Are your web sales lagging? Or are you failing to meet the goals you’ve set for yourself? You may need to give your website a tuneup to make sure it is working to optimal benefit to encourage sales.

You may need to make a simple tweak to your site to see a huge improvement, or you may need a major overhaul. Here are a few things you can do to expand your website sales:

Improve the Checkout Process

Many people abandon their purchases right in their carts because they can’t figure out how to determine shipping costs before they get to the end, or how to enter a coupon code, or how to change quantities, or how to do some other thing to complete the transaction. You need to make the checkout process as seamless as possible to improve and retain your sales.

Using a service like Checkout.com can help you do just that. The service allows you to customize your checkout cart, take all major forms of payment, accept payments from international buyers and offer alternative forms of local payment.

Write Engaging Descriptions

Many people who run online businesses just use the descriptions that the manufacturer provides for the product. However, these descriptions are not always the most engaging, and they don’t really do all they can to sell the product. In most cases, they provide basic details to let people know what they are getting — not really convince them to buy it.

You need to produce your own product descriptions and you need to make sure to really optimize them for maximum impact. This is the time to really spend some money to hire the best to write those descriptions for you. The better those descriptions are, the more those products will sell.

You also need unique product descriptions to ensure that your site ranks higher in search results. If you use the same descriptions as everyone else, your site will rank lower and you won’t get the traffic you need, let alone the sales.

Ensure Site Has Easy Navigation

You might have just the right product for a customer, but they may not buy it because they can’t find it. If you don’t have a clear navigation for your site, customers may not find what they need, or they may become too frustrated trying to use your site that they just leave.

You need to hire a professional web designer who can analyze your site and make recommendations or improvements to the navigation. Just like hiring a professional to improve your product descriptions, this is money you want to spend. You’ll get a great return again and again for your initial investment.

Improve Your SEO

Maybe the problem isn’t that people can’t find your products but that they can’t find your site at all. Most people find new sites by doing a search for related terms. If your site isn’t ranking high for those terms, you will be buried in Google search results. Most people only look at the first few results, and few ever look beyond the first page of results. Is your site there for your best keywords?

If not, you need to do some SEO work. That includes a range of things, like optimizing your site for keywords, creating fresh and quality content, getting authority links to your site, and more. Again, it’s best to hire a professional to do the work since effective SEO is more of an art than a science, and professionals are up-to-date on all the latest changes at Google.

Get a Complete Site Analysis

Really, there could be any number of issues that could be hampering your business. If you’ve tried some of these tactics and your sales are still suffering, consider a complete site analysis. A professional can comb through everything from your on-site tags to your site architecture.

By getting right to the heart of the problem, you can save money and start getting the results you need faster.

Your website is a powerful tool to grow your business and increase your sales. Make sure you are getting the most from your site by following some of these tips. If your sales are lagging, one of these things is likely the culprit.

Categories: General