3 Important Things Your Website Is Missing

Is your ecommerce conversion rate lower than you expected? Do you have a high bounce rate? Are visitors to your online store spending a lot of time browsing, but failing to make any purchases?

If you are experiencing any of the above issues, it might be because your online retail website is missing some important elements. Adding these elements – which will help users find, access, and navigate your site – will increase your conversion rate and make your website far more profitable. But first, you need to know what you’re missing:

A High-Powered Search Function

While adding a search bar to your website’s main menu is extremely helpful in improving navigation, it will only be successful if you also properly catalog your website’s products. Whether you have a few hundred or several thousand items for sale, customers don’t want to have to scan through pages and pages of search results to find the one item they’re looking for. According to a study from Google, 61% of mobile shoppers reported that if they could not find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, they would quickly give up and leave.

• According to a recent study, the average time users spend on a site is less than 3 minutes because they fulfill their goal and then leave. After 7 minutes on site, shopper conversion rates drop dramatically due to inefficient search mechanisms and navigation.
• Make sure your products are properly classified and cataloged so that customers can find them quickly and easily. If you offer multiple similar products that have slight variations – such as versions in multiple colors – make sure that your search function can disambiguate those items appropriately.

Unique and Diverse Content

Is your site getting no traffic? Are you receiving penalty notifications from Google? Ecommerce websites in particular have been hard-hit by the latest Google Penguin updates. SEO for the new Google algorithms require diverse, engaging, and fresh content – even on ecommerce websites with thousands of products.  If all of your product pages look the same or feature content that is duplicated on other websites, you’re going to keep getting hammered by Google until you update that content.

• Re-write the descriptions for your products, starting with your most popular items and working your way downwards. Replace the manufacturer’s description – which every other site selling that item is using – with your own original words. This will appeal not only to the search engines, but to your inquiring customers as well.
• Add social share buttons, product reviews, and other widgets to your product pages that can continually refresh the content on the page without necessitating your involvement. The more frequently your pages’ content is updated, the better it will function for SEO.

Mobile Functionality

According to Resource Nation, “mobile payments could reach $617 billion by 2016.” If your ecommerce site doesn’t have a mobile-enabled version, you could be missing out on a significant volume of traffic and potential sales.

• You have a variety of options for making your retail site accessible to the 50% of US adults who own a smartphone. Whether you decide to use a plugin, code for responsive design, or create a whole new mobile site, you need to take action lest you be left in the mobile dust.

Understanding where your ecommerce site is failing is the first step towards resolving those problems. If your site lacks diverse content, an effective search function, or a mobile option, you could be missing out on a large volume of sales and revenue. Take action now to recoup your losses and make your site more successful.

Bio: Megan Webb-Morgan is a business blogger for B2B lead generation resource Resource Nation. You can follow Resource Nation on Facebook and Twitter!