Over the years, working with ecommerce brands of all sizes, I’ve been able to identify some simple tricks and hacks that work very well for online stores. 

In this post, I’ll go into some of these tricks of the trade that you can use to improve conversions, gain better rankings and boost sales. 

What’s Your Goal?

The goal of your store’s plugins, themes, and setup is to create the optimum experience for your customers. This way you’ll always have optimal conversion rates.

Keep the following things in mind:

Have great images, because larger images at higher definitions are known to make better impressions and improve sales. Stay away from small green images at all costs.

Keep your loading times down. A delay in loading times up to one second can result in a up to 7% reduction in conversions, so make sure your site loads quickly.

Give great customer service. Just because my store is not a physical store, does not mean I can ignore customer service. In fact I have to be more diligent about providing great customer service, because I have to work harder for the trust of online shoppers.

Tricks of the Trade

Nothing beats experience, and over the years, there are a few tricks (or ways) I learned that have helped me a lot in growing ecommerce businesses rapidly for clients and myself.

The first one is a tried and tested strategy. The second one is a bit technical. The third one is plain common sense.

Without further ado, here you go:

Video product descriptions work three times as well as the ordinary ones

I don’t think I need to go deep into this one, but Bombtech Golf is a great example of a brand that does this very well.

Video product descriptions convey the pros and cons of your products much more clearly than ordinary textual product descriptions, and when done the right way, are more share worthy content.

Optimize for Crawl Budget Before Delving Into AMP

When Google introduced AMP, we noticed a new issue with many new clients that signed up with us. Site crawling issues began increasing right after they implemented AMP.

And yes- this is what sitemaps and sitemap submission is for. 

But imagine this:

You have an ecommerce website that has hundreds of thousand of pages that get updated frequently.

And you have a hundred different ways to filter the products listed on your site.

Now this is where the problem occurs. With all these different filters, there are all sorts of new URLs that Google can crawl. 

But how can you get around this?

Your robots.txt! Just make sure you use commands that allow Google to crawl only some filters, and disallow crawling for the remaining majority of them.

Now this is where it gets interesting. 

If you already have crawling and slow indexing issues, don’t delve into AMP just yet. AMP pages causes all URLs on your website to have a different version.

Here’s what I mean:

domain.com/page/  ,  and

domain.com/page/amp/

Get it?

Fix crawling issues first, and then implement AMP. The best way to do this is to run a thorough content and SEO audit and optimize your robots.txt for your current crawl budget.

Thoughtful, useful, actionable content is the key to growth

I’ve always felt that the single greatest advantage to starting your own ecommerce store rather than selling on Amazon is the ability to use content marketing to drive in leads passively and independently.

And with a proper process to take care of the content creation and promotion, it’s super simple!

More and more ecommerce brands are using content marketing to increase traffic and thereby sales volumes.

The idea here is simple- the more buyer centric content you publish, the more traffic you drive to your ecommerce blog. The sales you bring in is almost directly proportional to the traffic you drive. And as a plus, as you keep driving more and more traffic, your content begins to gain traction, thereby bringing in even more sales.

Summing Up

Be sure to select a great ecommerce plugin that will meet your needs. Then make sure you choose a theme which improves your customer’s experience and doesn’t detract from it. The theme you choose should be mobile compatible, period. 

To maximize conversion rates, offer great customer service along with keeping load times down and having great images. And then try to use video descriptions, make sure you optimize for crawl budget, and start blogging! 

There’s definitely much more to having a successful ecommerce store than just these few things, but if you pay attention to these tips for building a great foundation, you’ll be off to an excellent start.

The post Setting Up A Successful WordPress Store: Tips and Tricks appeared first on SiteProNews.

However, we can utilize one of the fundamental elements in digital marketing: content. 

Content is king, it works wonders in helping you rank, drives visitors for conversion and gets you just the right amount of exposure to promote your brand in ways that you can’t even imagine.

In this short article, I’ll discuss ways to help you automate your blogging plan, promote your content, and get potential customers in your store to drive efficient conversions.

What Should You Write About?

The basis of all content that is centered on driving conversions is keyword research. Now there are a lot of ways to conduct keyword research and there are a myriad of tools that can help you. AHREFS, SEMRush and Moz have excellent tools that can help you identify low-lying fruit or keywords that you can rank for easily.

However, there’s a technique called Keyword Opposition to Benefit Analysis (or KOB Analysis) that you can easily utilize if you’re looking to rank your content. It works by checking out what keywords your competitors are ranking for and hijacking them.

In order for you to do this, you’ll need SEMRush, which is a great tool for competitor analysis. For this example, I”ll be using a completely random site, imdb.com.

Type in your domain name and hit search.

On the left hand site click “Organic Research”, followed by “Competitors”.

Check out their biggest competitor, in this case Rotten Tomatoes.

Click on the major competitor. Scroll down until you find their organic keywords. Click “View full report”.

Hit the filters and leave out the ones that are over position 20 and export the data. The full report should look like this.

Once the data has been exported to excel. It’s time to filter it out.

You filter these keywords using the KOB equation:

Opposition / Benefit = KOB Score

The higher, the better.

The quick way to calculate opposition is to get its keyword difficulty from SEMRush and divide it by its benefit. Benefit is equal to its CPC rate multiplied by its average search volume. 

So create a new column entitled keyword difficulty and stick in a formula that looks like this:

=cell with KD or keyword difficulty/(cell with CPC*cell with search volume)

Drag it down to populate the rest of the cells.

Now:

• Add a column where you can put in the topic of that particular keyword (and what sort of content was in the URL). 
• Now organize the competitor URLs and label it depending on which topic it belongs to.
• Now create a sheet that looks like this:

• Now list these topics one by one in terms of good KOB score in this new sheet that you have created. Only pick the ones with a high KOB.

Which ones do you pick?

Do a Google search for each of the keywords; pick the ones that have a combination of these factors:

• Good CPC rate
• Adequate monthly search volume
• No ads on the search (ads indicate competition and a hard keyword to rank for)
• Are low authority websites ranking for that keyword (this is a good sign)
• Journey or how will it be funneled to a sale

You have an area called “New or Rewrite” where you get to decide if you should rewrite existing content or produce new ones.

You can now start adding these keywords to your content calendar and designing content around them.

Content Calendars and Getting Your Team Together

Once you’ve planned out the keywords that you want to target for the entirety of the month or quarter, it’s time to map out when you will be releasing content. Getting a content team together is no longer a tricky process.

There are two ways to go about this and you can always do a mix of both. You can have in-house writers or you can outsource the entire team.

Sites like Upwork or Fiverr are popular with freelancers and people looking to outsource.

The essential people that you’ll need are: your writers and an editor. Optionally, you can go get yourself a content manager who can handle the entire operation for you and a couple of people whose job is to promote the posts.

Automating Content and Drafting

The first step in content automation is getting your systems in place. There are various ways for you to do this. The easiest and probably the most utilized way to automate content is by using a Google sheet.

Using Google Sheets, you can get your content writing team to collaborate on one spreadsheet so you can track the progress of your entire blogging plan. A simple content process sheet can look like this:

As you can see, everything is laid out simply and clearly. 

• Date assigned 
• Due date – Allow your writer a few days to complete the task. Remember this due date is primarily for the editor.
• Title – Sums up the overall theme of the blog post
• Primary Keyword
• Secondary or Supporting Keywords
• Notes – How you want your article written
• Progress – Is it in progress, completed, or drafted?
• Drafted URL – The URL of their drafted post.
• Editor’s Notes  – Has the editor approved of the post or are changes required.
• Published URL – The live link to the article once the editor, content manager or yourself has finally approved it for publishing.

Basically, you or your content manager assigns an article to one of the writers according to the content calendar’s schedule, the details are filled up and the deadlines are given.

To make things easier, you can give the writer limited access to the backend of your site so that they may draft their content there. Once they save it, they can just copy the draft URL and paste it on the sheet.

They mark their progress and the editor is alerted to proofread the piece. Once that process is done you can then publish the article or assign someone to publish it for you.

Why It Works and Other Alternatives

It’s a barebones approach that relies on everyone in the chain ensuring that they update the sheet accordingly. If you want to choose to go about the spreadsheet route but want something more powerful, Smartsheet offers a slightly more powerful alternative to Google Sheets.

If you want something more visual, online project management systems like Trello or MeisterTask can really help.

Trello uses cards with each task and its corresponding details. You can fill each card with notes, checklists, attachments, and even assign certain people to follow these cards.

Just get your team to drag the cards to their correct positions based on progress.

Content Promotion Strategies

There are basic content promotion strategies – like social media promotion, but there are better ones.

Finding an influencer to pseudo-sponsor your content is a great strategy in content promotion. Apps like BuzzSumo can help facilitate your search for influencers.

An influencer can promote your content, let you write for them (sometimes), direct some of their followers to your content, and be a major asset in driving conversions.

Now don’t let your assistants do the work when you’re reaching out to influencers, send them a nice, short concise email telling them about your plan. 

Don’t be sycophantic. Personalization is key.

Also, consider a syndicated press release from a press release provider. These services send out your content or whatever you want released to a variety of sites in minutes. Services like iReach can help you out with this.

Alternative Promotion

An effective tool that digital marketers still use is outreach link building. Instead of writing content for your own blog, you can offer to write content for another site that links to your site. You’ll benefit from their authority and reach, and you’ll even get a link directed at your site.

Let me summarize the steps involved in the outreach process. It starts with collecting prospects followed by identifying the most apt content topic for a particular prospect.

The next part involves personalizing the emails and using an email marketing software like Mailchimp or Constant Contact to automate the entire process including scheduling and email tracking. Once, the campaigns are set and scheduled, it’s time to play the waiting game. 

So there you have it, a quick way to get your keywords, content calendars and article automation for better conversions using content.

The post How to Establish a Well-Rounded Blogging Plan for Your Ecommerce Store appeared first on SiteProNews.

Starting out as an ecommerce portal, it has spread out to online entertainment. And now it’s taking on PayPal with Amazon Payments, also known as Amazon Pay.

By storing payment information in their Amazon account, customers can pay for products or services without using their credit or debit cards. It reduces the check out time and makes shopping and paying less stressful and more enjoyable. 

What Amazon Payments Offers

Here are the features offered by Amazon Pay:

• It features advanced fraud protection features and comes with a payment protection policy, giving businesses the reassurance they need. 

Their customers are provided Amazon A-to-Z Guarantee coverage which provides security of their personal and financial information. This coverage comes without any additional payment and secures the checkout experience. 

• Another reason why Amazon Pay is really convenient is because customers just need one login to enter wherever Amazon Pay is available for transactions (just like PayPal). There are no multiple user names, passwords or OTPs to remember. This is huge, especially in ecommerce, where the ease of checkout plays a major role in cart abandonment rates and thereby on conversions. 

All through the checkout process, customers stay in your site. They can log in with their Amazon ID, and you’ll receive the name, email ID and zip code for completing the order. 

• And you don’t have any hidden fees to worry about. There are no fees for setup, monthly use, unused authorizations or cancellations. You can lower the overall cost for accepting payments for your business since Amazon offers low volume-based pricing.   

Amazon Pay isn’t exactly a pioneer in this field. There’s been another major player here for a long while, PayPal. So how does Amazon Pay fare against PayPal? 

Card Payment Options ranks Amazon Pay as no. 1, giving it 5 out of 5 and an A rating based on reviews it has collected from ecommerce merchants. PayPal though receives only a B rating and is only rated 3.8 out of 5.

Examining PayPal

PayPal was initially part of eBay and has been around for much longer than Amazon Payments and other online payment solutions. 

But for PayPal, things have not been helped by a recent class-action lawsuit where plaintiffs alleged that PayPal handled disputed transactions made on PayPal accounts in an improper manner and placed improper reserves and holds on suspended or closed accounts. The plaintiffs also alleged that PayPal did not provide the error-resolution annual notices plus the monthly account statements as required by the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. PayPal will be making payments to the plaintiffs as part of the settlement. 

• With PayPal, merchants need to request fund transfer to their bank accounts from their PayPal accounts. The transfer usually takes place in 48 hours after the business day closes. PayPal also offers the option of check payments and also by a debit card which can help in purchasing or withdrawing cash from an ATM. 

• PayPal also offers merchant services by which businesses can accept credit card payment as in a usual merchant account. Just like Amazon Pay, PayPal can’t be used with traditional card processing equipment. It has a virtual terminal that comes with optional credit card reader that can be plugged into the USB port of a computer. 

With the virtual terminal, merchants enter credit card data by themselves. Then they can use PayPal as a traditional merchant account. 

• With the “PayPal Here” feature, anyone having a compatible smartphone can accept credit card payments. 

  PayPal is offered in the basic PayPal Payments Standard version, and as PayPal Payments Pro.  

PayPal Payments Standard

Being quite an easily configurable gateway PayPal Standard is among the most popular payment gateways. The one drawback here for merchants is that the customers get redirected to PayPal during the payment and checkout process.

Since your customers are taken to the PayPal site, you need not be worried about authorization, processing or managing security. All you need to do is add the PayPal widget on your site. 

However, redirecting customers to another site actually takes the entire checkout experience of your customer out of your control. It would be better to handle payments on your site, but that’s not supported. 

But all this makes it a much less expensive affair and ideal for small businesses and startups. It also seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce.  

PayPal Payments Pro

This is the premium version of PayPal Payments Standard. The big advantage of this package is that customers’ card payments can be handled from your website directly, giving you greater control of the checkout process. So you can customize the checkout, enabling you use it for maximizing conversions.  

PayPal Pro comes with the PayPal Virtual Terminal. This service enables your business to accept customer payments even through phone. That’s a great advantage since it gives you another sales channel you can target. 

There are no fees for this feature, and no setup fees as well. But transaction fees are high. Besides, there is a monthly fee of $30. To get the official WooCommerce PayPal Proextension, you need to pay $79 more. 

Both Amazon Pay and PayPal are competitive, though PayPal Standard is the easiest to set up among the two. There are several other alternatives that have easier setup processes though. 

Your customers would prefer the ease of Amazon Payments since they just need to log in to their Amazon account to complete the purchase. It’s a less-stressful and more enjoyable experience, unless of course you sign up for PayPal Payments Pro which rates slightly higher in customer satisfaction.  

Which platform do you think offers a more seamless experience? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post The Rise of Amazon Pay: A Head-On Comparison with Paypal appeared first on SiteProNews.