In this digital age, e-commerce industry is showing noteworthy growth.  No wonder, more and more business owners are coming forward to avail the opportunity. However, the question is, is it so easy to gain success by just having an e-commerce store? No, it is essential to create a practical strategy to experience remarkable growth.

Let’s see how:

Mobile

This is a mobile-first age, where people like to browse web through their mobile. That is why, it is important to develop a mobile friendly website.

However, you need to focus on certain elements, such as:

• website design
• page load speed
• usability

Chatbots

Today, more and more marketing managers recommend using chatbots to help customers and simplify their buying process. However, it must be noted that your chatbots have a clear understanding of your customers and should improve the overall browsing and buying experience of customers.

You also need to ensure that your chatbot:

• engages maximum number of users
• provides conversational support
• elevates buying experience of users

Videos

Today, top e-commerce giants have started using videos to impress their customers and make them loyal.

For better results, you should:

• create compelling and story based videos
• create a clear call-to-action
• explain the features and benefits of products/services

Snapchat

Snapchat is revolutionising the sphere of marketing. It allows businesses to improve the overall experience of their users.  If you are having an e-commerce store, you must leverage its features and functionalities (GeoFilters and Memories).

Same day delivery

It is yet another extraordinary way to attract users as well as improve sales. It is not only helpful in making your brand distinctive, but also engages online shoppers, which is the need of the hour.

Loyalty programs

If you want to encourage repeat customers and improve customer satisfaction, you need to create different types of loyalty programs. Today, customers expect more from a brand that is why it is essential to engage them through loyalty programs.

Classic website designs

There is no better way to attract customers than creating a beautiful website design. Beautiful, bold and flashy designs not only attract customers, but also engage them for long. However, you need to strike the right balance between text and images.

So, are you ready to avail the opportunities and accelerate growth in e-commerce sector with the above given strategies.

Looking for amazing tools and techniques that can improve content quality as well as amplify business productivity? Here are a few ways to improve your online marketing endeavours.

Focus on competitive analysis

Whether you are a new marketer or a seasoned one, to maximise your brand’s visibility as well as ensure success, you need to perform competitive analysis. For better output -

• Identify your competitors.
• Check their social media profiles, posts as well as fans and followers.
• Keep an eye on the number of shares, click-throughs, and comments.
• Use the right tools – SEMrush, Sproutsocial, etc.
• Determine their content strategy.

Analyse your website

It is important to make your website clean, usable and competitive. For better results -

• Eliminate ads that irk users.
• Try to build trust and authority.
• Remove 404 errors.
• Optimise images.

Write quality blog posts

Today, it is essential to maintain a blog because it is an efficient form of marketing. Of course, writing high-quality blog posts is a difficult task; however, if you invest your time in proper research, you may win the battle. For better results -

• Do a proper research on the blog’s title.
• Publish your blog posts on basic HTML layouts.
• Include practical ideas and tips to attract users.
• Use quotes.
• Include real-world examples.
• Discover great content by using answerthepublic.com

Maximise your online presence

Consumer behaviour changes very fast; hence, it is important to change SEO strategies accordingly. For better results -

• Always keep an eye on the competition in SERPs.
• Create content that meets your users’ needs.
• Set up your mobile analytics.
• Use Schema markup.
• Use Bing Ads and Google AdWords.
• Focus on customer’s intent while optimising your website.
• Optimise important website pages for users.

Improve conversions

Whether it’s a shopping season or not, make good use of conversion techniques. For better results -

• Test and analyse your shopping cart at regular intervals.
• Give importance to customers’ reviews.
• Always use the most attractive images.
• Create category pages properly.

Use high-quality SEO reporting and analytics

Both analytics and reporting are  important for an SEO campaign. As a marketer, you should use high quality Analytics and reporting tools to ensure success.  You can use -

• Search console
• Neil Patel’s SEO Analyzer
• Woorank
• SEMRush
• Majestic SEO

There are a number of ways businesses can use to benefit their marketing efforts. However, you can use these actionable techniques to improve your bottom line.

Search engines are the dominant players in online marketing; hence, as a business owner, you should utilise SEO and online marketing to build your brand.

Here are a few techniques to build your brand:

Develop an effective social media campaign

Social media is useful in promoting products and services; in fact, it is also helpful in building brand awareness, and establishing relations with customers. That is why, it is essential to create an effective social media campaign.

Tips -

• Always talk about the total number of platforms being used.
• Explain significance, features and benefits.
• Always consider time frame.
• Always focus on creating educational and informational content.
• Include multimedia in your to-do-list.
• Choose the most efficient method of promotion.
• Calculate ROI.
• Focus on management and measurement.

Use Reddit

Reddit is an online community that allows people to post content, discuss topics, read and write reviews and more. It is the 8th most popular website on the internet; no doubt, it is the best place to find content ideas and promote content.

Tips -

• Always remain active and respond to comments.
• Share videos and infographics on a regular basis.
• Always keep an eye on upvoting and downvoting.

Use blogs

Blogging is an excellent way to improve your reach in a natural and organic way. It is quite helpful in increasing traffic, drive sales and boost brand impressions. (According to a report, 6.7 million People blog on blogging sites and 12 million people blog via social networks.)

Tips -

• Use answer the public.
• Choose a better CMS to promote your blog.
• Encourage readers to react and comment.

Perform competitive analysis

According to experts, marketing managers fail to devise a perfect online marketing strategy. That is why, it is essential to perform competitive analysis at regular interval.

Tips -

• Identify your competitors.
• Analyse their social profiles.
• Always use a cover photo on profiles.
• Use LinkedIn to promote your products.
• Analyse competitors’ content.
• Study competitors’ multimedia promotion techniques.

Use powerful targeting

If you are unable to target audience properly, you are losing something. Hence, you should use Facebook for powerful targeting.

Tips -

• Define your Facebook advertising goals.
• Focus on increasing likes and brand awareness.
• Create and promote relevant content.

Use analytics

Always make sure that you use a wide range of analytics platforms such as rivaliq, sprout social and Google analytics to monitor your progress in real time. It will help you to intensify your online marketing efforts.

Tips:

• Use Google tag manager and set goals.
• Choose paid marketing to gain better results.
• Obtain valuable information and adjust your marketing strategies.

So, use the above mentioned strategies for branding and positioning.

If your online business is not picking up, you should devise a reliable, step-by-step optimisation plan.  Here are a few optimisation techniques:

Optimise website for CTR                                                                                        

According to Wordstream, Click-through rate (CTR) is a measure of the percentage of clicks advertisers receive out of total ad impressions. “Impressions” refers to the number of times your ad is viewed. Hence, as a marketer, you should optimise CTR for better online presence.

Tips -

• Create high-quality titles and descriptions of landing pages.
• Improve website’s speed.
• Use Google Search Console, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool and GTMetrix.com.
• Create and distribute PDF checklists.

Leverage SEO

If you want to gain maximum results, you should use both basic and advanced SEO techniques.

Tips -

• Use White hat SEO techniques because they tend to produce better and long term results.
• Fix crawl errors in Google Search Console.
• Create AMP Pages. (https://www.ampproject.org/)
• Adopt cross linking technique.
• Create an XML and HTML Sitemap to ensure that all pages are found. (https://www.practicalecommerce.com/SEO-HTML-XML-Sitemaps-Explained)
• Find and remove thin and duplicate content. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi-wkEeOKxM&feature=youtu.be)
• Don’t ignore WC3 validation. (https://validator.w3.org/)

Pay especial attention to E-commerce sites

If you want to increase your  popularity and  backlinks on the web, pay attention to e-commerce sites. (Google uses backlinks to judge popularity, determine quality, and decide what to rank where in its search algorithm. – Searchenginejournal)

Tips -

• Streamline site’s architecture.
• Invest time in marketing and niche research.
• Never fail to optimise category and product pages.
• Use long-tail and LSI keywords in titles.
• Add clean navigation.
• Track outbound links.
• Write original product descriptions.
• Implement product review schema.
• Add robots.txt file. (https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt)
• Use SEMRush, DeepCrawl and ScreamingFrog.

Stay away from duplicate content

Duplicate content can ruin your credibility.  (Duplicate content is any content on your website that is the same or very similar to other content across your website or across multiple websites. – Google)

Tips -

• Delete or redirect duplicate content.
• Focus on content audit. (https://www.singlegrain.com/blog-posts/content-marketing/the-step-by-step-guide-to-conducting-a-content-audit/)

Focus on basic elements

If you want to improve search engine rankings, use basic optimisation strategies, such as:

• Research your competitors.
• Use www. Or non-www version.
• Create social media profiles.
• Join relevant groups on social media sites.
• Share your blog posts, images on social media
• Create newsletters.
• Install an SSL Certificate on your website.
• Identify and fix indexing issues.
• Use Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Quora.

Use powerful tools

If you want to take your business to next level by generating leads, you should use the following tools.

• Mention
• MailChimp
• Medium
• Marketo
• WordStream

So, use the above mentioned techniques to achieve your online goals and increase your profitability.

Implementing SEO and internet marketing techniques often results in a wide range of challenges and opportunities. As a business owner, you need to embrace opportunities and tackle challenges to achieve success.

Here are a few SEO and internet marketing techniques to improve your chances of winning:

Simplify mobile search results

According to Google, web pages that show intrusive pop ups, banner ads, or overlays called interstitials offer a poor user experience compared to pages that provide immediate access to its content. Hence, you should remove all such clutter from web pages and make information accessible.

Tips -

• Avoid using pop ups that cover the main content.
• Simplify navigation.
• Avoid using intrusive interstitials.
• Create high quality and crisp content.
• Optimise titles and meta descriptions for better rankings.
• Don’t block CSS, JavaScript, or images when it comes to mobile optimisation.

Accelerate your website

Website speed is important for a business’s success, especially for mobile websites.

Tips -

• Optimise images.
• Reduce redirects.
• Remove unnecessary codes from the source code.
• Study – https://www.slideshare.net/Radware/2015-spring-state-of-the-union-ecommerce-page-speed-web-performance-infographic

Use A/B testing tools

Use high quality A/B testing tools to improve the performance of your website. Here are a few excellent tools:

• AB Tasty
• Adobe Target
• Apptimize
• Campaigner

Resolve key SEO issues

To gain prominence on the web, you need to resolve certain critical SEO issues, such as:

• Broken links
• HTTPS (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en)
• Redirects
• Crawl errors
• Structured data
• Encryption and authentication
• Hreflang Attribute (https://www.semrush.com/blog/hreflang-attribute-101/)
• Keyword cannibalisation
• Thin content (http://searchengineland.com/myth-duplicate-content-penalty-259657)

Focus on improving conversion rate optimisation

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors.  As a marketer, you should streamline your website for maximum conversion rates.

Tips -

• Include before and after results on your landing pages.
• Improve the website’s usability.
• Use testimonials.
• Use photographs of happy customers.
• Integrate videos on landing pages.
• Auto-generate user names and passwords.
• Secure your website.
• Stick to the core message across the website.

Use SEO tools to speed up your marketing

If you want to attain good results and streamline your overall marketing process, you must use actionable SEO tools, such as:

• Analytics SEO
• WooRank
• TribeLocal
• SEO PowerSuite
• Brightedge
• AgencyAnalytics
• Web CEO
• Moz
• Majestic

Use powerful analytics tools

Whether you want to improve your internet marketing efforts or measure your results, you should always use effective analytics tools, such as:

• Campaign Monitor
• Zoho Reports
• Marketing 360
• Google Analytics
• ClicData
• InsightSquared

Are you ready to carve a new path?

According to Marketo, lead generation is the process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline.  Lead generation requires consistent efforts, planning, monitoring, and adjustment of marketing strategies

Here are a few robust lead generation tools to use:

Leadformly

It is a smart tool designed to create lead generation forms for better conversions. As a marketer, you should use it to create intelligent & interactive forms.

Features:

• Built-in analytics and audience insights
• Easy to use and integrate

Benefits:

• No coding required
• Increases conversions
• Improves ROI
• Improves lead quality

Intercom Acquire

It allows you to communicate directly with leads/visitors. It is helpful in collecting customer’s feedback.

Features:

• Provides extensive knowledge base.
• Creates, organise and publish articles.

Benefits:

• Helps to manage conversation with leads
• Helps to send targeted messages to improve engagement
• Improves marketing and sales

Lead Forensics

This powerful lead generation software identifies leads in real time. It helps you to collect insightful information such as business name, contact information, demographics, search behaviour, financial data and much more.

Features:

• Triggers instant notifications
• Flags your ‘dream’ customers
• Tailors your portal

Benefits:

• Maximises sales and ROI
• Converts anonymous traffic into leads
• Empowers CRM
• Provides data-rich intelligence

Active Campaign

If you are using email marketing, you should use Active Campaign to fine tune the performance of email marketing. It not only empowers email marketing campaigns, but also fosters business CRM.

Features:

• Automates marketing
• Easy to use interface
• Mobile friendly

Benefits:

• Manages and grows your contacts
• Helps in targeted campaigns
• Helps to monitor marketing campaigns

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

If you’re into sales and marketing, LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator is an effective lead capturing tool.

Benefits:

• Provides relevant insights on leads.
• Improves your business reach.

Datanyze

It is a perfect tracking and predictive analytics tool. It helps you to identify and analyse the technologies used by your competitors.

Benefits -

• Helps to find the right contact and send them to your CRM.
• Helps to improve sales.

Qualaroo

It is a great customer research tool with incredible features. It allows you to communicate with those who visit  your site.

Benefits -

• Helps to generate leads.
• Helps to gain qualitative users’ information.

So, use these lead generation tools to grow and maximise the performance of your business.

Improving a website’s visibility requires time and a concrete strategy. To help you manage a successful online visibility, we have put together a few strategies:

Handle technical SEO 

It is difficult to handle technical SEO issues, but you need to carefully resolve all the technical SEO issues, if you want to improve your website’s visibility as well as performance.

Tips -

• Improve page load speed.
• Understand and resolve website-architecture-related issues.
• Write SEO-friendly product descriptions.
• Properly use H1 and H2 tags.
• Optimise content.
• Focus on image optimisation.
• Carefully use hreflang tags.
• Resolve Hreflang conflicts (58% multilingual websites have hreflang conflicts within a page source code – semrush)
• Implement HTTPS.

Try new social networks

According to some business owners, they find it difficult to promote their products and services on the mainstream social networks; that is why, they should explore and use new social networks, such as:

• Mastodon
• Amazon Spark
• Mottle
• Airtime
• FreshTeam
• Workplace
• Cabana

Use Instagram

It is a platform for sharing inspiring images. For businesses, it is an effective platform to convey a brand’s story as well as connect with consumers. However,  quick results depend on how you use certain Instagram tools, such as :

• Layout
• VSCO
• Enlight
• Boomerang
• SocialRank

Content marketing

It is a great way to attract customers and improve the overall visibility of a website. All you need to do is to create and share informative and relevant content.

Tips -

• Always follow a set of rules and standards.
• Use a Spelling and Grammar Checker – Grammarly, Hemingway Editor, Ginger.
• Detect and correct duplicate content.
• Use quality content research tools.
• Identify trendy content.

Use Pinterest

It is a compelling social media platform for online retailers. It’s worthwhile to spend time and efforts on Pinterest to improve a site’s visibility.

Tips-

• Create a sound and compelling business profile.
• Include your site’s URL.
• Pin other images, articles, and videos.
• Write relevant Pin Descriptions.
• Follow industry leaders.

Local SEO

If you want to take advantage of local market, you need to invest in local SEO. It is a great way to improve a website’s visibility in the local region.

Tips -

• Optimise Google My Business (GMB) listing.
• Use local keywords across content.
• Use consistent address across your online profiles.
• Embed a Google Map in your website.
• Include Geo tags.
• Optimise meta tags for local keywords (both short and long-tail).

Improve users’ experience

In order to improve  a site’s visibility as well as its overall conversion rates, you need to streamline the users’ journey.

Tips -

• Share content through email marketing and social media.
• Use product ratings and reviews to influence users.
• Provide a “related product” section.
• Use CTAs.
• Create high quality headers.
• Create relevant, descriptive and appealing product descriptions.

In a nutshell, integrate the above mentioned proven strategies to improve the visibility of your site.

To transform your normal website into a competitive and successful one, you need to embrace well-established SEO and internet marketing techniques.

Here are a few SEO and internet marketing techniques:

Use smart SEO tools

Many marketers ignore SEO tools, but the fact is, SEO tools can make the process of online marketing  faster, easier and smarter. Here are a few SEO tools to use:

• Visual Website Optimizer – Use it to run A/B tests without knowing code.
• Raven – Use it to perform SEO, content research and automate marketing reports.
• Moz Pro – Use it to get actionable marketing data for better marketing.
• Whois Lookup – Use this competitive intelligence tool for better understanding.
• https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/robots-txt/ – Use it to perform technical SEO.

Focus on 301 redirects and bad backlinks

Infinite loops, long chains, bad links as well as 302 redirects affects a website to a great extent.

Tips:

• Remove low-quality backlinks.
• Resolve overly complex redirect patterns.
• Solve crawling and indexing errors.
• Wisely Use 301 and 302 redirects wisely.
• Understand Penguin 4.0, Phase 1 https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Disavow backlinks

Google always recommend removing as many spammy/low-quality links from a website  to improve its overall quality.

Tips:

• Stay away from bad links and paid links.
• Study quality guidelines. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769
• Never abuse rich snippets markup.
• Perform link audit.
• Learn the process of disavowing links – http://www.linkresearchtools.com/case-studies/google-penalty-recovery-disavow-tool/

Integrate live chat feature and a blog

Live chat features improve a customer’s overall shopping experience. You also need to integrate a blog section in your website to educate and inform users about products and services.

Tips:

• Share business tips and industry insights.
• Write useful content to add value to your business website.
• Share blog posts on social media channels.

Tackle common technical problems

It is quite frustrating when a website suffers setbacks because of some technical problems. Hence, as a marketer, understand tricky problems and resolve them.

Tips:

• Use a URL rewrite module (to enforce lowercase URLs).
• Resolve the issue of multiple versions of a homepage (default, index, home, etc.)
• Change page URLs with 301 redirects https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en
• Keep your sitemaps updated.
• Resolve robots.txt errors.

Speed up your Website

If you want to   provide fast web experience to your users, you need to work on improving the overall speed of your website.

Tips -

• Choose a good hosting server.
• Take advantage of browser caching.
• Enable gzip compression.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN).

So, use these tips and techniques to increase your site’s performance.

Most of the business owners use SEO; however, standard practices can take a website to the next level of excellence.

Here are a few productive SEO techniques for online websites:

Reviews and ratings

Marketing has changed a lot and is likely to change further. Today, companies use a wide variety of techniques to impress users. Reviews and rating techniques are widely used ones.

Tips:

• Always provide quick, relevant and the best customer service possible.
•  Respect each customer.
• Encourage your customers to recommend your products.
• Embed product/services videos into your website.

Improve communication through better content

Communication is the key to success. In order to improve and strengthen your communication, you need to focus on content. (88% of marketers are using content marketing today). So, write fresh and original content

Tips:

• Explore the best topics and keywords.
• Write high quality and relevant blog posts.
• Publish your content on top publishing websites.
• Write motivational stories.
• Optimise your content.

Alt tag

According to a research, most websites do not use “alt tag” as a result, they struggle to get rankings. Hence, you should use it to help your image rank higher. But keyword stuffing will not produce any results.

Tips:

• Use core keywords in alt tags.
• Understand the technique of image optimisation.
• Study – https://yoast.com/image-seo-alt-tag-and-title-tag-optimization/

Use Hreflang code

Many website owners do not even recognise the importance of hreflang. It is a code that helps you to specify  different URLs on your site that have the similar content. In other words, these URLs will have the same content in  different languages.

Tips:

• Study – https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/.
• Understand hreflang attributes.

Use robots.txt file

A robots.txt file is a text file, which is read by search engine spiders. As an optimiser, you should use it to tell the search engine, which URLs on a website it’s allowed to index.

Tips:

• Always keep the file at the root of your domain.
• Use directives correctly.
• Study – https://yoast.com/ultimate-guide-robots-txt/#what-is-robots-txt
• Use it to tell the location of your XML sitemap.

Focus on certain essential SEO elements

There are a few things to bear in mind when it comes to SEO, such as -

• rel=“canonical” – Use it to prevent duplicate content issues on your website.
• Understand protocols like – HTTP, HTTP2 and HTTPS.
• XML sitemaps – Never forget to create XML sitemaps.
• Focus on responsive designs.
• Use AI-powered tools for better SEO efficiency.
• Use SEO tools to improve your online marketing efforts.
• Use SEO-friendly CMS.
• Try to improve the trust and quality of a website.
• Focus on mobile friendliness. (https://yoast.com/improve-mobile-site/)
• Don’t block JavaScript, HTML and CSS code.
• Use Copyscape, Siteliner, Moz, SEMRush, etc.
• Regularly perform content audit (https://moz.com/blog/content-audit)

So, if you think SEO is ineffective, think again… because it still remains a powerful force in this digital age.

It is no secret that SEO can bring success to an online business. However, for that, you need to embrace standard and proven SEO and internet marketing strategies.

Here are a few SEO and internet marketing strategies:

Priority based SEO (Almost 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine and 70% of the links that people click are organic. – Study) 

Irrespective of the type of audiences – B2B or B2C, you need to prioritise SEO. According to a study, websites with technical issues make it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Tips -

• Keep the website’s architecture simple and clear.
• Create a mobile friendly website.
• Study your competitors to understand their strategies.
• Access Google Search Console to resolve errors and warnings.
• Study Analytics to improve the conversion rate of a website.

Optimise for Voice Search

Voice search is growing fast across the world and is of vital importance. As a marketer, you want to focus on Voice search to improve the overall experience of your customers.

Tips -

• Optimise your site for voice queries.
• Use analytics.
• Choose some natural-language and long-tail keywords.
• Properly optimise your business listing across the web.
• Always keep your content up-to-date.

Create awesome content

Always create high quality and relevant content for your users.  The question arises how to create better content?   The answer lies in the use of advanced tools and techniques, such as:

• Access Google Search Console as it provides plenty of information about the performance of a website as well as web pages.
• Use Google Keyword Planner, nTopic, Scoop.it, WooRank, SpyFu and SEMrush.
• Use Hemingway application, readability testing tools, Zen Pen, Cliche Finder and Grammarly.

Focus on YouTube

If you want to tap billions of users, you need to use YouTube. All you need to do is to create informative, innovative and entertaining videos that can compel users.

Tips -

• Identify trendy subject.
• Make sure your video is accessible.
• Create relevant and specific metadata.
• Optimise your videos.
• Add a video transcript for better understanding.
• Create a video sitemap.

Focus on Social media along with SEO

Tips-

• Use Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.
• Use Pinterest to improve your brand awareness.
• Respond to negative reviews.
• Use social media management tools.
• Perform social media audit at regular intervals.
• Focus on analysis and measurement.
• Share videos and infographics.
• Create emotional content.
• Focus on improving reach and engagement.
• Provide incentives to users.
• Share organisational content.

Embrace PPC

Use PPC to accelerate your online marketing. It not only supports your existing online marketing strategies, but also takes your business to another level.

Tips -

• Use calls to action (CTAs) in your descriptions.
• Design relevant landing pages.
• Perform competitive analysis at regular intervals.

The landscape of SEO and online marketing changes fast; so, use the above given techniques as soon as possible. Are you ready to reap the rewards?