The easier it is for your website to move from your landing page to your checkout page, the higher your conversion rate.
It’s tempting to have a permanent link to anything on your site. Providing users with all types and categories of content in one place seems like a great way to save them time. The problem is that most websites don’t have the right content in the right place the first time.
More content means more navigating, searching, managing, and staying up to date. From a content curation perspective, this quickly becomes overwhelming, with high-quality content thinly distributed throughout the site. Product descriptions and images become outdated, videos (if any) become irrelevant, no one answers questions, and sales plummet.
Avoiding this requires a consistent effort to reduce the overall amount and variety of content accessible online.
Overall, reducing the amount and variety of content accessible online requires a consistent effort.
For example, during a website redesign, The Good discovered that the top 50% of customer products accounted for 80% of sales (the bottom 25% of products accounted for less than 5% of total sales). occupies). By focusing their content efforts on these products, the client was able to reduce their workload, streamline their content, and increase overall traffic and sales to their new website.
Even if you reduce the amount of content on your brand’s website, your website still needs to be end-of-sale.To do this, your customers must be able to find the right product and intelligently evaluate their choices.
Here are some best practices for selling your branded website:
Navigation
Pages with clear navigation are naturally more accessible. They direct customers from their landing page to product detail pages that provide excellent checkout information.
Navigation has always been the biggest challenge for websites. This is often because the industry has a backwards-looking, brand-centric mindset when it comes to content creation. In their constant search for relevant conversations, content creators are usually more concerned with quantity than quality. This content quickly becomes outdated and does not help customers with their purchasing decisions.
The time you spend improving your website’s content will lead to higher conversion rates.
Search engines assess the value of page content when ranking search results. You consider how many people will find your content helpful in achieving their goals. This alone is enough to convince managers that conversion rates reflect the time spent improving content.
Pages with clear navigation are naturally more accessible. Drive customers from your landing page to product detail pages that provide great information.
It’s important to put popular content in a prominent place on your landing pages, especially your homepage.
The main content of the landing page
- Links to best-selling products
- Selected product videos
- Descriptively named product categories prioritized by popularity
- Product search bar
- Store search function
- Customer service contact details
- Link to shopping cart
More content means more complexity. Complexity prevents people from completing the assessments and actions they were meant to do. It irritates both managers and customers. Therefore, the easier the way to complete a task, the better. A simple fix like adding a product filter could increase sales for him by 76%. Fixed navigation is 22% better than scrolling to a menu at the top of the page.
Site search
Website search plays a different role for each e-commerce site. In general, the more inventory you have, the more important your search becomes. Unfortunately, if there’s one area where websites consistently let customers down, it’s website search.
Customers who know exactly what they’re looking for often turn to site search in hopes of getting there faster than navigating through the site. Search terms used by customers ranging from exact product names to product SKUs (for e-commerce).
An excellent site search engine will:
- Return accurate and expected results
- Auto-suggest relevant keywords
- Account for:
- Plural case
- Singular case
- Unique branded spellings
- Category Search (return product category listing page)
- Common misspellings
- Offer helpful suggestions and top links on pages that return no results
- Provide visual results
If you have to track site search through Google Analytics, try this quick analysis.
- Login to Analytics and navigate to: Content > Site Search > Top Queries > Export top 50 queries
- Go through and test each query by taking the top query first
- Evaluate the quality of the results you find. To get started, categorize the search results into four main groups: Excellent, Good, Poor, Zero Results, Irrelevant
- Measure how each of these search results compares to see how your site search is performing. Make sure to consider quality by search volume, prioritizing higher-ranked searches.
If you do not have a site search set up in your analytics program, you can usually get the same data by identifying the first parameter when a search is made. If this is the case:
- Go to your site and perform a search
- Look at the URL in the address bar and identify the search parameter (such as /search?q=)
- Go into your Analytics program and navigate to Content > Site Content > All Pages > Search for your unique parameter
- This will list all the pages that include this parameter in the URL
- Export this data
- Clean the data by removing all parameters and substituting dashes for spaces, etc. Once the data is clean, you are ready to evaluate the search quality
Product Comparison
In our experience conducting user tests and interviews, we’ve found that users want to compare products side by side to figure out which one will work best for them. After narrowing their choices to two or three options, they’ll compare every last detail right down to user reviews.
Over half the customers we’ve conducted tests with abandoned their session because they couldn’t find enough information about a particular product to make a confident purchase. Detailed product information can’t be compared if it’s not there in the first place. Over half of our customers abandoned sessions because they were unable to find enough information about a particular product.
The best way to encourage useful product comparisons is to provide easily comparable information for similar products. Without this kind of information, you have to wade through a sea of marketing jargon to differentiate your product.
Typically, when users try to compare products side by side, they open links in multiple tabs and flip back and forth between them. I’ve seen people create massive spreadsheets to determine the best products and even catalogue the smallest details. Some websites offer product comparison tools, but often there is no comparable information available within these tools.
Great product comparison tool:
- Provides the same type of information for similar products
- Contains detailed technical data
- Provides sizing tips based on power needs
- Describe the best use cases for each product
- Help customers choose from similar products within a series (Basic, Standard, Pro, Pro XL, etc.).
- There are prominent links:
- Remove or add items to compare
- Return to the product detail page
- Add item to shopping cart
Store Locator
No matter how good an online shopping experience may be, there will always be customers who feel more comfortable completing their transactions in a retail store. This makes easily findable store locators a necessary component to any ecommerce site, especially since 90% of customers who search for a store nearby take action within 24 hours.
Based on a Nielsen Group study, 96% of users found a location near them, but 32% reported that they had difficulty in the process. Many users couldn’t easily find the store locator feature, and 73% used a search engine to find a nearby store instead.
If a store locator fails, it typically fails in one of these key areas:
- Identifying where to start searching
- Using the store locator feature
- Getting directions
- Bad data – the store information is out of date or the store doesn’t carry the product (or brand)
A successful store locator:
- Is easy to find in the main menu and on product pages
- Is easy to use and includes key contact information for each store
- Provides directions from any starting point to a store’s location
Radio Shack saw its mobile locator increase in-store traffic from 40%-60% by improving its store locator. 73% of users go to search engines (mainly Google) when asked to find places near a particular business. Only 13% went directly to the company’s website, and the remaining 13% went to a dedicated mapping service.
