Optimising your online store: Tips for turning browsers into buyers

This is branded content.

If you want to turn your online browsers into buyers, there are certain steps you need to take to optimise your online store.

These include, for starters, engaging in digital marketing to attract quality traffic to your website, as well as ensuring that your online store provides customers with the best possible user experience.

As well as this, we must not forget how powerful customer reviews are.

Capitalising on positive reviews will encourage new customers to purchase from you, and ultimately, help move them from browsing to buying.

If you're looking to maximise your eCommerce revenue, keep reading for our detailed breakdown on how best to optimise your online store for the greatest amount of sales.

An important part of optimising your online store is to ensure you are attracting the right customers to your website - customers who are there to buy, and not just browse.

To do this, you need to engage in digital marketing and especially, Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO). Importantly, SEO helps you reach customers who are ready to buy and actively seek out your business offering.

Let's say, for example, you are selling footwear in your online store.

When these prospective customers input search terms such as 'shoes' into a search engine, the goal of SEO is to ensure that your business is displayed on the first page of the search engine results that are returned to them.

An essential element of SEO is referred to as link building, or the process of creating backlinks.

Admittedly, this is quite an elusive process, and it is best left to the experts.

As such, premium link building services can be provided by expert digital marketing agencies who specialise in the creation of backlinks.

But, what is a backlink, and how does it relate to SEO?

Creating a backlink involves linking your website within the body of the text that is uploaded to another external site.

This means that the external website links back to your page, and can influence how prominently your site is displayed in search engine results pages - thus attracting more customers to your store.

Once you've attracted the right customers to your online store, you need to gain their trust.

You can do this by ensuring that visitors to your site have a positive User Experience or UX.

As such, executing a website design that has user experience in mind (also known as UX Design), is essential.

So, what does positive UX look like for site visitors?

Most importantly, a UX-designed website curates a user experience that is engaging, compelling and interactive.

This is of course impacted by how well a website is designed and built, as well as the technical elements that influence the usability of the site.

For example, elements such as page loading speed, site navigability, and click responsiveness, all contribute to site UX.

Of course, your online store also needs to look good.

While it can be tempting to utilise stock-standard, default-designed site builders such as Shopify, for example, it pays to engage the services of web development professionals to build your online store for you.

If you do, your site will appear credible, seamless, and most of all, trustworthy.

This will encourage customers to buy from you, as your store will appear legitimate to your audience.

Lastly, always pay attention to the power of positive customer reviews.

Indeed, word of mouth can make or break a business, as customers care deeply about the experiences of others to influence their purchase decision-making.

But how do you encourage customers to write reviews of your business?

First, it doesn't hurt to simply just ask them to do so.

Sending customers a link to your Google or Facebook review page is a great way to do this.

Alternatively, you could send your customers a link to a short post-purchase survey on your website.

Once you have obtained a few online reviews, make sure to make the most of these.

Use them as examples in your social media posts, or link them on your site.

If you have sent your customers to post directly to your Google or Facebook review pages, their reviews will appear automatically when people search for your business online.

Your Google Business star rating will also be influenced by how many reviews you capture.

Positive reviews are essential to growing your business, and to converting more browsers to buyers.

If you are looking to maximise your eCommerce revenue and convert your browsers into buyers, it helps to optimise your online store.

By engaging in digital marketing and SEO to attract customers to your website, ensuring that your online store is designed to provide the best possible user experience to your customers, and capitalising on positive word of mouth, you can gain the trust of new customers.

And, most importantly, help encourage them to make purchases.