Conversion rates will vary for different kinds of traffic that visit your site and that’s to be expected, what you want to learn is what is your best converting source of traffic and how can you get more of it. Track it back to referral sources, if it comes from organic search find out which phrases convert best and focus on improving the rankings for those phrases.  If it comes from PPC which are your money phrases and conventrate on them for SEO.

The following is a list of Conversion Factors that could be affecting your conversion rate. Scan down the list… do any of these factors affect your conversions? Can you take action on any of these points to improve your Conversion Rate?

If you are not sure where to start consider doing some Usability Testing to get feedback from real people using your website to perform tasks designed to test your specific website conversion goals.

Trust Elements:
- Safe Shopping Icons (hacker safe, BBB)
- Free or Local Cost Phone Number visible
- Address visible
- Quality of Design
- Quality Domain Name
- Money Back Guarantee
- Risk Reversal (We’ll pay the return postage costs)
- Accepts all forms of payment
- Nice Logo
- Testimonials
- About Us prominent
- Contact Us prominent
- Privacy Policy
- Order / Postage / Invoice tracking
- Privacy Policy
- We don’t spam you messaging
- Clear and unambiguous optin/out for marketing & 3rd party marketing
- Ability to get offline help at physical locations

Look and Feel:
- Site is easy to navigate
- Easy to grasp what the site does
- Clear Calls to Action on every page
- Links to further information are easy to find
- Great site search returns relevent results
- Checkout / Conversion process is clear
- Forms are forgiving (e.g. taking dashes, spaces for credit card)
- Forms error handling – clear, concise errors & instructions for correcting
- Does not require registration up front
- Fast Page load times. Adverts render last.
- Pages load consistently (high availability)
- Renders in all major browsers
- Accessibility Issues have been addressed
- Pictures are good quality and highly optimised
- Good quality help / FAQ system
- No Broken links or broken images
- Relationship Marketing, encourage 2-way interaction through Facebook, Twitter etc

Product / Selling Proposition:
- Product / Site Exclusivity
- Compelling Product
- Brand Name awareness and reputation
- Good Product Pictures, quality and quantity
- Compelling Offer / Price / Clarity
- Price easy to find
- Add to cart button is inviting and prominent
- Terms and Conditions highly visible
- Path to checkout is unencumbered with no distractions
- Extra charges (postage) are low and easy to find
- Speedie Postage
- Free Postage
- International Shipping
- Good Comparison Matrix (including competitors)
- Independent Product Reviews
- Good Headline
- Good Tagline
- Supporting Copy
- Supporting resources (buying guides, blog, forum)
- Scarcity (limited Quantity or limited time)

Off Page Factors:
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Holidays
- Seasonality
- The weather
- Event Timing (product will be regulated, taxed or discontinued)
- Item / site gets significant press coverage (TV appearances, BBC coverage)
- Relevant Advertising
- Type of Advertising (banner vs PPC)
- Visitor profile of site where advertising appears
- Compelling ad copy
- Ad copy matches landing page
- Click Fraud
- Quality and efforts of Affiliates
- Reputation of your Site
- Size of your Organisation
- Newsletter Quality
- Offline advertising
- Presence of offline locations
- Competitor Offerings and Marketing

The original conversion factor list that inspired this post came from: http://paul.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/08/15/conversion-factors/ I have taken the liberty of adding to it and amending it for our target audience.

What other factors would you add to this list?

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Little glitches or errors will frustrate the user and more than likely turn them away; like a search function that doesn’t work properly or a slow loading page. Worse still, a shopping cart that fails to add the products or forms that have errors.

There is one particular tool that you may find very helpful for looking at how your visitors are interacting with your site and in particular handling your forms. Have a look at www.clicktale.com

Broken Links between pages or image links that go to the wrong place will not inspire confidence in the potential customer.

Poor Quality images of products will not show them to their best advantage or entice people to buy.

These are just some of the reasons visitors may exit your site and seek out your competititor. It is important to have your usability testing done by someone who is not already familiar with the site as they will pick up navigation issues for example. A new user will really tell you how intuative or easy it is to buy from your site.

Remember too that webusers can be fickle and unforgiving as they scan for the results they want. They also have increasingly high expectations making them harder to satisfy with sub standard websites. Don’t make them search too hard or make them fill endless forms or they will quickly loose interest. Website usability testing finds out how much time users might take to search for a particular product or item on your site; what are the difficulties faced by them while conducting the search; do they face any problems related to your website design and features, such as navigating from one web page to the other, opening up links, downloading images or content, and the like.

In a nutshell, website usability testing is an approach to calculate the ease-of-use quotient of your site. Here at SIM we have perfected a system of usability testing that has been invaluable to our clients. Give us your target audience demographic and we can arrange for comprehensive testing of your site with a full report.

Based on the website usability testing analysis, you can then apply the changes and correct glitches and errors in the knowledge that you will be improving your customer’s experience.

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Twitter for example is very popular at the moment. But how can I make it work for me? Firstly, you need to decide how to use twitter for the most effective results for your business. There is always the danger with social networking to let it take up too much time! As mentioned above; your social networking/marketing should make up 10% of your online marketing time. If you are on twitter all day – there is something wrong.

Listening out on the Twitter airwaves

The first way to use Twitter is to engage and open communication potential and existing customers. This has proved to be an effective strategy for many brands as they can be notified instantly if anyone mentions their brand or company name and react accordingly. Read this example:

A guy is sitting in an internet café using the free wifi service. The wifi malfunctions and he sends out a tweet on Twitter telling his friends that the wifi is down in the café and he is annoyed that he will have to move on to finish his work. The pr company (for the large chain of coffee shops) pick up the tweet as they have a search running for their client’s name. They contact the coffee shop immediately and ask them to locate the person packing away his laptop. The guy is given a free cup of coffee and the wifi connection is fixed. 5 minutes later he tweets a new message: singing the praises of the coffeeshop.

A negative pr situation is instantly turned on its head.

Note: This doesn’t mean scouring twitter manually day and night in the hope of intercepting a tweet about you. Use the search functions on www.tweetdeck.com for example to be alerted when you are mentioned. You can also use this search function to be alerted of any tweet or conversation that mentions a word or phrase you are interested in.

Tweeting for tweeting sake

Don’t tweet for the sake of it – if you subject your followers to masses of inane updates about the state of your health and what your dog ate for breakfast you will soon loose that following (unless you are a blonde celebrity!).

However, broadcasting your offers and new products to encourage clicks back through to your website should also be part of your strategy but it is worth remembering that you need to make your tweets and updates interesting to your audience so that they will follow your links – address the issues that affect them.

If you only bombard them with self promotional tweets they will not feel that you are adding value and will cease to click through to your site or worse; unfollow you. If they really like what you are saying they may ‘Retweet’ your message to their followers, and so your message is spread further afield.

Tweet etiquette:

• Do follow back any followers that you have a genuine interest in.
• Do Retweet useful info from your fellow tweeple.
• Understand and use the @replies sparingly or you will be inundating your audience with half conversations – very dull.
• Cut out the running commentary – 25 tweets an hour will push other people’s messages off followers’ homepages.
• Don’t over use #hashtags, in fact don’t use them at all unless you are genuinely contributing to the conversation.
• Do Check your links before you tweet them.
• Do complete your bio information as fully as possible
• Do use a picture of yourself or an image that represents your brand well.
• No swearing or verbally attacking fellow twitterers
• Watch your follower/follow ratio. If you are following thousands more than follow you – you are probably a spammer.

What are your experiences of twitter? Do you have anything to add? Please do leave a comment…

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• Link popularity: To enhance the ranking of your e-commerce website, ensure that it is well linked from other websites. Links are like votes, the more you get the better you will rank but its not just an issue of quantity, quality carries a much greater weight and one good quality link can improve your rankings significantly above hundreds of bad quality links. Whenever possible, solicit links from different websites. In fact, a website with links belonging to a wide variety of different IP addresses is a good example of an effective ecommerce SEO tactic.

• Relevant links: Search engines, especially Google, ranks websites that are linked from relevant websites higher than the ones which are just randomly linked to from other websites. The greater the number of relevant sites linking to your ecommerce site the higher your search engine rankings will be.

• Appropriate anchor text: SEO traffic can be enhanced by ensuring that the anchor text of your website’s external link has the main keywords. For instance, if you want to improve your rank for the keyword ‘burglar alarms,’ ensure that the link that directs the SEO traffic to your website uses the keyword ‘burglar alarms’. Vary your anchor text amongst your main key phrases and so not include any other irrelevant content in the anchor text link.

• PageRank (PR): Getting links to your website from high PageRank sites enhances the credibility and importance of your website and pushes your rankings up. This is because PageRank is passed from one page to another, so a page with 10 links on it will pass one tenth of the link juice to the pages it links to. If you have a link from a site with a high PageRank (PR6 or 7) and you are one of very few links on that page you will receive a lot of juice. This is a good link, actually a great link! If you have a link on a page that is PR1 or PR2 and your site is one of 100 listed then you will receive nothing of value from that. The higher the PageRank of a page the more authority it is considered to have, the more valuable the link and the harder it is to get a link from it. Note that PageRank is not passed through a nofollow link.

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Simplicity rules in the world of e-commerce websites. Customers tend to prefer a website where products are just two to three clicks from the home page. A flatter and well-networked website structure also improves your page rank because page rank from your higher level pages passes more easily to your deeper product pages.

Also, if your website features a variety of brands, create a well-optimized landing page for all the brands. This ensures that customers are informed about different products that are offered under a particular brand.

Try incorporating a product feed to keep customers updated about the latest offerings. You can also use them to boost your SEO traffic by submitting the feed to content aggregators. XML-based product feed is accepted by Google Base as are other formats. Gradually, your website with start to feature in Google Base searches which provides another avenue for good quality traffic. Such product feeds are also ideal for getting increased free back links to your product pages.

Next time we will be looking at Off-page Optimisation tips for ecommerce website owners.

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To name your page files, always use keyword-rich text. For instance, a page file named www.yourecommercesite.com/keyword-phrase.html is more effective than a URL with numeric variables such as www.yourecommercesit.com/?ID=1234567.

Title Tags

For title tags, be precise and concise and never stuff the tags with extra keywords. Avoid including repetitive content in all tags. For instance, if your e-commerce site sells furniture only emphasise your primary terms in your home page title tag. Do not try to list all the different kinds of furniture you sell.

Google only indexes 10 words in your title and the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) only display 64 characters.

Meta Tags

Unique meta tags is a very important component of ecommerce SEO. To develop a search engine-friendly retail website, ensure that the product pages have different titles and descriptions targeting different primary and secondary key phrases. Although it might not instantly improve web results, it will certainly save you from the penalty associated with duplicate content. Also, do not stuff your meta tags with keywords that are not relevant to that specific page.

Meta Tag Description

The meta tag description is often the description that appears on the SERPs so this should be writing to attract your target audience into your website. It should also contain your target phrases but be written in a compelling way. This aspect alone can increase your click through rate.

Next time we will talk about the importance of user friendly features on an ecommerce website.

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