Five Tips to help Grow your E-commerce Business

In terms of passive income, owning and operating an online business can be one of the best available strategies. However, just because you are online does not mean your site will perform. Even if you have all your products listed on a responsive, professionally designed website, it is very possible for no one to ever know you exist. Moreover, growing your business means increasing profit in addition to growing traffic. This means that even if you advertise, you might be spending your profits in an attempt to draw more people to your site.

The secret in growing an online business resides in your ability to attract organic traffic. Organic traffic represents interested visitors who find your site via links on other websites or via search engines when customers enter keywords. Organic traffic is the online equivalent to brick-and-mortar word-of-mouth. It is free. It helps people interested in knowing more about your service or product find your site. Most importantly, when this type of traffic spends money, your profit percentage increases dramatically because you did not have to pay a single cent for it.

Of course, the question is: how do you grow your site’s profits and traffic via organic traffic?

1. SEO

Search-engine optimization is the process of organizing the content of your website to attract the attention of search engines. If search engines can find your site, your customers will find your site via search engines.

However, you need to optimize your site in a variety of specific manners.

– keywords
– long-tail keywords
– H1 and H2 tags
– alt descriptions for your images
– keywords in your meta data

Although SEO optimization involves a lot of in-depth structuring for your website, just upgrading your website to include the aforementioned items will help rank your site with search engines.

Keywords, for instance, represent words in your content that people are searching for. H1 and H2 tags are the titles and sub-header titles, respectively. These headers help search engines understand the content on your site. Alt descriptions on your images can also include keywords.

More importantly, they are descriptions that make it easier for the visually impaired to understand images on a site. Finally, including keywords in the your sites behind-the-scenes meta data will help target search engines.

2. Urgent Calls to Action

If you are able to attract traffic to your site, you might be failing to grow sales because you do not ask for the sale. In real-world, brick-and-mortar stores, sales people are trained to assume sales. For instance, regarding a hypothetical watch sales person, assumed sales language involves the sales person saying such things as “how would you like this watch wrapped?”

The question assumes the customer has already decided to buy the watch and is a soft sale tactic to increase sales.

For online sites, you might not have an online sales representative, but each piece of original content can ask for you. For instance, you can run a sales event that expires, and your content can encourage your visitor to take advantage of the temporary low price by “clicking here and saving money today!”

Doing so helps guide people to your product and emphasize the need to buy. Additionally, the expiring sales event lets people know the price will rise soon.

3. Fresh Content

Of course, part of any website’s growth involves the consistent addition of fresh content. If you run a watch website, you should publish all sorts of interesting content that people shopping for watches want. Additionally, you should publish this content on a regular basis of at least twice per week.

In terms of attracting potential customers, the reason for publishing consistent content is obvious. However, it is also important if you want to attract the attention of search engines. In fact, if your site lapses in its publication consistency, search engines will consider your site stale. As a result, your site will decline in the search-engine rankings.

4. Content Management

Of course, publishing content for any ecommerce business website is not necessarily easy. That said, content-management systems that involve a Magento extension can make the process much easier. In fact, a Magento extension can help you in a variety of additional ways.

– displaying content
– creating call-to-action buttons
– displaying ads
– adding photo galleries
– displaying products and sales events
– providing shopping-cart capabilities
– checking out customers during the sales process

If you own an e-commerce business, you are making your job much more difficult if you are not using a Magento extension.

5. Multiple Revenue Streams

Of course, if you own an e-commerce business, it is a good strategy to not rely on one product. You should have multiple products. Ideally, you should have ancillary products that are related but not necessarily core products. If you have ever been to a convenience store, for instance, you probably are aware of the wide-ranging products at the counter. For your business, you should also have additional products that might complete your customers’ orders.

Thanks to Evelina Brown