A website is the face of your business. It’s probably the first thing a potential customer will see, and it’s what they’ll judge you by. Building a website for an eCommerce business is not as difficult as many marketers claim it to be.
What’s the first thing you need to set up an eCommerce website for your business? A team of developers? A marketing team? A seasoned sales team? Maybe designers? Nope, not really. You need a plan!
Today, I’d like to go over the touchpoints of a business website so that it looks professional and helps you attract clients, sell, and present your brand.
A little disclaimer here. My tips might not be applicable to a heavyset brand with a solid website. But if you’re just starting out and want some online presence for your business, these are some of the basics you have to take into consideration before you decide to build your eCommerce website or a landing page.
Why are you building an eCommerce website?
If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that any sort of big planning starts with realizing why you’re doing all this. Anything needs a strategy. A website is no different. You can’t just make any website you want.
A lot of factors play a role in how your eCommerce website is gonna look like. Your target audience. Your business goals, heck even our budget or time you are going to spend on it.
First, see your website as a tool to reach your objectives. Do you need to spread the word about your brand? Or do you need sales? Maybe you want to attract new visitors by stating your expertise. A website has all the functionality to reach those goals.
Studying the competitors never gets old. Do that not to copy the ideas but rather to decide whether your business or target market needs this page or that feature. Create a sitemap and list the pages to be included there.
Do you need a blog? How many landing pages do you require? Are you planning to gather leads through your site? Having answers to these questions will help you understand how to build your website.
Technical details of your eCommerce website
This is probably even more important than your content to make the first impression. Your website name is the first thing, your visitors are going to know about you.
So take care of your domain name. Make sure it’s short, easy, SEO-friendly, and memorable.
Next comes the hosting. Choose a reliable one with good tech support. It might not be the cheapest step, but you want to secure your website from falling, errors, and poor server maintenance.
By the way, you can code the website yourself. Or you can use a website builder if you’re just starting out. While choosing, pay attention to the design and customization options, integration capabilities, small but important things like pop-ups, and customer support.
There are also things like social proof and asking people to leave a review of a product you are selling. Make sure your website has the functionality for that.
Another good idea would be to incorporate a chatbot into your website. This allows you to stay available to customers 24/7 and answer FAQs immediately.
Don’t forget about traffic and site performance tools like Google Analytics. You’ll Be able to track your visitors, page views, time spent on site, bounce rate, and such.
Ecommerce website content strategy
Content is king. Think your content plan through and generate some ideas for future articles.
Work on your blog, and fill it with unique, useful, and relevant content. Encourage users to share your blogs or tag your website in their reviews. Also, work on getting linked to external sites—it’s called link building.
It goes without saying, regular posting will be a good sign to search engines. As they will pay attention to websites with fresh and frequent content.
Market your eCommerce website
Once your website is neat and informative — start spreading the word about it. What can you use? The first thing that comes to mind is social media. Instagram promotion works great or give Facebook a shot. Well, use them to tell about your website, or better — create a special offer that is only valid on your site.
Invest in SEO for your eCommerce website
If your website is optimized for the search engine, it is all set for people to find it. Since search engines use crawling, indexing, and ranking in their algorithms, you can prepare your website for these procedures.
Use backlinks to make sure your website is found on other websites. Fill the content on your website with relevant keywords, imagery, and up-to-date info. This will make sure your website is indexed.
Finally, your content needs to be unique and versatile for the ranking stage. If this happens, your website will be ranked as relevant and shown on the first pages of the browser search.
Maintain your eCommerce website
Don’t forget about the website audit. This isn’t about only counting your KPIs or click-through rates. Remember to check whether your website is mobile-friendly.
Remember to place new features and products and remove outdated stuff. Make sure your products have high-quality images and concise but informative descriptions. Integrate a payment system so that your customers don’t get stuck at the checkout and abandon their shopping cart without making a purchase. If they do abandon the shopping cart, have a retargeting option in place to get them to return to your website and finish the transaction.
That does it
Ah! Finally! I hope I covered all the basic steps that are essential when it comes to creating an eCommerce website. Sure, there is so much more to the issue of a good website for an eCommerce business, but I’ll try to cover other things in my future articles.
Leave a Reply