How to Get More Sales from Your Business Website

How to Get More Sales from Your Business Website

October 22, 2019 Rozanne Wilds

In our fast paced world, it comes as no surprise that everyone wants to see instant results. This statement is true for big and small companies alike – companies all wish to increase the number of sales generated from their website. While it’s completely possible to get more sales from your business website, it’s not always something that can happen instantaneously. There’s no easy way to go about converting your target market into customers.

However, there are a few practical ways to get more customers online. Enhancing your website and creating a user-friendly online shopping experience for is the first place to start. So, if you’re wondering how to get more sales from your business website, be sure to keep reading.

Are Business Websites Still Relevant in 2019?

While many businesses have shifted their attention to applications, websites remain a staple in the online marketing world and customers typically expect even small businesses to have their own website.

Your website can give your brand an opportunity to express itself online, while giving you control of the content that’s posted and how it’s managed. This freedom of content allows for a unique, engaging and customized platform where you can alter and control your brand’s image.

Websites are still one of the most reliable marketing platforms. By providing customers with information they might not have been able to access on your other information sharing platforms, a business website can enhance the credibility your brand.

For small business owners, creating and maintaining a website is cheaper and more beneficial than most other marketing platforms. When compared to investing in traditional advertising methods such as newspapers, having a business website is far more advantageous.

Owning a website will also give you instant access to statistics on conversion metrics for your site. This allows you to measure how effective your website is at making sales, enabling you to focus on on-site conversion rate optimization.

Can A Business Website Increase Sales?

While small businesses owners might argue that having a website isn’t necessary, as their business is accessible on other platforms, results say otherwise.

Up to 81% of consumers research a business online, before making a purchase decision. Your website should thus have the correct and relevant information to help and encourage customers to make a purchase.

Your website also functions as a platform to showcase your products or services. Customers have often do research online about brands and services before going to physical stores to purchase.

Even importantly, if you don’t have a physical store and your website serves as your business’ main presence online, it must convenient, accessible and easy to navigate – allowing customers to make purchases and receive customer service at any time of day.

How to Get Customers Online?

The first step would be to get your target audience as visitors to your website. Even if your site is getting thousands of monthly views, it won’t help if the people visiting your site aren’t your target customers.

In order to increase your online sales, you need to increase the traffic on your website, with a specific focus on attracting your target audience. If you already have a website, look at your current strategies to see why you haven’t had success. The most straight-forward, obvious tip would be to advertise your website on your social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

Making use of SEO and keywords are also a way of ensuring that customers manage to find your website online. Blogging is a great way to increase the number of keywords that appear on your website, helping to attract new visitors.

Implementing SEO to Attract New Customers

It’s important to get the basics right. If a customer is on a search engine looking for a business similar to yours, your on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should drive traffic directly from the SERPs (search engine results pages) to your business website.

Research which keywords are most suitable for your industry. When doing keyword research, think about what search terms consumers looking for your product or service might search for. Google AdWords has a good SEO planner that can help you to select relevant phrases and words related to your industry.

Once again, blogging is a great way to improve your SEO. Create blog posts that incorporate internal links, along with the keywords you’ve selected, which should appear in the text.

Include Calls to Action

Each page of the website that your customer lands on should have a call to action, such a “buy now” or “sign up” sign up button, for instance.

Chat windows can also enhance the customers’ experience of your website. They serve as great tools to increase sales through direct person-to-person interaction similar to what customers would expect from a brick-and-mortar business. What better way is there to get more sales from your business website than to offer a personal experience to customers?

Another method of getting more sales from website visitors is to offer them exclusive, time-sensitive discounts when making purchases online. Be sure to advertise any sales you’re running online on your website in areas like the sidebar or on your home page.

Start An E-Newsletter

Popups that prompt customers to sign-up for a company e-newsletter can have great conversion rates. What’s even better is that prospective customers on your newsletter are much more likely to buy from you than ones who aren’t. By running company newsletter, you can inform customers whenever you’re running a sale, which can draw more attention to sales and help you get the most of them.

While welcome mattes and disruptive popups that appear over the main content are popular, users don’t favor them. Newsletter sign up prompts appearing as a small popup in the right corner, or in the sidebar and footer areas are a less disruptive choice which will offer a better experience to your website visitors.

Web Design Choices

Using a simple design is another way to enhance user experience on your site. Make sure your website design is simple and easy for your potential customers to navigate. Before figuring out what your design should look like, think about your target audience and adapt your website to meet the needs of your customers. Your brand and the overall feeling that goes with it should reflect in your website design.

Keep your home page simple. Research has shown that fewer products on offer on the first page can increase website sales.

Pages should load quickly and the necessary information such as your business contact details should be easy to access.

Remember, customers don’t just access websites on their laptops — smart phones and tablets are also used. Because of this, modern websites need to be equally presentable across different devices. A website design that displays well on desktops, tablets and cellphones is called a responsive design and all business owners must ensure their website is responsive.
This is because your web design choices have a direct impact on your SEO. If pages on your website are is too cluttered, load slowly, or lack keywords, they won’t rank well in search engines.

Responsive web design is an integral design element for SEO purposes. The majority on search engine requests in modern day times are from smartphones, so search engines penalize websites that don’t have mobile versions, as this will limit accessibility for most users.

Reviews and Testimonials

Never underestimate the power of a good word! Having a page on your website dedicated to testimonials from previous customers can really boost your credibility online.
Customers tend to seek approval from others, so a good review will can increase sales tremendously. Reviews help your company to be seen as more credible than competitors and establish initial trust with prospects, hopefully cementing them as repeat customers.

In addition to reviews and testimonials, having an industry-led accreditation can boost customers’ morale and persuade them to make a purchase.

Keep Your Website Updated

A basic tip that’s often overlooked is keeping your business site updated. The company needs to hire an individual or professional web service to update the website on a regular basis.
Check your website for broken links and make sure you add more engaging content. If there are “error messages”, or “coming soon” landing pages where they don’t belong, you’ll lose customers due to sheer neglect. Any errors on your website will have a direct impact on your search ranking.

In terms of the general functioning of the website, ensure that your pages have a fast loading speed, otherwise potential customers will leave your website without ever seeing your content. Think about your website as an extension of your business and brand identity. You wouldn’t want customers to associate a visit to your shop with slow service. Likewise, a visit to your website shouldn’t seem long and dragged out either! Put in effort to ensure your business website best reflects your company values.

Get More Sales from Your Business Website

The role of a website for small businesses can’t be underestimated. It serves as both a platform to increase sales, while also providing improved accessibility to your business for customers. Your website establishes your credibility as a business, helps form relationships and showcases your company. To get more sales from your business website, make sure you invest time and money into your website and keep it updated.

Rozanne WildsHow to Get More Sales from Your Business Website
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PPC vs SEO: Which Is Best for Small Businesses?

PPC vs SEO: Which Is Best for Small Businesses?

October 8, 2019 Rozanne Wilds

In the constantly connected world we currently find ourselves, it makes sense that business owners would find potential customers online. Over the past 30 years, since the advent of the internet, the instance of digital marketing being used as the primary form of advertising has grown exponentially.

But, the digital marketing world is no easy landscape to navigate. There are numerous acronyms to decode and things to decipher. However, once you get the hang of it, online advertising can be a hugely rewarding and satisfying way to market your business. Read on to learn the difference between PPC vs SEO and what CPC means within a PPC campaign.

PPC vs CPC: What’s the Difference?

PPC and CPC are related digital marketing concepts. While PPC stands for Pay Per Click and refers to the type of advertisement being run on a particular platform, usually a search engine, CPC stands for Cost Per Click, and is the amount of money you will pay the search engine every time someone clicks on your advertisement.

PPC adverts are usually run on search engines such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon. Google Paid Search has become synonymous with PPC because it’s the biggest and most popular advertising platform in the world. Essentially PPC is a way to buy visits to your website instead of earning them organically through SEO techniques, which we’ll discuss later.

Whether or not your business’ advert is presented to a potential customer depends on the keywords that they type into the search engine in question. For example, if you have taken out a paid-for advert via Google Paid Search for your painting and repair business in Florida and your advertisement has the keywords “painting and repair” and “Florida” and someone types in the search term “Painting and repair business in Florida”, it will pick up on those keywords.

However, because “painting and repair” and “Florida” are such general terms, there is probably a lot of competition for them, which means you’ll pay more per click. That’s why advertisers and business owners conduct keyword research. The goal is to find out which industry-related search terms people are searching for and try to pick the ones which are relevant to the product or service, but which don’t have as much competition. This allows for a lower CPC in PPC campaigns and helps business owners get more exposure online for less investment.

Your CPC, or the amount that you pay every time someone clicks on your ad should be small enough that the customer’s visit is worth more than the fee. In other words, if you paid $2.50 for the click and the visit converts into a sale worth $200, that’s almost a 1000% profit.

Therefore, advertisers need to bid for keywords that are relevant and in line with their budget. Because Google wants to show its customers the most relevant search results possible, advertisers who select the most relevant keywords to the landing page of the product or service that the advert leads to and create highly organized, well-researched ad campaigns will be rewarded. The rewards are in the form of lower costs per click and higher search engine result page rankings.

PPC vs SEO: What’s the Difference

There are two ways to market your business through search engines like Google: PPC and SEO. Although the end result of gaining visitors to your website is the same, SEO and PPC marketing differ in the tactics that they use to attract customers and where they appear on the search engine results page (SERP). Marketing through SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, entails gaining visitors to your website organically, i.e. without having to pay for it, by using various techniques and strategies to improve your website’s SEO ranking. Various factors determine a website’s SEO ranking or what position it appears on the SERP.

PPC is instant — as soon as you start running your ad you will be able to see it at the top of the page on Google. SEO takes a lot more time and effort before you start seeing results. Generally, it takes about 6-9 months before you start seeing results, which means that if you aren’t persistent, your ranking might start to drop. Even though PPC adverts are instant, your campaign will only run as long as you have specified.

PPC vs SEO: Which Is the Best form of Marketing for A Small Business?

One advantage that PPC has over SEO is that you can target potential customers in specific geographic locations by using location-based keywords and chances are that if you’re a small business owner, you’ll want to target people near you. However, if you want to rank locally using SEO, you will have to make sure that your business name, address, and phone number are the same across all platforms.

As previously mentioned, SEO takes a lot longer to see results whereas PPC is instantaneous. Some SEO tactics include on-page optimization, blogging and backlink building which all require a lot of time and effort to execute. The person implementing these tactics also generally needs to have a good understanding of SEO and on-page ranking metrics so that they are able to determine whether their tactics are actually working. Taking all this into consideration, SEO might not be the best marketing strategy for small businesses who need results fast and can’t afford to wait for SEO to pay off.

That said, the long term investment into SEO should eventually pay off. Once your website consistently ranks high organically for local search terms, you won’t need to pay for every potential customer visiting your site. If your website stays high in organic search results, you might actually attract more traffic to your website with SEO compared to PPC.

So what’s better between PPC vs SEO will depend largely on your business marketing strategy and current needs. A combination is usually best for optimal results.

How to Get Started with Paid Advertising Online

The most popular out of all paid advertising channels is Google Ads. Google is by far the most popular search engine globally, so it makes sense to advertise on a platform where more people will see your ad. Through the Google Ads platform, you can easily measure your ROI and see which ads are performing well, as well as which aren’t. This can help you determine which campaigns you want to continue running.

Within PPC advertising, there are two types of ads: search network and display network. Search network ads are those ads you see at the top of your search engine results page when you type in a search term on Google. They look almost identical to the organic search results except for the fact that they say “ad” next to them. These are the most common types of PPC ads.

Display ads are less conspicuous than network ads — they look a lot more like ads. They consist of banner ads that appear on other websites that people visit and they are used to retarget potential customers. So, if you were browsing shoes on Amazon this morning but didn’t purchase anything or placed an item in your cart but failed to check out, chances are that later that day, you’ll be targeted with a banner ad for shoes. This way, companies can encourage potential customers to converting customers. These banner ads on other sites are called display ads.

Because banner ads are visual, they generally require someone with graphic design knowledge to design them and small businesses rarely have a graphic designer employed but of course this depends on the nature of the business. For this reason, a lot of business owners might prefer to use search network ads rather than display ads.

Creating Ads and Finding the Right Keywords

You will need to physically create PPC ads on Google Ads. Search ads are formatted with two headlines and a description with the option to add extensions which include extra information such as sale or promotion information which will entice potential customers to visit your website.

But before you create a PPC search ad, you will first need to conduct keyword research and in order to do this, you will need to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. This helps to determine what sort of search term they would enter if they were looking for the product or service that your business is selling. You can then enter this search term into the Google Ads keyword planner.

Make sure to narrow down the term as much as possible. If you are a business that sells shoes, don’t just use the keyword “shoes”, it’s too broad and there will be a huge amount of competition for it. You can try including the location of your business, as well as the type of shoes you sell.

Once you have come up with a few options to rank for, you will need to do some competitor research to check what kind of keywords your competitors are ranking for. This can seem daunting and you may want to enlist the help of a professional paid search specialist to help you with this.

Determining which keywords to use is the most important part of creating a search ad because it will dictate which kinds of visitors you attract to your website and whether or not those visitors will convert to customers, so it’s a good idea to do thorough research before spending money on clicks that don’t result in any sales.

To avoid wasting money on ads that don’t convert, it’s always best to hire an digital marketing firm with PPC and keyword research experience.

Rozanne WildsPPC vs SEO: Which Is Best for Small Businesses?
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