@annstanley

Creating an engaging and

user friendly website that

converts, and is found in

search engines

by

Ann Stanley

May 2012

@annstanley

@annstanley

Introduction

@annstanley

How to double your sales?

• Multi-channel management:

– Sell through other channels eg Amazon, eBay, Play.com etc.

• Increase traffic to your website:

– Buy more traffic eg PPC or ad serving

– Improve your search traffic through SEO, Google Merchant Centre,

Google Places

– Use other marketing techniques eg Affiliate marketing

– Make sure your site is mobile friendly to take advantage of 20-30% users

using mobile

@annstanley

How to double your sales • Improve your conversion rate:

– Reduce your bounce rate

– Give buyers the confidence to buy from you

– Provide the information to make the buying decision easy – especially if it is endorsed by other customers or social connections

– Personalise the user experience so your site is more relevant

– Improve the buying process so you reduce shopping cart abandonment

• Increase sales from each customer:

– Increase average order value

– Encourage customers to buy again or more often (email, loyalty, promotions, social media)

– Build a community of advocates (sharing, social and incentives)

@annstanley

Ecommerce landscape

Sales from Search marketing

(PPC, SEO, Merchant Centre)

On-site sales

from other sources

(email, affiliates, display ads, social, mobile, shopping comparison,

voucher sites)

Shopping platforms & market places

(Amazon, eBay)

Other

off-site sales

(Social, Mobile, drop shipping, daily deals sites)

Conversion optimisation

On-site Sales

Off-site Sales

@annstanley

Part 1:

Changes to your site to

increase search traffic

@annstanley

Top UK sites by visits and

where consumers start shopping

http://go.channeladvisor.com/UK-Website-2011-

Consumer-Survey.html?ls=Website

Source:

Hitwise week

ending

19/05/2012

@annstanley

Panda?

LSI – Latent semantic indexing http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2104571/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-People-Baffled

@annstanley

Google’s Panda update and the

need for ‘good quality content’

• In February 2011, Google implemented a rolling algorithm

update known as ‘Panda’, which ‘penalises’ sites that host

poor quality content and/or provide a poor user experience

• With every update, Google becomes more sophisticated at

judging the quality of content on a site

• Many ecommerce websites were badly affected

@annstanley

This was followed by the Penguin

update on the 24th April 2012?

Designed to penalise

search spam!

• Keyword stuffing

• Link schemes

• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects or “doorway” pages

• Purposeful duplicate

content

@annstanley

Optimise for the user –

not search engines • Making sure a site is optimised to provide a rich, relevant and rewarding

experience for visitors is the best way to avoid penalties, which means:

– No duplicate content - use Canonical tag and Webmaster tools (plus other technical ways) to ensure Google only indexes pages once (eg. when products

are listed in >1 categories, pagination issues, repeated content in tabs)

– All pages should have unique, relevant and useful content (including the 1000s of category, sub-category and product pages on ecommerce sites!)

@annstanley

Optimise for the user –

not search engines

– Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce rates, inbound links

to ‘deep’ pages, social mentions etc.)

– No spam (keyword stuffing)

– Avoid link schemes and develop “Natural links” – a higher

proportion of links should have anchor text with your brand name

or URL (not just your keyphrase)

@annstanley

Ecommerce optimisation –

unique content on category pages

@annstanley

User-generated content • User-generated content, or UGC, is still a great way to add

unique and relevant content to web pages – especially

product pages in the ‘post-Panda’ search environment.

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Video integrated with product

pages

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Ongoing ‘Fresh’ content

(blogging with social plug-ins)

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Google’s “Search, Plus Your

World”

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• Pinterest is a social platform that allows users to ‘pin’ images and videos they like into pre-determined categories or ‘boards’. Since it’s launch last year Pinterest has become the fastest site ever to reach over 10 million monthly unique visits. Therefore, if Pinterest is not part of your social strategy – it should be!

• There are many social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious that are currently enjoying record traffic (Reddit recently announced it has tripled in size over the past year and now serves 1.6 billion pageviews per month). Again, with these kind of figures, if these sites are not part of your social strategy then perhaps they should be!

@annstanley

Pinterest

@annstanley

Part 2: Good design (and

other ways) to improve

conversion rates

@annstanley

The key to getting the best website

We need to get

a balance

between these

elements

Design

first impressions counts

Functionality

what the site does for the user and

your business

Content

what the site says to the user and search engines

@annstanley

Is your Bounce rate over 30%?

2/10 seconds to make the right impression:

– Load speed

• Also impacts Google rankings

• Platform issues

• Images/file size

• Servers/technical issues (often blamed?)

– Do I like what I see (design/layout/images/colours) or do I have the “yuck response”?

– Am I on the right page (relevancy)?

– Are things in the right place (conventional design) and does this site look trustworthy?

– Can I be bothered? Is it worth me spending more time reviewing this page/site?

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Komodo –

old design vs new design

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Analytics results

Bounce rates

Page views

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Homepage designs

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Common homepage themes Above the fold:

• Conventional layout and “sandwich”

design

• Header with additional menu, search,

basket

• Top mega-menus

• Delivery messages

• Billboard image with great photography

• Rotating sales message

• 2-3 offers or calls for action (often on side

of main image)

• Carousel of brands

Below the fold

• Images of each category

• Text?

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Branding – lifestyle & aspirations

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@annstanley

Different homepage styles

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Category and search

results

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Burburry uses magazine or

catalogue approach

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Next use a horizontal scroll or carousel

approach for product listing

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John Lewis show colour options

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My-Wardrobe has 2 versions of

each image

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Example of landing page

A:B test using Google Optimiser

Using models for the product photos raised purchases by 44% and increased the average

order value by 67%.

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Product pages

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asos use drop downs for options and display

recommended products on the side-panel

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Selecting variants or options

Drop down to select

variants for simple

choices like colour and

size (this approach of

“parent and child” is also

used by Amazon)

Table to select variants

(where availability is

displayed for each option)

@annstanley

Variant issues • Parent-child relationships have to work for both your website and

any marketplaces you want to sell on

– Smaller websites may prefer each colour to be treated as a separate

product

– Amazon and larger websites will treat product/style as parent and

colours and sizes as children

– If you want to sell on Amazon you may have to aggregate your

products/variants into a “pseudo-grandparent”

@annstanley

Only have a separate variant page if

you have unique content

– but link back to other variants eg for alternative

colours

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Shopping cart optimisation

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Shopping

cart

abandonment

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Calls for action – the blur test

Ref: Dr Mike Baxter www.slideshare.net/TheInternetConference/improving-the-ecommerce-user-experience-dr-mike-baxter

Contrast may be more important than colour?

@annstanley

Shopping Cart Example

@annstanley

Shopping Cart checklist

Strong calls to action and button

Isolate the checkout – no navigation bar to encourage them to leave

No compulsory registration

Single page checkout or “Progress bar” to see the steps

Repeat your offer/benefits on the first page

Clear form design – simple & easy to use

@annstanley

Shopping Cart checklist

Minimise the information input required

Avoid losing information already entered – have a summary

always displayed

Thumbnail images of products in cart

Stock management and delivery – no nasty surprises

Checks for errors and validation – eg correct email address

Reassurance and Trust (anti-spam, security, guarantees,

returns, credit cards taken)

@annstanley

Mobile and the

effect of different devices

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Activities differ by device

(Data from AdMob )

Report can be found at http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/

@annstanley

Designing for mobiles

• The growth of SmartPhones now means that around 30% of all

internet visits are currently made on a SmartPhone.

• The use of mobile devices to access the internet is due to overtake desktops in 2014. So it is essential that your website is

optimised for mobile devices.

@annstanley

Designing for mobiles

• Mobile devices such as iPhones and Android phones will

display the standard version of your website, by letting you

zoom in and out of certain sections of the page, with the

different elements of page in miniature (i.e. they will be in the

same position as if you were viewing the page on a desktop).

• However it is possible for your site to be built with a separate

CSS specifically designed to work on different size screens –

we call this device responsive design

@annstanley

Device responsive design

• Same url for all devices rather than a separate mobile site or sub-domain

• User detection agent (distinguishes device)

• Liquid or responsive design suitable for each size device/operating system/browser

• Mobile design often has a single column with most important content/features moved to the top and in some cases some content hidden

@annstanley

Amazon.co.uk responsive design

or Amazon.co.uk App

Main site – with adaptive CSS Amazon App

@annstanley

Key take-aways • There are 4 main ways of increasing sales but increasing organic

traffic (from all devices) and improving website conversion rates

are the most cost-effective!

• Panda and Penguin may have affected your organic traffic:

– Deal with duplicate content issues

– Add unique content (category and product pages, user-generated

content, multi-media content)

– Use of blogs and social sharing

– Avoid spam (keyword stuffing and dodgy links)

– Site interaction and social signals now influence your search rankings

@annstanley

Key take-aways

• Improve on-site conversions with good design:

– Reduce bounce rate (load times and first impression)

– What’s hot in homepage design?

– Product page and variant page design

– Calls for action – blur test

– Test new ideas/designs using Google Optimiser

– Shopping cart optimisation

@annstanley

Thank You

Ann Stanley

@annstanley

ann@anicca-solutions.com

www.anicca-solutions.com