Optimise WooCommerce Conversion Rates
eCommerce is a very competitive space. Think about Takealot or OneDayOnly and how they dominate the eCommerce market in South Africa and what actually made you purchase any product from them. Combine that with the heightened expectations of modern consumers (50% won’t wait longer than 3 seconds before abandoning a poorly-designed e-commerce site) and you’ll understand why it’s vital to optimize your e-commerce site.
How can you do that? Just follow the optimization tips mentioned below and think how they can apply to your own website!
1. Optimize Your Product Pages
Include SEO-friendly titles. Keywords here are important to attract traffic organically – the following should be your golden rule of thumb when making page titles.
- Write the title for humans first.
- Keep your titles short and to the point.
- Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning.
- If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords.
- Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles.
- Make your title catchy to improve CTR.
Use breadcrumbs. Specifically based on product hierarchy and visitor history so people can find products easily. Your site’s navigation should be easy to understand and intuitive. Ever found yourself looking for a product to purchase and you go through a few links, then found that you can’t go back? This is the purpose of breadcrumbs, being able to move around without breaking the user-experience completely – especially when a user is looking for multiple products and / or comparing them
You also need to follow other e-commerce SEO best practices pertaining to internal linking, meta descriptions, and navigation. Your SEO efforts should be geared towards providing the best UX to your visitors, which will automatically enhance your search rankings.
Ensure you are using high quality product images. If you do not have any – look around on the internet – amateur product images can make the product less attractive; Such as lighting could be bad and make the product color seem dulled or discolored.
2. Mobile-Optimize Your Site
Mobile-optimized stores have higher conversion rates than websites that aren’t mobile-ready. Devices are varied and almost everyone has a mobile phone in the 21st Century.
To ensure that your e-commerce site looks and works perfectly on mobile devices, you can implement the following:
- Speed up your site by minifying code and compressing your images. This would help both desktop and mobile users – This would become and obvious problem as for example: A user is on your website downloading 20 Megabytes per page that loads completely at 10 seconds – They wouldn’t browse very far before leaving out of frustration.
Not sure if your website is slow or not? Visit this page for more information on how to test your website and get results if you need any website speed optimisation. - Build your website on responsive designs and make sure everything fits well within the responsive viewport.
- Act as a user – albeit a very simple solution, often overlooked – Follow the customer journey on your own device from start to checkout – do so in various ways – the most common problem you will find is not being able to find a certain product. Implementing ajax product search and accurate filters will become invaluable.
3. Upsell to Existing Customers
It’s easier and cheaper to sell to existing customers than to new ones. To upsell efficiently, here are some things you can do:
- Use social proof to convince customers. Such as quotes and reviews from existing customers
- Reduce prices. If you notice a certain product being slow sellers in comparison to others? Put down the price to make it a deal hard to refuse.
- Upsell correctly. Product pages are the most used spot for upsells “Frequently Bought Together” or “Popular Products” sections have a good response rate on product pages.
4. Create Urgency & Incentivize
Urgency and incentives are a great way to boost your sales and optimise WooCommerce conversion rates – If you don’t want to discount your products for exiting visitors, We completely get you. Discount codes can hurt your profit margins and reduce your products’ perceived value.
Whatever your incentive is (a free product, shipping, or small discount), my suggestion is to offer it only to a portion of your visitors.
How?
Use urgency-creating indicators.
- Display limited stock levels.
- Create timed sales or themed sales.
- Create banners that are visually appealing with sales info.
- Make use of exit-intent popups. Exit-intent is a technology that detects when a visitor’s cursor moves outside the browser window.
There are so many benefits to using exit-intent popups on your website. Here are just a few ways these campaigns will help your business:
- Grow Your Email List: Attract new subscribers with FAST results.
- Distribute Lead Magnets: Entice new visitors with valuable content, coupons, freebies, and more.
- Reduce Site Abandonment: Keep visitors engaged with your site longer before they leave forever.
- Reduce Cart Abandonment: Provide incentives to buy at a critical moment in the customer journey.
- Boost SEO: Increase the overall time people engage with your site, redirect users to popular posts, and more to help your SEO.
5. Reduce Cart Abandonment Rates
radiantWEB makes use cart abandonment software to follow up on lost customers and track abandoned carts. For example, sending follow up emails reminding the user that their is items still left in their cart – one can offer a discount to try push for conversation – the possibilities and engagement is extensive – so really what you – as the store owner would like to approach that engagement and one the quickest solutions to optimise WooCommerce conversion rates.
One important point to cover is checkout – this needs to be thought-out and precise and overall general ways improve WooCommerce cart checkout, such as:
- Remove surprises during checkout such as large delivery fee’s – be transparent as possible.
- Offer multiple payment options.
- Allow guest checkout.
- Send abandoned cart emails
- Allow the use of coupons.
- Add trust indicators, such as guarantee’s and certifications.