FOCUS | Making the most of the internet Make your website work for you


David O’Keefe, digital marketing director at website design and digital marketing agency Fat Media, on how to make your website more user-friendly and productive


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he key to driving online sales and also getting people into store is creating a website that showcases your products in the right way and converts visitors to customers. The principles of getting your website to drive sales are basically the same whatever industry you work in. The secret is making things easy to find and easy to buy. Sounds simple, but it involves a lot of work and testing to get it right.


Navigation


The first thing I recommend to any business, but in particular retail companies, where you really need to catch potential customers before they just bounce from your site to a competitor, is to get your navigation right.


If you can’t capture interest quickly, you’ll lose that custom, so the site needs to be easy to navigate for users, so they can find exactly what they are looking for when they want it.


Don’t overcomplicate the journey and user experience. For many retail clients, we recommend adding what we call a mega menu on the home page. This makes it simple for visitors to quickly locate products, rather than clicking through several pages to find the item they need.


This mega menu and the site navigation as a whole should be ‘sticky’, so basically when a visitor is scrolling down through pages, they can still instantly go to the navigation bar to find something else, rather than having to scroll back up to the top of the page. Similar to this is also making sure you have an effective site search function, so visitors can just add in a keyword and find the product straight away. Easy navigation and speed of finding products is what really leads to site visits being converted to sales either on that visit or in the future. Sticking to the easy navigation theme, another thing that is key for e-commerce and retail sites is having a wish list function. This wish list gives visitors the opportunity to shortlist items they like before they are ready to buy.


Often for certain products, particularly higher-ticket items like bathroom suites, beds, sofas, kitchens, etc, it’s not going to be a quick purchase. The decision time is often longer, but if the website gives potential customers the opportunity to shortlist their favourite items, it helps them find their choices easily when they revisit the site, added to which it’s easier to show them to friends or partners who maybe involved in the decision-making process. Finally, when it comes to the purchase element of the website, keep it simple and fast, so you don’t lose custom on that final hurdle. For most of the clients we work with, we recommend using Magento 2. This is an e-commerce platform that has a really simple, two-step checkout process, so it really is easy for the customer to use.


Content is king


Content is still king on the website for numerous reasons, both from the perspective of conversion and also SEO (search engine optimisation). Look at just providing simple, uncluttered content and easy links to other areas of the site. It’s important you do this for each page. You may be surprised, but lots of visitors don’t always hit your home page first, so every page must work as efficiently as possible.


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Use Google tools more effectively. They offer a whole range of analytics that can be used to test and improve how your website is performing


There’s nothing worse than a crowded page, so separate content on to different pages. That way, there isn’t an information overload, plus it gives your site more opportunities to appear in search engine results. This is because specific content will rank more highly for a given term – so the more you have, the more searches you should appear in. When planning your website, you need to know which pages are the most important and this can be done with help from Google Analytics. It will show which pages visitors are entering your site on, and therefore which should be prioritised. As well as thinking about the depth of content on each page, it’s important to consider the tone of voice – how things are described and whether you are using up-to-date imagery? This is all key to both improving search engine rankings and making sure your website drives sales.


For clients like Finest Editions and Oak Furniture UK, we paid a lot of attention not only to the navigation, but also the content descriptions and use of imagery, recommending actions such as writing longer and more detailed product descriptions. This is because Google sees longer and more detailed pages as more authoritative and ranks them higher. We also used Google’s Keyword Planner to understand what terms are searched most often,


and used this to determine the keywords we used in the page copy and the metadata, which is the page title and description that searchers see. One of our key tips for businesses is to use Google tools more effectively. They offer a whole range of analytics that can be used to test and improve how your website is performing.


The Google Search Console, in particular, provides vital technical data on SEO issues on your website that may be critical and need attention. This tool can be used to optimise and improve your SEO and website content.


Re-marketing One of the best methods of re-marketing to people who have already


browsed your site but not


purchased is serving them adverts to bring them back or in-store to view the product they were interested in. So, if we were to recommend one form of digital marketing to really convert your web traffic, it would be to invest in this tactic. By improving the ease of navigation on your site, re-targeting people already interested in your products and really thinking about making those pages deliver the content visitors want, you can create a website that will engage and convert online users to either online sales or visitors to the showroom.


kbbr Top social media tips from retailers


• Don’t let it take over. It’s awesome and fairly essential but not the be all and end all. – @meliorakbb on Instagram • Have it planned out and be organised – @dunlop_kitchens on Instagram • Have a schedule of what you are posting and when. Be consistent and use


apps like Buffer – @tillykh on Instagram • Good quality content and not too much text as people will get bored of reading – @affordablekitchens on Instagram • Only post interesting stuff – @hayleyt76 of @day_true on Instagram


• Be organised. Have a plan, with goals and diligently stick to it – @saffronpea, marketing professionals, on Twitter • Stay up-to-date with what’s trending and incorporate this into your business! Have fun with posts to add personality to the brand – @nuiebathrooms on Twitter


kbbreview · December 2019


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