Today, most business owners choose the best e-commerce platforms to launch their websites. They integrate the safest payment systems, make their websites fast and responsive to attract the maximum number of customers; however, not all businesses attain success. Here are a few online marketing techniques that are helpful in attracting and converting more customers:

• Use a clean website design – You must use a clean, professional and systematic website design that can highlight your products. You must use high quality images, logos and descriptions to attract more customers.
• Display your phone number and address – It is important to display your phone number and address on the top of your web page to establish your online credibility. This will install confidence in your customers.
• Don’t ignore the critical elements – You must highlight certain critical elements on your web pages, such as "Free shipping", "returns policy", "discount offers" and more. All these elements can easily grab the attention of visitors and encourage them to take actions.
• Clearly display prices – You must display the prices of products as clearly as possible. In fact, you should clearly explain your shipping policies as well. This will dramatically improve your website’s conversion rate.
• Validation marks – Integrate validation marks on your website or security certificate icons or logos (such as VeriSign, Better Business Bureau, etc.) to gain the confidence of your visitors. This gives your website more credibility and trust in its niche.
• Reviews and Testimonials – Always add real reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers on your product pages to increase conversions and reduce your bounce rate. This will improve your trustworthiness and make your brand more popular.
• About Us Page – A creatively written "about us" page makes your website distinct from others. You can tell your story in a unique way to attract as well as retain customers.
• Promotional offers – You should display promotional offers, online coupons, Promo codes, cash back offers and deals on your home page itself to convert the maximum number of people. No doubt, this technique is helpful in engaging customers and generates additional revenues.

So if you want to improve your sales and bottom line, use these online marketing techniques. These techniques are powerful enough to accelerate the performance of your business and increase its overall efficiency. Get ready to realise the untapped growth potential of your online store. Quick facts:

• 89% of customers begin their buying process with search engines.

Different types of SEO strategies and innovative online marketing techniques are being adopted by a large number of brands to gain optimum advantage from e-commerce businesses. However, most e-commerce businesses fail to address key challenges and as a result of which they are unable to develop tactical SEO plans for their websites. Here are some of the key SEO strategies to achieve success:

• Setup Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools - It is a known fact that the use of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools on your site will allow you to monitor, analyse and measure organic search traffic and other performance indicators on your website more efficiently. These extraordinary tools allow business owners to monitor current trends, traffic sources, landing page performance, check backlinks, identify technical errors and other elements that are important for their business.
• Unique titles and meta descriptions - Titles and meta descriptions are crucial as they attract search engines. In fact, these are helpful in inspiring visitors and improving their knowledge about your products or services. Therefore, it is important to write unique titles and meta descriptions to convey your message.
• Block unnecessary URLs - An e-commerce website usually contains many dead pages, irrelevant URLs, thank you pages and other issues that consume a lot of time and make your website slow. You can use the Robots.txt file to block them and make your website more relevant, faster and responsive.
• Include keywords in your URLs - This is the best technique to improve organic visibility of your e-commerce website. In fact, this is vital for all category and subcategory pages. It also strengthens the structure of your website and eases crawling as well as indexing.
• Add reviews on product pages – Adding reviews and ratings on your product pages helps customers. In addition, it also helps to increase the organic visibility of your website.
• Make your site mobile friendly - Mobile friendly sites attract the maximum number of visitors - even search engines reward them. So make your website responsive and mobile friendly.

Use these smart SEO strategies to address specific issues of your website and grow your e-commerce business. However, you must strengthen your backlink profile, clean your website’s structure, make its "search features" stronger and resolve navigation issues to gain added advantages. Quick facts:

• 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more to get a better customer experience.
• Two-third of Americans aged 50-plus buy from e-retailers.

Carrying out a technical audit of a website is one of the most important things you need to do to improve a websites overall growth. It is done in order to make a website flawless and more search engine friendly. The ultimate aim of carrying out SEO technical audit is to highlight strong and weak points of a website. Of course, it is a daunting task and needs time and great skills; however, it can convert an ordinary website into a high performing website.  A complete website audit includes a detailed assessment and an in-depth analysis of:

• server errors
• indexed pages
• website speed
• robots.txt file
• site's cache dates
• Canonicalisation issues
• Internal and external content duplicity
• Case sensitive URLs and more.

Here are a few ways to perform a technical audit:

• Google Search Console – You should use the Google Search Console to examine and maintain your site's presence in Google’s Search results. You can easily monitor and resolve malware or spam issues with the help of this free tool. In addition, you can also check out your website’s traffic, optimise your rankings and make better informed decisions for your business.
• Google Analytics - Google Analytics is the best tool to monitor your website’s traffic and other insightful information regarding your website. You can use its various in-built tools to measure your website’s overall performance.
• URL Structure – You should keep the URL structure as simple as possible and use "hyphens" to separate words as opposed to “underscores". If possible, try to avoid the use of parameters in URL. Never ignore semantics.
• Screaming Frog SEO spider - Use Screaming Frog SEO spider to check for broken links (the http response ‘404 not found error’) on your site. If dead URLs are present; fix them immediately.
• Internal linking strategy – This is an important part of your SEO audit and should be strategically planned to strengthen the overall structure of your website.
• Anchor text - Anchor text is the visible part of a hyperlink; however, you should avoid using it frequently because they distract a web user.
• Nofollow tag - "Nofollow" tells search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link". You should use them on the unnecessary or worthless links.
• Javascript Redirects – Avoid using javascript redirects on your website and if they are present remove them instantly because it may attract a penalty from the search engines.

Conclusion No doubt, technical audit has to be perfect because a slight mistake can be fatal. So, make your website technically strong and see the results.

Magento is a well known e-commerce software platform trusted by the world's leading brands. Worldwide business owners use Magento because it is one of the best open source e-commerce platforms written in PHP. Its functionalities and features are extraordinary. Here are a few reasons to use Magento:

• Magento is Open Source – The Magento Community Edition is free. You can use any number of extensions to empower your website and make it an ideal online store. It has extensive features that helps business owners to manage their store easily.
• Support – Since this is an open source solution, a large community is there to assist you at every step. They keep the platform up to date as well as safe to use.
• Exclusively built for e-commerce – Magento is a perfect e-commerce platform with incredible in built capabilities. It has special, flexible, out-of-the-box and functional e-commerce features that make it unique and strong.
• Scalable - Magento is appropriate for e-commerce companies serving local communities as well as MNCs. Its e-commerce features are quite helpful for the business owners.
• Cost-effective – Magento helps to reduce development cost as it is loaded with great e-commerce features and extensions. It is easy to implement and maintain as well as ensures high performance of a website. Developers can easily improve its code’s quality with little efforts.
• Guaranteed high performance - When it comes to page load speed and other performance parameters, nothing can beat Magento. This simply improves the experience of online browsers.
• Flexible – Magento is a highly scalable and a professional platform; it provides a rich and engaging experience across all devices. In-house developers can easily implement and maintain it. In fact, it also boosts engagement and online sales.
• Easy to integrate - Integrating Magento with a great number of third party services, such as payment gateways, database applications, shipment tracking etc. is fast and easy.

In addition, Magento helps online stores to connect with their customers and provides a unique and exceptional brand experience to them. Some of the best advantages are:

• It requires minimal coding,
• It offers mobile optimised experience,
• It provides a completely customised design interface.

Quick facts:

• Magento is an ultimate feature rich platform, which provides its users a greater level of flexibility and control.
• Magento is a platform, which empowers about 150,000+ online stores.
• It is used by nearly 25% of the top 1 million websites.

Today, every online business strives to achieve leads. They use various advanced marketing tools and techniques to stay ahead of their competitors, but they still don’t know how to break the ice. When it comes to lead generation, content marketing is still unexplored. Interesting, innovative and easy to understand content can easily capture the interest of people. In a nutshell, better use of content marketing can generate more leads. Quick facts:

• The biggest challenge for B2B marketers is “generating high-quality leads (61%)”.
• The three most common lead generation strategies are: email marketing (78%), event marketing (73%) and content marketing. (67%)
• 83% of B2B marketers use content marketing for lead generation.

Here are a few ways to generate leads by using content marketing:

• Newsletters – A newsletter is a regularly distributed publication that is used for capturing the interest of people. In fact, it is one of the most cost effective and efficient ways to grow your email list. Newsletters are not only helpful in updating customers, but also improve their knowledge and understanding about a specific topic.
• Blog Posts – World class business owners have recognised the potential of regular blogging. Blogging not only establishes a better connection with customers, but also helps businesses to make their customers loyal. Businesses spread their messages, industry or product information in an interactive way through blog posts. No doubt, blogging can easily improve a brand image and visibility of a website as well.
• Quiz - Offering a quiz to your visitors is the best and the most creative way to learn more about them, engage them, spark interest in them and obtain their information. It is also a great way to connect with your audiences and learn about their preferences.
• Videos – In order to generate leads, it is important to create helpful, interactive and useful videos that can solve the problems of your users. You must create "how to" videos or "video tutorials" to help your users. Through videos you can easily educate them in a friendly manner.
• Webinars – This is the best and the most effective way to share your presentations, discussions, demonstrations or instructions with your audiences. Most business owners use webinars to spread their messages and presentations to public.

You can combine all these dynamic content marketing tactics to redesign your marketing plans. However, well crafted content is the key. So, it’s important to create valuable content for your users so that it can play a sheet anchor role for your business.

Businesses spend far too much money on their content marketing efforts; however, they often fail to achieve the desired results. One of the prime reasons is that they do not develop an interactive content strategy. Interactive content is the best way to educate, inform, entertain and engage audiences. It is a well known fact that interactive content has the ability to convert browsers into customers. Here are a few established tools to create interactive content for business promotion:

• Qzzr – Quizzes are the one of the most interactive methods and engages a large number of users on the web. To generate an online quiz, use Qzzr because it is a great and effective online quiz tool.  This tool also helps you to post a quiz anywhere on the web and measure results.
• SnapApp – This is one of the most interactive content marketing platforms, which gives you everything you need to create, publish, manage and measure compelling audience experiences. This tool allows you to develop a great variety of content from calculators to surveys and even infographics. This tool is easy to use, fast and flexible as well.
• PowToon – You can use PowToon to create animated, professional and interactive videos as well as presentations for your customers. Interactive videos are the best way to grab the attention of users. You can easily interact, explain, teach and engage your audiences through your videos.
• SlideShare - SlideShare is a flexible and scalable platform that helps modern business owners. Businesses can share their presentations, infographics, documents or videos to inform and educate their customers.
• ContentTools – This tool is very useful for online marketers. It is helpful in creating interactive content like quizzes, micro-sites, infographics, calculators, content to capture leads and engage audiences.
• Piktochart - Piktochart is an easy and flexible infographic design application to produce beautiful and high quality graphics or infographics. It has the ability to take your visual communication to the next level. You can import your data, create statistics and use in built icons to create presentations or infographics.

You can easily grow your business’s popularity and achieve new heights by disseminating fresh and interactive content. All the above mentioned tools are easy to use, excellent and versatile. You can use them according to your business objectives and requirements. So, plan, create, optimise and publish interactive content to achieve quick and sustainable results. Embrace the power of these intuitive tools.

Every online business owner wants to make a highly productive landing page to gain the maximum advantage; however, they often make certain mistakes. In order to make a landing page productive and effective, it is essential to focus on its essential aspects. There are many aspects of a landing page from its headings to the images. You should optimise them appropriately to gain significant benefits. Learn how online marketers can take advantages of optimising their landing page:

• Images/vector graphics – Use high-resolution realistic images that are relevant to your products or services. Good images will make your website more appealing and professional.
• Explanations – Add proper and persuasive explanations wherever necessary to improve the overall understanding of your users. Your explanations should match your headings as well as images. Perfect descriptions or explanations help to sell products.
• List product and service benefits – This will add extra value to your website and allow your users to understand and make informed decisions. This will also differentiate your website from others and improve your customers’ shopping experience.
• Maintain a flow – Some business owners use CTAs at different locations on their websites, which is a big mistake. Maintain a logical flow – provide explanation, benefits, features testimonials and conclude with your CTA. This will make your website more professional and attractive.
• Use forms – You can use persuasive elements such as forms. This will help you to receive information about your users. You can use colourful images, forms and contrasting CTAs.
• Add testimonials – This is the most important trust signal for your website. You must add reviews and success stories to add value to your website. However, you should use short testimonials with pictures and authentic information.
• Means of contact – Add multiple contact details (a phone number, a physical address and an email address) to your website to help your users. This will prove that you are a legitimate business on the web.
• Use compelling CTAs – Use bright, colourful and a bigger "call-to-action buttons" to every page of your website so that they can elicit an immediate response.  This will attract users and encourage them to click and take action. In fact, positioning of your CTAs is also important; so, perform A/B testing before implementing them.

Your landing page is the best place to convert web browsers into your customers. You must perform thorough research and analysis before creating and optimising your landing pages for optimum results. A better landing page will increase your brand’s visibility and allows you to become a dominant player in your industry.

Smart implementation of SEO techniques can increase websites’ visitors, search traffic as well as the overall conversion rate. Unfortunately, more often than not business owners fail to understand its fundamental and as a result they miss certain significant elements. Therefore, it is important to adopt a desirable SEO approach to achieve maximum gains. Here are a few actionable SEO techniques that should be implemented by all online business owners:

• Keywords Research – Of course, it is the most fundamental element for any website and should not be ignored. Business owners should spend a lot of time and efforts in researching the right keywords. It requires skills, knowledge as well as an analytical mind to pick the best keywords for each campaign. (Use the Google keyword  planner tool)
• Content creation – Don’t write just for the sake of writing. Business owners should analyse and research the finest tools/resources to obtain the industry insights to develop the most effective, readable and actionable content. (Use Buzzsumo to analyse content)
• Write attractive headings – Whether it is a piece of web content, an article, a blog or a press release, always write compelling and keyword rich headings. This will improve the overall engagement as well as lower the bounce rate of your website.
• Focus on user generated content - User generated content can make your website much more authentic, relevant, attractive and valuable. This will help you to achieve an edge over your competitors on the web.
• Email your subscribers - Once you publish a post, immediately email your subscribers with this news to update them and improve their overall understanding.
• Promote your content on Social Media – Whether it is a blog post, article, press release, video or any presentation, never fail to promote this on the top social media sites. This is the best way to achieve extensive organic traffic.
• Join LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a must for all businesses. It is a true game changer and a powerful platform for companies to make new connection and build their brand.
• Use Google+ - Google+ delivers measurable output and can transform your online business efficiently. This will significantly improve your website’s popularity.
• Achieve more inbound links – Create beautiful infographics, case studies, brand related stories, useful articles and presentations to achieve inbound links for your website. This will improve the trustworthiness of your brand or a website.   
• Use Quora – This is one of the most innovative and creative platforms to connect with your customers. All you need to do is to answer the questions and help your customers. This is the finest way to build your brand on the web. (Quora is a well-known question and answer site)

All these SEO techniques are helpful for both rookie as well as seasoned SEO professionals who want to achieve scalable results. Quick tips:

• Always make keyword rich title and description tags.
• Use Google’s Search Console to find your exact keyword rankings.
• Try to embed long tail keywords in your title tags.
• Use keyword rich anchor text across your website.
• Always use the Keyword Planner tool to get the closest variations of your keywords.

Today, online business owners want to dominate their niche and for that they develop a functional website and promote it all across the web. To connect with their audiences they often choose blogging because it is one of the most effective forms of business promotion and communication, which allows them to spread their messages to the widely distributed audiences. However, in order to achieve success in blogging, certain essential elements need to be considered. Here are a few elements that can make your blog more popular i.e. visible, accessible & readable:

• Organise your posts – It is always good to organise your posts in separate categories. This makes your content more visible, accessible, readable, searchable and influences your readers positively. You can add impressive images, videos and other engaging elements for more visibility.
• Always suggest previous and next posts – This is the best way to guide your readers and simplify your blogging structure. This will improve the quality of your blog and reduce its bounce rate as well.
• Add social sharing buttons – Add social sharing buttons to your blog for instant distribution of your content across multiple social platforms. This helps to popularise your blog and make it visible all over the web.
• Use a sidebar - A sidebar is a vital element of your blog. This makes your blog much more interesting and compelling. A sidebar helps search engines as well as users to gain more information. You can provide your company’s or products’ information through this sidebar.
• Respond to the comments – Comments or feedbacks are a valuable asset to your blog; you must respond to each comment in order to involve your audiences. This will also improve your brand value and make your blog more popular. Never forget to thank people for their support.
• Write useful content for your readers – You can provide tips, techniques, guides, tutorials and other industry related information to improve the understanding of your readers.
• Optimise your blog content – If your blog has multiple videos, images, infographics and presentations, you must optimise them according to your keywords and use internal linking techniques because such links are an important part of any successful blog.
• Promote your blog – You must promote your blog on social media sites. This will help your blog to achieve quick exposure.  Make sure that your pages are accessible acrossall devices.

Nevertheless, spend some time to check your analytics for traffic volumes; bounce rate as well as visit duration. No doubt, all these elements will make your blog well structured, visible, accessible and popular that can attract the maximum number of readers and generate leads for your business. Quick tips:

• Use impressive videos, images and high tech designs on your blog.
• Keep your tone consistent.
• Never use jargons.
• Write in a conversational language.
• Maintain a consistent look and feel of your blog.

Quick facts:

• WordPress and Blogspot are two most popular blogging platforms.
• 93% of B2B marketers are using content marketing.
• More than 70% of B2B marketers use the “big 4” social media sites (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) to distribute content.

It goes without saying that customers always like safe, convenient and easy to use websites. In other words, improve the shopping experience of your customers and see the difference overnight. This will also improve your overall ROI and brand value. Here are a few ways to improve the shopping experience of your customers:

• Easy navigation and search features – Make your website’s navigation simple with a well defined path to specific web pages. It should also have a "search" feature to save the precious time of your customers. This is the most effective way to convert customers.
• Improve your site’s speed – By improving your website’s speed, you can actually help your customers to buy more in a faster and easier way.
• Dynamic pricing – Customise your products’ pricing to increase your profitability as well as improve customer relationships. This will also give you an edge over your competitors.
• Write original product descriptions – Fresh product descriptions add value to your website. You should also update product descriptions, specifications, terms and conditions, pricing details and other relevant information to assist and attract your customers. This will help your customers to make more informed decisions.
• Add product comparison – If you want to improve the decision making capacity of your customers, add product comparison to your website. This will help you to drive more sales.
• Product recommendations – You should provide product recommendations based on the shopping habits of your customers. This will help you to improve your sales.
• Quick order processing – This is the best way to improve the shopping experience of your customers. This will not only save their time, but also encourage them to order items in a bulk quantity.
• Offer bulk discount – You can easily accelerate the purchasing process by offering bulk discounts to your customers. You can also include coupon codes and other special offers to engage your customers.
• Relationship management - Relationship management helps you to improve the experience of your valued customers, focus on online and offline marketing efforts and provide them more personalised services. This will establish your brand image and allow people to become your loyal customers.

These figuratively invaluable elements can significantly improve the shopping experience of your customers. So, don’t just burn the midnight oil, integrate these website elements to overpower your competitors and enjoy success. Quick facts:

• Amazon’s website has 94 million visitors per month.
• 77% of men and 68% of women shop during their lunch hour.
• 72% of women look online for apparels and lingerie.
• Two-thirds of 50 plus Americans buy from e-retailers.