As an online retail business owner, you’ll understand how important effective search results are.
It’s estimated that 30% of visitors to retail online stores are the result of people using a comparison shopping website. At MyShopping.com.au, our visitor rate continues to grow with every year – in fact, we’ve had 48% more visitors this year than the previous one. As an online merchant, it’s hard to ignore these numbers.
Shoppers who use a comparison site or search engine are ready to buy. And with online shopping forecast to reach $21.7 billion by 2015 (up from $13.6 billion in 2010)*, consumers are buying from their home or workplace more frequently.
While the following tips may seem technical, they’re actually basic ‘musts’ that successful online retail websites apply. Any competent web developer will be able to implement the following.
This file, housed on your website, contains information on the products you sell. This information includes the brand, model, name, description, price, links to images and other product data.
The more accurate your product feed is, the better your store and products are represented on MyShopping.com.au. Click here for more information.
Dedicating a single page per product makes it much easier to manage your inventory. It also helps the shopping engine to scan your catalogue in order to send traffic to your store.
Comparison shopping sites link directly to your store’s product pages. This means it’s important to ensure the URLs of your product pages are maintained – changing links could result in the loss of sales. Millions of comparison shopping sites pages are 'cached'; (stored) at different levels.
Sometimes, users will access a 'cached' page months after they’ve been stored. If that page contains links on your site that have been changed, you’ll lose customers because the page will be decommissioned.
In addition to 'product feeds', shopping and search engines collect your website's information automatically, via robots that crawl the internet.
A robot – also known as a 'spider' or 'bot' - is, in fact, a program that browses your site and follows the links. Robots aren't as intuitive as human beings – they simply perform the task that they are meant to do, which is to click on a link and then proceed to the linked page.
Embedding direct links to each product page – on every single product page – is how you ensure the search engines can locate your products.
Unlike a retail store where visitors walk through the front door, an online store must be able to greet visitors on every single page. That's because search engines will often refer someone to a page on your site other than your home page.
As a rule of thumb, a visitor should need no more than 3 clicks to reach any of your product pages. Having more levels than that risk losing conversions. A prospective customer who has to work too hard is likely to drop out before getting to your product page.
Make it easy for shoppers to find not only the product they're looking for, but your entire catalogue. That way, they're more likely to buy more than one item.
If you know where your referrals are coming from, you can better understand which sites offer you the greatest return on investment. The simplest way to track your sales by source is to include a 'sales tracking code' (sometimes called a 'conversion tracking code').
A tracking code is a small script that runs within your payment confirmation page that lets you know the source of the transaction; that is, whether it's come from advertising or another referral site such as MyShopping.com.au (which is one of the few online merchant sites in Australia to feature a sales tracking code).
Many shoppers are happy to pay a bit more for a product if they know the store they are buying from is trustworthy. On completion of their purchase, encourage your customers to link back to the comparison shopping site and write a short review of their shopping experience with you.
If you'd like more information about optimizing your website for comparison shopping search engines, contact MyShopping.com.au. We'll be happy to help.
