Suggestions to improve conversion rate & seo.

[Matteh]

We've had our site up and running for about 3 years now (1 year with Prestashop) and our conversion rate is just way too low.

On average we have about 32 orders a month which is good considering how low we were before switching to Prestashop (about 1-3 a month) but its still not enough.

We get about 1500 hits a month so that is a pretty poor conversion rate.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions on how we can improve our conversion rate or even how to improve our search engine optimisation as we're still ranked quite low on Google?

Suggestions for other changes are welcome too but our main focus right now is improving the conversion rate.

 

Although I'm not sure how many of you would be interested in our products we'd happily give out a few vouchers to people we think have been extremely helpful.

 

You can find the site here: www.eposgear.eu

Please be aware this is a live site so please refrain from placing any test orders.

[Mike Kranzler]

Hi Matteh,

From an outside perspective, I think you may have too much information at the top of the page that is pushing your products further down. You don't want to have to scroll a lot just to find what you're looking for on your website.

 

Additionally, I don't know what the breakdown is on your top-selling products, but you may want to reorganize the products at the bottom of the page to make your top-sellers more visible.

 

And I didn't notice until I was about to close the page that you had the tabs on the left side for Contact Information, Home and more. You may want to make that more obvious, because I didn't know what any of those were until I rolled over them.

 

I hope this helps.

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

Hey Mike,

With regard to there being too much information at the top of the page I've reorganised a little and would be interested to hear your opinion on how it is now?

 

We don't really have any top products as we get so few orders and not usually focused on one product line but I'll look into our search engine data and check whether there are any products our customers are more likely looking for.

 

The tabs we had to hide for a reason, when tested on low resolution monitors they covered the left sidebar which obviously is a big problem. We mainly added them just as another place for customers to locate those pages should they miss the other links.

 

Thanks for you help.

[Mike Kranzler]

Hi Matteh, that's already much better . Before, it took me a couple visits to really get a handle on your site because the content was a little overwhelming, but now I really feel like I've arrived at the right site for my needs.

 

I also like that you moved your Siteground ad to the bottom, because it didn't look great to have an external advertisement as the first impression someone gets of your page.

 

One more thing though: After I noticed the "Optimized for Chrome" effect in the top right corner, I tried opening the page in IE9 just to test for any differences. The page loads significantly slower in IE, which is still (regrettably) the most commonly used browser in the world. You may want to consider how you can speed it up in IE, because odds are a lot of your potential customers are still on IE and you wouldn't want to turn them off with a slow loading time.

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

Glad you like the improvements to the homepage. Hopefully it should be a lot easier for those who don't know what our site does.

 

The Siteground ad has been a recent addition just because the site takes such little money that we needed to try cover some hosting costs but I do agree it was perhaps a little too in your face at the top.

 

With regard to the difference between IE & Chrome I'm not sure what I can do to fix this. I will add however I actively switch between Firefox, IE & Chrome and 90% of websites I go to do load faster in Chrome so I don't think its that its overly optimised for Chrome and not other browsers but I do agree that the loading times are an issue.

I'm not entirely sure what we can do to speed up our loading times, the quick find located in the header is the main issue, it contains a huge js file acting as a database but for the time being I don't have a fix for that.

 

Thanks again for taking the time to help us.

[Mike Kranzler]

That's what I'm here for! I'd be really curious to see how the homepage reorganization affects your numbers, so I hope you'll come back and let us know!

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

I've now added a small delivery banner to the homepage, would you say the products are still visible enough?

And I'll be sure to let you know the impact on our conversion rate.

[Mike Kranzler]

Yep, it still looks good on my end. Just FYI though, I'm using a desktop computer with a big monitor, so you may want to try checking it out on a laptop as well just as a comparison. This is how it looks on my end:

 

 

If it shows up anything close to this on a laptop, I think you'll be golden .

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

Thats exactly how I see it.

I'm gonna try find old PCs around the office and check it on there now.

 

I'm also considering making the review banner smaller and putting it in the sidebar above the review button, the only downside is the sidebars are already quite long. It would at least bring the products a little higher.

 

Edit:

Another change I just thought about and would be interested to hear your thoughts on this...

Basically I would split the products on the homepage into two, the top half would go at the very top of the page and would include the half that are most likely to sell then below them have the delivery & offers banners then finally the other half of products below them.

The idea to me sounds good in theory but it could make it seem a little more confusing to customers.

[Mike Kranzler]

Yeah I think that splitting the products would be a bit too confusing for most...

 

As for the review banner, what you might want to consider instead is moving the button on the right sidebar to just under the cart. This way, not only is it a little more visible on its own, but it's also right next to the banner! You could even add an arrow to the banner as a direct call to action to write a review.

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

Done what you suggested with the review banner.

I'm also now considering a similar change for the September offer banner, what do you think?

[Mike Kranzler]

Actually, what I was suggesting was to leave the banner at the top, but move the button on the left sidebar higher up so that they are right next to each other. In that scenario, you could even rotate the pencil in the banner to use that in the place of an arrow. As it is, I think it's even less visible now that you've moved the original banner.

 

And as for the September offer, the only change I would suggest is maybe change the wording to "Free A5 Sprial Bound Notebook on Orders over £5"

 

-Mike

[Matteh]

Ah yea I see what you meant with the review banner now, I've just finished work though so I'll try your method when I'm back in tomorrow.

 

With regard to the september offer I'm not sure how much trade it actually bring in. It wasn't placed there as an incentive to order but rather proof we're still an active company by having a constantly changing offer each month but it doesn't seem to have done too much. So I'm still trying to decide whether to just get rid of it completely.

[Matteh]

Well we already have Canonical URL but for a completely different reason, our SSL would only work if you hadn't included the www.

I wasn't aware however that it would have an effect on rankings so I'll look into it further and check its all working correctly.

 

Featured products we've tried to avoid mainly because we're selling so little we have no idea what to promote and promoting items that aren't gonna sell will only make our homepage look even more complicated.

I can have a word with my boss about a week trial promoting a few certain products we think may sell but I can't see featured products being much of a help.

 

Thanks for helping.

[philee]

Great site Matteh.

 

For me, when I went into your products description page, I notice the right column to stood out a lot. I was trying to keep focus on the content of the product; however, I was distracted by the bright colors on the right. The page has very settle soothing colors, and the banners on the right were louder colors. That's just my suggestion as a visitor though.

 

Also, I have a question. I noticed when you highlight the image it has a zoom-in feature on the right side. What module did you use to have the feature? Looks awesome.

[Matteh]

I'll see if I can adjust the colours / move the images around on the right side later today.

 

For the zoom in feature go to your admin panel then preferences > products > then select yes on 'Enable JqZoom instead of Thickbox on product page'.

 

Thanks for your feedback.

[philee]

Check this out Matteh.

 

http://www.mind-projects.it/projects/jqzoom/demos.php#demo2

 

There's other version of jQZoom. I like #4 Inner Zoom. Really clean zoom.

[Matteh]

That #4 does look nice.

Might look at getting that when I've got some spare time to set it up.

[philee]

For sure. I want to get it implemented on my web store as well. I just don't wanna mess with it unless there's a tutorial.

[Matteh]

When I'm not as busy I'm gonna set it up on my test store & I'll let you know if I get it working.

[amyandr06]

Building a successful and profitable site will ultimately depend on the amount of traffic your site receives. The content you produce and how much effort goes into promoting your site will help attract visitors and dictate the quality and how targeted that traffic is, but ultimately, how well your traffic converts will be the deciding factor in whether or not you have a successful and profitable web site.

Conversion rates are well documented as being poor across the internet. Between 1 and 3% conversion rates seem to be an almost standard rate across the web. Calculating a sites conversion rate is relatively straight forward; If 2 visitors out of 100 convert then your site has a 2% conversion rate.

How to test?

 

If you are new to Google optimiser, then use a simple A/B test, this will allow you to test 2 versions of a page against each. Once you add the java script to the pages you want to test Google will begin to show the competing pages to your visitors and once it has gathered enough data to make a comprehensive decision on which page has yielded the best conversions you will have a winner. A/B testing will allow you to familiarise yourself with how testing works and the processes involved, to move your testing to a new level you will need to test the different pages elements and what combination of these elements will work best and you can do this with a multivariate test.

 

Test every element on a page and test multiple versions of each element

 

Google will take a lot of work out of putting these tests together. But it’s very tempting to set up multiple elements and just let the test run. Unless the page you are testing gets thousands of hits a day you will wait a long time before the results of your tests are in. Keep your tests small and you will see results and improvements in your conversion rates much sooner.

 

Improving your conversion rates is usually a slow process and to do it successfully you will need to have in-depth knowledge of your site, the traffic it receives and what has convinced your visitors to convert in the past. Once you know this you can build on this success and further improve your conversion rate.

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[philee]

Great write-up Amyandr06

[PrestaThemes.com]

We've had our site up and running for about 3 years now (1 year with Prestashop) and our conversion rate is just way too low.

On average we have about 32 orders a month which is good considering how low we were before switching to Prestashop (about 1-3 a month) but its still not enough.

We get about 1500 hits a month so that is a pretty poor conversion rate.

 

Has anyone got any suggestions on how we can improve our conversion rate or even how to improve our search engine optimisation as we're still ranked quite low on Google?

Suggestions for other changes are welcome too but our main focus right now is improving the conversion rate.

 

Although I'm not sure how many of you would be interested in our products we'd happily give out a few vouchers to people we think have been extremely helpful.

 

You can find the site here: www.eposgear.eu

Please be aware this is a live site so please refrain from placing any test orders.

 

Interesting post, one thing I certainly advise is using the free Google tools, Webmaster Tools and Analytics are amazing and free.

 

When you say '1500 hits a month', do you mean unique visitors or just pageviews? there's a big difference!

 

For increased sales you need more people to view your site ( unique visitors ) and you also need those people to wanting to buy what you sell ( targeted traffic ), I know all this sounds obvious, and getting there isn't easy as it requires, time, patience and ideally at least some money.

 

You could improve your meta tags, although there's many that doubt it makes much difference nowadays:

Meta tags report for: http://eposgear.eu/ meta tag length value Title: 63 EPOSGEAR - Cash Registers - Till Rolls - Accessories - EPOSGEAR Description: 54 Your number one store for retail supplies and hardware Keywords: 215 cash register, national cash register, casio cash register, sam4s, geller, sharp cash register, sharp xe a102 cash register, sharp electronic cash register, coin scales, coin counting scales, tellermate, sign board, Robots: 12 index,follow

Meta tags analysis. Title: Title contains no errors.

This tag contains 63 characters.

Title relevancy to page content is good.

The Title relevancy to page content is 71%.

Description: Description meta tag relevancy to page content is poor.

The Description meta tag relevancy to page content is 33%.

Keywords: Keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is poor.

The keywords meta tag relevancy to page content is 38%.

Robots: The Robots meta tag contains no errors.

This tag contains 12 characters.