Owners of online stores for a long time do not need to explain that the site constantly requires investments: advertising, development, optimization, marketing. The trick in another: often these investments do not bring the long-awaited result. The information in our article warns the owners of online stores from the most common mistakes.
1. Opportunities do not match your request
One of the most frequent mistakes in promoting an online store – wrongly selected competitors. The trap for an inexperienced specialist may be the choice as competitors of major market players, as well as confusion with the niche online store.
We recommend the following checklist for competitor analysis.
Compare the assortment
Mono-brand or with a small list of product items shops will not be able to compete with sites that have an assortment thousands of times wider and more diverse. Look for competitors at your level.
Exclude major market players.
Internet giants who have held leadership in their niche for a long time are likely to have a huge amount of credit in search engines, which is difficult and expensive to deal with. Focus on such major players, of course, it is necessary. Compete – no.
Compare the current performance of the sites
The online store, as with any other site, there is a list of parameters on which it is evaluated by search engines. For example, the age of the domain, quality index, current visibility and others. If the difference between the promoted site and a potential rival is significant – we return to the previous paragraph, and this competitor is crossed out.
2. CMS is not the main thing, the main thing is convenience.
This point is particularly relevant at the stage of creating the site but is also useful for owners of existing online stores.
You can work with any CMS, but the costs will be different. Flexible adapted CMS will allow the online store to interact more quickly with the product base, which will directly affect the conversion of the site.
Owners of sites where each product, description, and availability in stock need to correct manually, will spend a lot of time on their updating and monitoring. Automated CMS allows you to do this in the background. Besides, they have many standard modules for commercial sites to save developers’ resources, not to write functionality from scratch.
3. Lack of reporting in E-Commerce
Having reached the cherished top of the issue, many owners of online stores forget about constant monitoring and analysis of the project. And for nothing. Search engines are constantly changing and refining algorithms, and you can not relax in such a competitive area as e-commerce.
For example, yesterday on the site in the product card was enough button “Buy”. And now 70% of competitors have a “Fast order”. The sooner the owner of the online store will notice the changes and adapt to them your site – the better, but to stay in the lead, you will have to be in the trend of such innovations.
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4. Global automation: let’s do everything by the template!
Working with the online store is largely limited to the compilation of templates for the site (layouts, meta-tags, texts), which can be applied in bulk and immediately get a result faster. But to use only templates – the grossest error. We recommend in about 10-15% of cases to use creativity and manual refinement.
Undoubtedly, it is easier to write one template and apply it to all products in the database, to all the divorce pages. But much more effective – to approach this work thoughtfully and in some cases to give preference to manual analysis.
Manual work is necessary everywhere where queries are important: these are meta tags, texts, and headings. Templates deprive an online store of such an important ranking factor as the presence of LSI phrases in texts.
We do not call for manual processing of huge arrays of content, but only recommend to pay attention to it and, if necessary, to approach to solving problems individually. But there some cases when it is better to automize the process like fees with Shopify Order & Product Fees App.
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5. The online store should only sell
Globally, we can distinguish two large segments of sites – information and selling. Many owners of the latter consciously refuse information traffic and make a serious mistake. Semantic core, selected for information articles, not only will increase the overall relevance of the site, but also will lead to a new audience. Take the expert article “How to choose an inexpensive sofa”: an interested user who will be told in detail about the nuances of the choice, will offer a model and free delivery, with a high probability will be grateful for the help and, having made a decision to purchase, will make it on your site. Plus, the behavior of this user on the site will have a positive impact on loyalty indicators – the depth of viewing pages and time on the site. Such articles – is an additional link on key requests, which again has a positive impact on the optimization of the resource.
