takes a lifetime to scroll through. Convert your product grid into a slider that users can swipe through horizontally.

Floating Add To Cart Button

Similarly to a floating header, it’s always a good idea to fix the add to cart button and a quantity input to the bottom of the user’s screen.  This way, as they scroll down to read your product description, product specs, or product reviews they’ll be able to add to the cart at any point.

Exclude Heavier Assets

While mobile users that are actively connected to wi-fi can typically load a website just as quickly as a desktop user can, that may not always be the case for users not connected to wi-fi. When optimizing your website for mobile users, excluding heavier assets like videos, gifs, and images can help reduce load times and improve the overall user experience.

While you can’t conditionally load assets using liquid in Shopify, you can use Javascript to lazy load items conditionally. For example, instead of including a video file directly into your liquid template, you can use Javascript to first identify the user agent. Then, if that user is on a desktop machine, insert the video into the template using Javascript. If the user is on a mobile or tablet device, you can simply hide the section, or include an image if appropriate.

Invest In Digital Marketing

Once you’ve spent some time refining your website user experience, it’s time to get some more users! Now unlike brick and mortar stores, no one is going to simply stumble past your website and decide to take a look at what you have. You’ll need to position it in front of them.

So what’s the most effective way to get new people on your site? We suggest taking a multi-faceted approach to your digital marketing campaigns. Instead of dedicating your full budget to just one advertising channel, you might want to try a strategy using a  combination of the channels below.

Facebook Audience Network

The Facebook Audience Network is one of the most popular and powerful channels that you can use to promote your brand or business. This network will deliver your ad to Facebook users, Instagram users, Application users, and a wide range of website users.

The Facebook Audience Network is a great way to build brand visibility and educate new users. You can use engaging images and videos to grab users’ attention, and then introduce your offer using long-form text and headlines. In many ways, you can think of it as a similar exposure model to that of a television commercial.

There are a number of advertising options that you can take advantage of when you use Facebook. For example, you can run engagement campaigns to build audiences, conversion campaigns to drive sales, lookalike campaigns to target users who are similar to your existing customers, and even catalog campaigns to position your products right in front of your audiences.

On the Facebook Audience Network, you use interests and demographics to target users. So instead of targeting people who have searched for a term like ‘automotive supplies’, you would target your ads at ‘people who own auto parts stores’.

While cost-per-click is an important metric to track when running a Facebook Ads campaign, it’s not actually the way you’ll be billed. Facebook charges on a CPM, or cost per 1000 impression, basis.  Simply put, this means you’re not paying when the user clicks, you’re paying every time a user simply sees your ad.

If you are able to clearly define your audience and have a great product offering to position in front of them, advertising on the Facebook Audience Network can be a very effective way to build visibility and scale your sales.

Google AdWords

Google AdWords is another great way to bring highly qualified traffic to your website.  While similar to the Facebook Audience Network in that you are going to be paying money to send new users to your website, the similarities pretty much end there.

For one, with Google Adwords, you are not targeting interests, you are targeting the search queries that users are submitting. So if you wanted to make sure that any users who searched the term “Automotive parts suppliers” on Google saw your ad, AdWords is the way to do it.

For those who are unfamiliar, AdWords ads are the sponsored search results that appear above the organic results in the Google rankings.  By strategically picking the keywords you target, you’ll be able to place your website at the top of the search results above your competitors.

For many businesses, AdWords presents a really great opportunity to quickly scale a business. This is because, unlike on Facebook, you’re able to place your ad in front of the user at the exact moment they’re considering purchasing.

Google AdWords is billed on a cost-per-click basis. This means that you are only spending money when someone clicks on your ad. This can end up being extremely profitable or extremely costly, it all depends on how well you target your keywords and the quality of the offer you’re presenting to the customers.

When you select the keywords you’ll be targeting, you also set your bid amount for that keyword. Then, when a user submits a query containing your keywords, your bid will go up against the bids of all of the other advertisers who want to show up for that keyword. Generally, the order of the advertisements will depend on who has the highest bid.

AdWords can also be a great way to drive new customer signups. Instead of sending users to specific product pages or category pages, you can drive them to sales pages with registration forms.

No matter what it is you sell or the industry you’re in, there is almost certainly a way that you can use Google AdWords to grow your B2B eCommerce business.

SEO

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, can be an extremely profitable way to drive traffic if done properly. Performing search engine optimization involves configuring your website in a way so that search engines can understand your content and feel confident sending users to your website.

According to data released by Forrester, 71% of US shoppers will use a search engine to find what they’re looking for online.  Considering the volume of eCommerce searches that happens every day, you really can’t afford to not rank well.

Unlike paid advertising channels, it doesn’t cost you anything to rank in search engines. So once you’ve secured a top result for your target keywords, you’ll keep seeing that return month-over-month at no additional cost.

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization, also known as technical SEO, has to do with the configuration of your website. This includes a variety of factors including metadata, text headlines, text density, text length, crawl depth, and much more.

When performing on-page optimization for a Shopify store, there are a few things main to keep in mind.

Make sure to write descriptive, but succinct page titles. You should aim for the title to be about 60 characters if possible. It’s also good to include the focus keyword in the title if it’s a page you’re optimizing for a specific term.

When it comes to your meta descriptions, it’s a good idea to limit the length to about 155 characters. These should also be descriptive, unique, and should include a focus keyword somewhere in the text.

There’s quite a bit more that goes into on-page optimization than we can write in this article, but here’s a pretty comprehensive run down that will help. We’ve also linked to an eCommerce SEO cheat sheet below.

Content Creation

One of the best ways to attract new customers to your website is by creating engaging content for them to consume.  Content includes things like blog articles, videos, infographics, and even interactive tools.

When creating content for your website, it’s important to first consider who your ideal audience is and what types of things they may be interested in related to your products. For example, if you sell jewelry you may want to create articles and videos that discuss fashion trends, styling guides, and similar topics.

Each piece of appealing content that you create is another opportunity for a member of your target audience to land on your website.  You should aim to create at least 1 new piece of content each week, but the more you can crank out, the better.

To maximize your chances of being discovered in the search engines, do some keyword research before creating your content. There are free tools available online like searchvolume.io and keywordtool.io that will help you find the search terms with the lowest competition and highest search volume.

Off-Page Optimization

The final piece of the SEO puzzle is off-page optimization. Off-page optimization involves creating visibility for your brand on websites, social media channels, and other places around the internet. The more external websites that mention your website, the more authority you are establishing for your website.

There are a number of ways to improve your off-page optimization. For one, build as many social profiles for your brand as you can. Social profiles are almost always free to create and typically have high domain authority.

It’s also a good idea to try and identify any directories, forums, or marketplaces that are related to the products that you sell. By creating profiles, engaging in discussions, and answering questions on these types of websites, you’re further establishing topical authority for your website.

Finally, you can also try reaching out to bloggers, magazine writers, and journalists with ideas for stories. These types of brand mentions can be very valuable for your SEO efforts, especially when there’s a backlink involved.

It’s best to have a unique topic idea in mind or a completed article when you reach out to writers. The more informative and engaging the article is, the better your chances are of receiving more brand mentions.

Need some help with your eCommerce SEO strategy? We put together a little eCommerce SEO cheat sheet for you that you can download here.

Retargeting

The last digital marketing strategy we’ll cover in this article is called retargeting. Retargeting, also known as remarketing, allows you to deliver ads directly to people who have recently been on your website and did not make a purchase.

Depending on the platform you’re using to retarget your customers, there will be a wide variety of ad options available to you. For example, if you’re using the Facebook Audience network, you can retarget your customers with ads featuring the very products they were looking at.

According to a recent study, customers that receive your retargeting ads are 70% more likely to convert than those that don’t.  Sometimes it takes a little reinforcement or an added incentive like a coupon code to convince a customer to make their first purchase on your website.  Retargeting is a great way to help those shoppers that are on the fence finalize their purchase.

There are a number of places that eCommerce store owners will typically retarget their customers.  The most popular places are typically Facebook and Instagram as well as website networks that encompass thousands of websites. There are also networks (including the Facebook Audience Network) that will allow you to deliver your ads to application users.

Regardless of what types of products you’re selling, retargeting is a very effective way to lift your conversion rates, generate more revenue, and keep your customer base engaged.

 

Generate Social Proof & Authority For Your Brand

In today’s eCommerce marketplace, there are few things more important than having “social proof” for your products and your brand.

So what exactly is social proof? It’s when customers publish positive reviews, social media comments, or other positive feedback about your brand online that then influence other people to purchase.

So just how important is social proof? Well, according to PowerReview, more than 70% of online shoppers read product reviews prior to making a purchase.  So if you’re planning on running a profitable eCommerce store, positive social proof is a “must-have” ingredient for success.

Social Media Engagement

One excellent form of social proof is social engagement. This includes things like comments, likes, and shares on popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram.  It also helps when you get engagement like retweets on Twitter, and bulletin board pins on Pinterest.

As you acquire more positive social media engagement, keep track of any especially powerful feedback.  This type of feedback can make for great advertising, especially if it’s coming from an influential person.

It’s best not to try and cheat the system with fake reviews and comments though. If you get caught by the social media channel, you may receive a suspension or a ban on your account. Online shoppers are also usually able to spot fake comments, so it’s best to just avoid fake engagement altogether.

Customer Reviews

In addition to social engagement, it’s also a great idea to collect reviews both on and off your website.

You can use tools like YotPo and TargetBay to collect reviews from your customers on your website. These tools allow you to display website reviews, product-specific reviews, and even embed review forms to collect more reviews.

These tools also have automated features that make collecting reviews much easier. For example, you can create an automation that will follow up with customers 5 days after they purchase. It can also help to include a small discount on their next order in exchange for a review.

In addition to collecting reviews on your website, it’s also great to collect reviews on third-party websites for added authenticity.  The more reviews that you can acquire on platforms like Amazon, TrustPilot, Yelp, and Google My Business the better.

Influencer Marketing

If you are marketing your own line of products you can try influencer marketing. This is when you have content creators with larger followings promote your brand within a post.

Typically, you will need to send the influencer free products in exchange for the review. Depending on the size of their audience, you may also need to pay an advertising fee.

When determining if this is the right approach for you, you can use the findings in this study. When you consider that the average conversion rate for influencer marketing is about 2.55% and the average click-through rate is about 2.0%, you can calculate a potential ROI.

So if the content creator receives about 10,000 views on average when they create new content, you can expect that about 2000 of those people will click through to your offer. If those 2000 people convert at 2.55%, that would mean 51 sales. If they receive 1,000,000 views on average when they release a new video, you would expect to see 510 sales.

Now it’s just a matter of calculating how much profit you would expect to see from any given post based on an influencer’s metrics, and weighing that against the cost of running the post.

Build An Email List & Utilize It

Whether you end up using one, or a combination of any of the strategies and tactics outlined above, one thing that you should always be focused on is growing your email list.

No matter how you’re bringing in new users, make sure to place plenty of opportunities for your website visitors to opt-in to your email list throughout your website. For example, you can offer free resources, small discounts, product giveaways, and other incentives in exchange for your visitors’ email addresses.

The more creative you can be with the incentive or the offer, the more likely you are to gain new email subscribers. No matter what you do to

You should also be giving customers that go through your checkout process the opportunity to opt-in to your email list. Shopify will give you the opportunity to connect any number of email marketing tools like MailChimp to your store to make the process easy.

According to CampaignMonitor, email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. What’s more, 72% of people prefer to receive ads via email, compared to 17% who would rather see their ads on social media.

From a conversion-focused standpoint, email marketing is also the preferred medium. When it comes to purchases made as a result of seeing an ad, email marketing has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social media, direct mail, and others.

So clearly you can see how valuable building a good email list is, but building your email list is only half the battle. It’s also important that you utilize your list regularly.

Automated Email Campaigns

If you’re running any sort of digital marketing strategy to grow an email list, then you should really be taking advantage of email campaigns.  Here’s a general example for those who are unfamiliar with the concept.

To start, let’s say you’re offering your website visitors a coupon code in exchange for an email address. In this automated email campaign, the first email that the user will receive is the email with their coupon code. This email will typically send anywhere from 1 to 5 minutes after the initial subscription event.

The next email in your campaign can then trigger a few days later.  You may want to use this email to introduce a less well-known product or product line or share a piece of engaging article or video content.  Your goal should be to reengage subscribers and keep your brand at the top of their minds.

From there, you can continue sending additional emails as is appropriate. Depending on the types of products you sell, how large your catalog is, the purchasing patterns of your typical customers, and how often you run promotions you may continue to send automated emails once a week, once a month, or even every day.

In general, make sure that the emails you’re sending are fresh and that you’re not spamming your subscribers.  Sending out the same email blast over and over again is a great way to lose subscribers and kill the profitability of your email marketing campaigns.

Cart Abandonment Emails

Similar to retargeting advertising, you can also retarget your website visitors with emails. These emails are called cart abandonment emails.

When you connect your Shopify store with email marketing platforms like MailChimp, setting up cart abandonment emails is easy.

1. On your MailChimp dashboard, click the button “Automate” in the drop-down menu. Then click on Email.
2. Next, click on the eCommerce tab.
3. Click turn on an abandoned cart email.
4. Select your Shopify store and click Begin.
5. Now on the email checklist page, click Edit Recipients to set the delay.
6. In the drop-down menu for hours, choose the delay you want.
7. Click Save.

Now you’ll need to set up the design of your abandoned cart emails.

1. Click Design Email in your email setup checklist,
2. First, you need to select a template. MailChimp offers a number of easy setup options.
3. Setup the template, preview your campaign, and make sure everything works as expected.
4. Save the email and go back to the campaign checklist.
5. Now you can activate the abandoned cart email and click “Start Sending”.

Now, whenever a customer leaves an item or items in their cart, they will automatically receive your abandoned cart email based on the delay you set.

Content Marketing Emails

Another type of email that you may consider sending your customers is content marketing emails. In these emails, your primary focus is to share engaging content that’s related to your products with your customers.

For example, if you sell skateboard shoes and skateboard clothing, you may want to send weekly emails with cool new skateboard videos. If you sell auto parts, you could take a similar approach using articles and videos focused on racing or car repair.

While you can include small banners or ads for your products within these emails, it’s typically best to keep them as product-free as possible. The goal with these emails is ongoing positive customer engagement. By keeping the content high on quality and low on ‘sales pitch’, your customers will begin to look forward to your email blasts, not look over them.

Collect Customer Feedback

As your customer base continues to grow, it’s important that you listen to your customer feedback. As customers bring new strengths and weaknesses to your attention, make sure to pay attention. You never know when you will receive a tip for a great organizational improvement or user experience improvement.

Schedule A Call To Discuss Our Content Marketing E-Commerce Growth Strategies

If you are a Shopify website owner looking to grow an e-commerce store, Proper Noun can help you develop and execute a winning content marketing and technical SEO strategy. We’ve worked with countless e-commerce businesses to drive tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of targeted, engaged visitors month-over-month. Click here to schedule a consultation today.

 

8 Creative Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses (For Every Budget!)

What if you had the greatest idea in the world but no one ever heard of it?

You’re proud of your small business and know-how wonderful your products and services are. However, it takes good marketing to let the world know about everything you have to offer.

To truly stand out, you’re going to need some creative marketing ideas. Here are just a few of our favorites!

1. Kings and Queens of Content

If you’re reading this, you want ideas to advertise your business. However, customers don’t want “advertising”: they want content.

The key to bringing new visitors to your site and creating returning visitors is providing original content. And the best content offers actionable value to the reader.

Let’s say you sell furniture. Original articles about how to decorate a living room or safely move furniture into the house are invaluable for your readers.

Of course, there is subtle marketing magic going on with this content. By providing instructions on how to best use your products, you ensure that more people will feel empowered to buy those products.

2. Curating Content

As we’ve noted, customers want original content. In addition to creating your own, you should try becoming an online content curator.

The idea is simple. You create articles that collect links to other content that your customers might find valuable.

Customers’ love of curation is why we have so many “Top 10” articles and videos online. Simply put, people have the desire to experience awesome content but don’t often have the time to find it on their own.

Try to curate content that has few (or no) other curators. In this way, you can corner this particular market while building loyalty for your small business.

3. Google My Business

National and even international marketing are very important to your business. However, you will get the most results from robust local marketing.

One of the best local marketing tools is Google My Business. And here’s the best news: it’s completely free!

This online tool helps make your business more visible when people are searching. Your business will now appear on Google Maps and its info will be on both the Knowledge Panel and Local Panel of a Google Search.

To get started, all you must do is fill out your Google profile. Be sure to answer each section as thoroughly as possible!

4. Calling to Action

Once you’ve crafted awesome online content for your small business, your task isn’t over. Your next step is to make sure each piece of content has a solid call to action.

You may be able to win customer loyalty and attention with helpful content. But this doesn’t help you until you steer them towards a relevant link on your website.

If you’ve written a guide to modern decorating, make it end with a link to your latest accessories. If done well, such a CTA is seamless: just as your content helped inform the customer, your link provides a solution they now know they need.

5. Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of our favorite ways of marketing via content. And it’s a marketing tool that works in two different ways.

When you write for other high-authority sites, it helps to build your brand. Furthermore, it makes your own business look high-quality because your content is appearing alongside the content of an established business leader.

You should also invite other thought leaders to write online content for your site. This builds up your authority while also inviting fans of the visiting writer to experience your website for the very first time.

6. Video Marketing

Once upon a time, video marketing seemed like a fad. Now, video is very clearly here to stay.

Your customers are accustomed to streaming video content whenever they want and wherever they are. Because of this, they now expect video to be a common part of other online experiences such as social media.

It’s true that video marketing takes more time and money than other forms of marketing. Fortunately, you can get a lot of mileage out of a single video.

For example, a well-shot video can be used as a commercial for local advertising. And it can be used to advertise your business via Youtube.

And you can cross-promote that video as well. Place it at the top of a relevant blog to add value, or post it on social media and watch it go viral!

7. Research the Trends

Does your small business have its fingers on the pulse? The best way to do this is to stay on top of both national and local trends.

For example, Google Trends lets you see the search frequency of specific terms and terms related to your query. This lets you analyze whether something is still hot and trending or if consumers have moved on to the next thing.

Be sure to leverage your research into local SEO. This helps you attract local customers who are most likely to become part of your sales funnel.

Finally, don’t forget to build local citations to your engaging content. These kinds of highly-specific citations help establish your authority to a local audience. And it further separates your original content from any similar (but more generic) content customers may find online.

8. Social Media Marketing

Our final creative marketing idea is one you can do right from the coach: social media marketing!

As we mentioned before, social media is a free and easy way to cross-promote your other content. You can share all of those videos and articles you have created with potential fans online.

Social media also creates a sense of community. Your biggest fans will share your posts and expand your brand.

Finally, social media lets people quickly message you. This kind of easy accessibility helps win customers over.

Grow Your Small Business With These Creative Marketing Ideas

Now you know some creative marketing ideas. However, do you know who can bring it all together for you?

We are a company specializing in SEO, web design, branding, and more. To see how we can grow your small business, just contact us today!

Creating Articles Engineered For SEO With TF*IDF

When it comes to generating new organic traffic for your website, one of the best tactics you can use is article writing. But what most people don’t know is that there is actually a formula that can be used to better “engineer” these articles for discovery in search engines.

So what is this “secret formula”? It’s called TF*IDF, and it’s not really a secret.

So What Is TF*IDF?

If you’re unfamiliar with TF*IDF, this stands for Term Frequency With Inverse Document Frequency. While TF-IDF is a complex concept, backed by an even more concept algorithm, in short, it has to do with term usage and keyword density across a selection of documents.

The TF*IDF formula calculates a weight that can then be used in information retrieval and text mining. The weight is the product of the two separate statistics – term frequency and inverse document frequency. The weight can be used as a way to statistically measure how important a word is within a collection of documents.

How important a word is will increase proportionally to the number of times it is included in a document. It is also offset by the frequency of the word throughout the collection of documents.

As a result, all sorts of variations of the TF*IDF scheme are used by search engines to rank the relevance of a document, or web page, for a specific search query.

What Isn’t TF*IDF?

TF*IDF is not a magic bullet that will make your content rank overnight. While it will very likely improve your standings in the search engines, there are myriad factors that go into creating a top 5 article. Running a short, poorly written article through a TF*IDF scan and making some content changes will not likely yield the results you are looking for.

While TF*IDF is a big part of our SEO process, we do not rely on TF*IDF based content implementation alone.  It’s still important to have an SEO campaign strategy with diversity.

A Basic TF*IDF Scan Example

For this example, let’s say our focus keyword is “Squarespace vs WordPress”.  You can reference the image below as a visual aid.

A TF*IDF scan would analyze your website along with several competitor websites. The scan analyzes the term usage frequency for your primary keyword, as well as the frequency of the contextually related keywords.

The tool would then generate a report that shows the frequency of all of the terms on your website in comparison to your competitors. It also provides suggestions on how to improve the content if you are over-optimized or under-optimized.

Let’s take a look at how to engineer an article using TF*IDF.

Keyword Research

The first step in creating your SEO article is going to be to do some keyword research. Start with a general topic or focus and then use a keyword suggestion tool to find variations for your starting keyword. Once you have a good list of keyword options, run all of them through a keyword volume checker.

Look at the keyword search volumes, keyword competition, and PPC value for the keywords. I like to find the keyword that is the best combination of the highest search volume, lowest competition, and the highest PPC value.

Once you’ve identified your focus keyword, you should also choose 3-5 contextually related keywords. You can use tools like SEMRush to find contextually related keywords or use a free online tool to generate a list.

If you don’t have access to any of these SEO tools, you can search Google for free SEO tools to use or check https://smallseotools.com.  SmallSEOTools.com offers free access to many of the tools you’ll need for free.

Research the Competition

Before getting started on your article, you should get an idea for what your competition is doing.

Open up Google in incognito mode and type your focus keyword into the search bar.  Pick out the top 5-7 websites that are similar to yours and you have a chance of competing with.

 

For example, if you are trying to rank an article, choose search results that are also articles as your competition. Don’t choose product pages from national retail websites, Wikipedia pages, or pages that are providing an entirely different kind of information in general.

Get baseline metrics for each of these websites.  These metrics should include:

• Word count
• Focus keyword density
• Number of internal links
• Number of bolded words
• Number of images
• Video Usage
• Website page speed
• General content analysis

Your goal should be to meet or improve on each of the items above in comparison to your competitor sites. For example, if your competitor’s pages have 1500 words on average, then your article should have 2000 words. If your competitor’s include 3 images, you should include at least 3 images.

Plan Your Content

Now that you have an understanding of how much content you’ll need to write, it’s always a good idea to plan out your content.

Start by identifying your article sections. By breaking your article into sections, it makes it easier for readers to digest and easier for you to write. I like to use my contextually related keywords and topical ideas as section headings when possible.

If you’re writing about something that requires research, now is when you should begin to compile your source materials. Make sure to use reputable sources and if you’re ever unsure on the quality of the resource, make sure to verify it. Also, make sure to save the links to your resources so that you can cite websites as needed.

Writing Your Content

The first thing you are going to want to focus on is your article length. Many sources out there will tell you that you only need to write a 500-word article and call it a day. It’s my thought that you should write at least 1000 words if you want to compete. However, what is most important is what the competition is doing. You should always aim to write more than them.

The content shouldn’t only be extensive, it should also be informative. Make sure that your article breaks down either one complex question or multiple less complex questions and gives well-explained answers to them.

Providing high quality, well-written information is an excellent way for Google to begin to view your website as an authority.

Whenever possible, you should include procedures or numbered lists. These work great to help better illustrate a point to a potential reader. Google also loves to elevate procedural answers to the top of the search results.

Many times Google will also show the exact procedures in the “Featured Snippet” area above all of the results.

Make sure to include images and videos when you can to help better explain your topic. Don’t forget to include alt tags on your images.

Once you’ve finished writing your first draft you can now begin editing your article.

Editing Your Content

Now that you’ve finished your first draft of your article, it’s time to start editing. The first things that you should focus on are grammar and spelling.

While Microsoft Word or Mac Pages will help with these things, I prefer Grammarly. Grammarly has a free version that does an excellent job of correcting spelling, grammar, overuse of words and more.

Once you’ve finished with the grammar and spelling, now you can focus on the text readability. Readability is pretty much just what it sounds like – how easy or difficult it is to read your article.

To test your article readability you can use this tool: https://www.seoreviewtools.com/readability-checker/

A few things you can focus on to improve your readability scores are:

• Break up paragraphs into 2-3 sentences
• Try to keep sentences to 20-30 words
• Avoid complex punctuation when possible
• Use direct language
• Don’t use passive voice

You should also read through your article content out loud one time if you are comfortable doing so. Reading the article out loud helps to identify any awkward phrasing.

Once you’ve edited for readability and fixed any awkward phrasing, it’s always good to run the content back through  Grammarly one more time.

Engineer Your Content with TF-IDF

Now that you’ve finished your content edits, it’s time to engineer it for search engine performance with TF*IDF.  As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, TF*IDF stands for “term frequency * inverse document frequency”.

The first thing you will need to do is find a TF*IDF tool. For a free option, I like the Link Assistant Website Auditor tool, but you can use whichever one you like best.

Run your content through a TF-IDF scan and give it a couple of minutes to run. The tool will compare the content on your page to the content of the top 10 competitors for your same focus keyword.

Once your tool finishes crawling the content, it should output a long list of 2-word, 3-word and 4-word keyword phrases. These keywords are all keywords that have been used in some frequency across the websites you’ve identified as competitor websites.

The report will show you the lowest frequency, the highest frequency, the average frequency, and your frequency for a keyword. This makes it easy to see if you are under-optimized, over-optimized, or right on the money for a given keyword.

Now go through your article and begin implementing the suggested changes. You may need to edit words, add new words in, you can even write new sentences to include new words if you need to. Just make sure to keep things natural and organic.

Different tools will give you different suggestions on how to modify your content. If you’re planning to use more than one tool for this SEO process it’s best to use them one at a time, not all tools at the same time.

For example, the Website Auditor TF*IDF tool will give you a ton of information on what terms to include and how often to use them. It does not give any insight into how to use the terms or where to use the terms though. I’ll usually use this first.

A tool like PageOptimizerPro will then tell you how to optimize the content within specific page elements. For example, it may tell you to increase the use of your focus keyword within your H2 element 4 times and to reduce the use in your paragraph tags 3 times.

It gives you insight into how best to organize and code your content. I use this tool last.

Once you’ve gone through and edited your article for TF*IDF changes, go back and give it one more read just to make sure that everything still reads well. This is especially important for longer articles.

Optimizing Your Meta Data

Now that you’ve finished up the content you’re almost ready to publish. But first, you’ll want to optimize your article metadata.

Start by optimizing your article’s page title. Make sure to include the focus keyword, preferably as the first words in the title. It’s also good to include your brand name or website name, for example [KEYWORD] [ ANY OTHER TEXT ] – [BRAND NAME]. Your title should be about 60-70 characters max.

Now write an optimized meta description for your article. Make sure to include your focus keyword in an organic sentence that explains the idea of the article. The meta description should be about 160 characters in length. Make sure not to stuff keywords or over-optimize the meta description.

In addition to your title and meta description, you should also include this same information in your Facebook OG Title, OG Description, Twitter cards, and any other social tags you have placed on your website.

Make sure that you only set a single H1 element within your article. In most cases, it will just be the article title used within the H1 tag. This tag should also include your focus keyword while being different from your meta title. If you’ve included your brand name or website name in the meta title, you can just exclude that from the H1 tag.

Post & Syndicate Your Content

Now that you’ve optimized your metadata and created your article, you can post it on your website or blog.

Once the article is live, you can now syndicate it using social media and other websites and online tools. Start by sharing the post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and any other social media channels you may use.

You can also share the article on content aggregators such as Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Digg. These sites can also be a great way to bring a ton of attention to your content.

Link shorteners like Bit.ly are also a great way to get more social signals for your article once it goes live. Search out 4-5 other URL shortener services that work for you and post your article to these as well.

You can also utilize Zapier to syndicate content as soon as it’s published. The Zapier free plan can create up to 5 automatic syndications and a paid plan will let you setup up to 20.

There are a number of other great places to syndicate content and services to help with this, but that’s more a topic for another post.

Tips

• SEMRush is an excellent tool for keyword research, competitor research and so much more. Their content and SEO writing tool will also help with your TF*IDF research.
• LinkAssistant Website Auditor has a great TF-IDF tool
• Zapier can help with your post syndication after it is published

Warnings

• Do not over-optimize your page or “stuff” keywords. Make sure to check your keyword density once complete. This should be about 2% – 3%.
• Don’t just copy and paste from other websites. Duplicate content will hurt you.

Conclusion

Achieving high rankings in Google is no easy task. It will take a lot of research and hard work. However, it is not impossible!

Will using TF*IDF guarantee you a top 10 ranking? Of course not! But in combination with well-written, informative content it can help get you there.

Do you understand the value in creating highly optimized, engaging articles for your blog but just don’t have the time to write them on your own? Why not hire us to write them for you?

Our team is experienced in researching and writing articles for just about any industry.  We’re so confident, we’ll write your first article for free. Just send us an email to schedule a strategy session so we can learn a bit about your website and your business and we’ll have an article ready for you in about a week.

Generate A Google Review Link In 2 Easy Steps

I’m sure it comes as no surprise that Google Reviews are an important factor when it comes to your online success. Google Reviews not only give your business authority and trustworthiness, but they are also a ranking factor in local search results.

It’s not always easy to ask your clients or customers to review your business, so when you are able to, it’s always a good idea to make the process as easy as possible for them. Sending clients a link that will bring them directly to the review form is obviously the best bet, but unfortunately, Google doesn’t make this an easy thing to do.

How To Generate A Google Review Link

Generating a Google Review link is actually pretty easy to do, you’ll just need to follow 2 steps.

1. First, you’ll need to find your “Place ID”. Start by going to the Google Place ID Finder and searching for your business name. Once you find your business, click the name and verify the location on the map. The map card that points to your location will include the Place ID. Copy the ID.
2. Now just paste your Place ID into the link below replacing the placeholder with your ID.
   https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid={PLACE ID HERE}

Using our business as an example, the final URL would look something like this: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=ChIJ8wdEEj2r2YgR-BS9gUBdK_k

Now, just paste the link into a browser to test it. When the page loads, a form should pop up asking you to review your business.

Once you’ve confirmed your Google Review link is working, you can now send it to your clients and customers to review your business.