Has your web store crippled your sales?

Maybe you started as a bricks’n'mortar store and you’ve added an online operation, or perhaps you had the idea of going online from the beginning and went straight online? You picked out some store software, or were forced to use a package, perhaps supplied by the manufacturer or distributor.

Chances are strong that when you made that initial choice, you didn’t really know what you needed. And now you’ve got Christmas coming up, probably when your sales should be strongest. But is your site causing you increased advertising costs and reducing your sales?

We do a lot of work investigating internet strategy and execution. We’ve recently come across a few examples of companies who had started with the best of intentions, but have now ended up with web sites that unintentionally drove users away, mostly because of attempts to attract users. The failures tend to be of two major types - SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Conversion (helping users to buy from you and not a competitor).

The SEO Disaster

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the set of changing techniques that help your site to rank highly on Organic Search. If you rank highly in Organic Search (the main index - on Google, that’s the stuff on the left, below the colored heading areas) then you get visitors without paying for them. There’s lots of companies that offer to get you great rank, using link building and other tricks. However, just the basic page and link design of the site can do a lot about helping search engines to improve your rank - we call this “in-site SEO” and we do an audit called the SEO Technical Hygiene Audit to check that the right things are being done.

Some of the web store developers have spotted the customer demand for in-site SEO. They’ve added mechanisms to populate the meta tags, and to set the page title and various headings. They offer advice to their customers, usually based on obsolete techniques and poor understanding of the techniques.

The result is often that:

• every page has the same keywords
• every page has the same description
• headings are used for SEO, rather than helping the customer
• Incomprehensible gobbledygook is stuffed on the page, to attract search engines
• Tabular design destroys the meaning of the page

If you can, use View Source to look at a few different products on your site. If you see the same or very similar meta tags (up in the “head” of the web page) for every product, then you need to find the trick to modify them individually - this will vary with the web store, and we’ve seen some store software where the miscomprehension of SEO was so complete that doing the right thing is impossible.

Now look at your site in the browser. Do the headings really work to help the user to decide that they are on the right web site and considering buying from a reputable company? Or were the headings supposed to optimise page rank and don’t help the user to buy?

What about the gobbledygook? You probably spent hours, or employed a copywriter, to stuff paragraphs full of the keywords (search terms) at a specified frequency of mention. Does that text help your visitor to buy from you. That’s the goal… sales… Keyword frequency appears to be a minor artefact of measurement, because otherwise techniques like “GoogleBombing” would be less useful.
Perhaps the worst mistake is misusing the description metatag. Chances are that you didn’t list your site on the various sources that the search engines use to select a “snippet” to show to the user. If the tag has been stuffed with keywords, then the description that a user gets won’t help them to pick your site, even if it ranks highly - users will go elsewhere if your site looks spammy or unhelpful (or even, as we’ve seen, says “your browser does not support JavaScript” or “click here to download flash player”).

Every web store that we’ve investigated uses a tabular layout. This almost certainly breaks every law on accessibility, and it may destroy the search engines’ idea of what you are selling. Tables put visually related items in order. Search engines read the page as a series of text items. Tabular layouts mean that related text is interspersed with irrelevant items - which may make the irrelevant links more highly ranked for SEO than the right links.

The Conversion Disaster

One of the key ideas of search marketing is to bring users directly to the most relevant page. So if consumers are looking for a specific product, they’ll land on that products’ page. That’s the first time that many of them will have seen your site.

If you put all sorts of messages on the home page about why your prices are higher or lower, or that all orders have free shipping and handling, or that you offer gift wrapping, etc… that message is invisible to someone that has dropped straight into a product page. So your key selling advantage may have been entirely omitted, because the idea that users start from the home page, is simply wrong.

You have to think about the user. When they searched for your product, what should they have seen (the snippet and a link to the page)? When they arrive on the site, what do they now know about what you are selling? Is it obvious what they have to do to add the item to a basket and continue shopping or checking out?

What to do?

Take a cold, hard look at your store, as if you were a buyer. Forget what you know about your company. Look at a product page. Can you understand what the offer is, and what to click on, without a vertical scroll or a click? Fix it, so you can.

Now search for your product, using the exact name of the product:

• are you on page 1 of the results? Great - does the snippet sell? Can you improve on what you are doing and get into the top 3, where most of the clicks happen?
• If on page 2 of results, you lost more than 60% of the clicks possible.
• Page 3? You lost more than 80%.
• Beyond Page 3 - forget it, only 3% of searchers typically make it beyond page 3. If you are on Page 3 and lower, you need to do something about SEO or you give that business to competitors - see any irrelevant links higher than you? That’s the lowest you should be using the simplest SEO techniques.

Some of the problems are addressable immediately - we can often find ways to modify the various parts of the web page to improve rank without further damaging conversions. We can often advise on small changes that will improve sales. Sometimes we advise abandoning the store software as soon as possible, because it simply does too many things incorrectly and the store developers aren’t willing to modify their web pages templates and database designs.

How long to have an effect? SEO is uncertain. It will probably take at least two weeks until you can see results. Six weeks is enough for many sites to improve position, if a good set of changes are made. In a highly competitive market, you may need even more techniques and ranking well may be a six month effort.