With almost every industry having made their journey from ‘bricks-versus-clicks’ to ‘bricks-and-clicks’, revenue from websites is no longer secondary. Leveraging technology to understand consumer needs have enabled brands to take a direct-to-consumer or D2C approach and build one-on-one relationships with them.
The pandemic has accelerated online buying in India like never before. Today, having a high-performing customer friendly website is a major factor contributing to a brand’s credibility. A high quality website is increasingly being used as a tool to stand out among the competition, and communicate with users effectively.
In this webinar, Mr. Sandesh Gupta from WakeFit emphasizes on several key factors that helped improve conversion rate on the website for WakeFit.
Key Enablers to Improve Conversion Rates on Websites
- Optimizing Navigation, Structure and Design
To start with, Mr. Sandesh Gupta stresses on the importance of going mobile first. The latest numbers indicate that 55% of page views come from mobile phones and around 46% of all consumers complete their purchase cycle on cell phones. These numbers are proof enough that brands with poor mobile sites are bound to lose out on ample opportunities.
The second most important factor that affects website conversion rate is navigation, hierarchy and user experience. The time and effort taken by an individual to make a decision is directly proportional to the number of choices available. How is this relevant to websites? Failing to design a smooth navigation for your users by cluttering your homepage/navigation bar with hundreds of products can easily overwhelm a customer and push them away to a competitor. Instead, use the navigation bar, main categories and subcategories optimally to provide the customer with helpful information instead of stuffing them with irrelevant or unnecessary information.
Mr. Sandesh Gupta also speaks elaborately on the importance of the right taxonomy for URL structures (with folder name v/s without folder name v/s sub-domain name) and their role in attracting the right traffic. He also highlights the importance of using accurate breadcrumbs on your category/product pages and its role in shaping customer experience.
- SEO Checklist
While learning how to use SEO to your benefit is an extensive subject by itself, Mr. Sandesh takes the viewers through the most important basics and their role in shaping website traffic/conversion. To begin with, avoid taking any shortcuts. It can be tempting to optimize on a few keywords for quick results. However, such results are often short-term in nature and may even turn counter-productive. Instead, go forward with a holistic approach and map your keywords to optimize user experience at every step of the user journey.
Based on your identified keywords, divide your content into two categories – transactional and informational. Transactional content is direct information that helps the user make a purchase decision such as price, offers, discounts and so on. Whereas informational content involves blogs, guides, articles, etc. Informational content improves the credibility of the brand and helps establish itself as a subject matter expert, which eventually leads to sales, higher retention and brand recall.
Other factors that Mr. Sandeep has focused on as crucial players in building customer experience are the page speed, sitemap structure, conversational abilities (including bots), schemas, placement of CTAs and the inclusion of vernacular languages (in case of businesses with a wider target audience).
Here are a few SEO tools that come highly recommended by Mr. Sandeep.
Based on his personal experience with WakeFit, Mr. Sandeep has also provided his viewers with a few quick hacks that immensely helped him in optimizing SEO.
Reviews, Ratings and Other Elements
Reviews and ratings play a significant role in building customer trust, and thereby, succeeding in SEO. There are multiple tools available today that help brands collect, segment and upload reviews and ratings from across the web (Amazon, Flipkart, Google). In case you do not have these tools, it is still fundamental to scrape them off the web manually and upload them onto your website. And most importantly, stay honest with your customers when it comes to reviews. Upload each and every review without manipulating them and work on the negative ones to get ahead. You can even segregate reviews on the basis of videos/images, quality based, delivery based and so on. This will help customers directly read reviews on focused aspects that they’re curious about.
There are several other factors covered by Mr. Sandeep covers including search bar optimization, filter optimization, etc. in this insightful webinar. The video of the webinar will be shared soon.
