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3 Common eCommerce Mistakes to Avoid

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |eCommerce Mistakes|3 Common eCommerce Mistakes to AvoidBeing an eCommerce store owner is no easy ride. There are many things you need to consider; the customer journey, the user experience, technical issues, minimizing cart abandonment, and many more. But there are also a plethora of opportunities to sell to customers all over the world. With the right strategies in place, you can skyrocket your eCommerce business for success.

Whether you own an established eCommerce store or just starting out, here are some of the most common eCommerce mistakes you should avoid if you want to grow your business to new heights.

#1 Not identifying your ideal clients

While it is ambitious to want to serve everyone, it, unfortunately, will not serve your business any good. This results in a strategy that is not very clear or focused and will waste a lot of time, energy, and resources as you drive the wrong traffic to your store, which will also increase cart abandonment rates and bounce rates. No matter how good or well-priced you think your product may be, you are selling to the wrong people.

It may seem like you are limiting your business, by narrowing down and specific on who you are serving, but it will mean you can talk to them directly in your marketing, find them quicker, and drive more intentional traffic to your eCommerce store. Make sure you create a brand persona, whereby you outline who your target market is, and include specific information such as their age, location, income, marital status, hobbies, interests, needs, how they make purchasing decisions, and their preferred platforms.

#2 Using the wrong technology

There is a lot of technology, applications, services, software, and platforms that you can use for your eCommerce store, and often, it’s not the most expensive, or how many that you have that means it will be successful. It is the opposite. If you use too many platforms or the wrong platforms, your data is likely to be all over the place and you risk a business that is disorganized and unaligned. This then means that data cannot be analyzed correctly, and you have a huge gap within your business to excel and make sales. Make sure you research the correct platforms right from the start, one that is right for your product and your internal working, to ensure all your departments are aligned and able to excel in reaching business goals and objectives. If you already have an eCommerce store, you can read more about integrating your current tools.

#3 Not optimizing your eCommerce store

Many eCommerce businesses opt for paid marketing, such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads. While there is nothing wrong with this, it is also vital that you are incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) into your marketing strategies. Without SEO, as soon as you turn the paid ads off, you will unlikely have visibility anywhere on the internet.

SEO is a long-term game, which is why it is not easy to measure an ROI at the beginning. However, implementing SEO strategies will enable you to build authority, rank, and visibility within the search engines, and start driving intentional, and sustainable organic traffic to your store.

For an eCommerce business to be successful, the right strategies are vital.

We Need To Talk About What It Takes To Ensure Your Website Is A Success

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Design|We Need To Talk About What It Takes To Ensure Your Website Is A SuccessYou’ve created a business and you’ve built a website for said business; maybe this was recently or perhaps it was years ago, but you’ve realised that your website just isn’t doing what it’s supposed to. It’s not ranking well in search engines and it’s visibility is shot, and then there’s the fact that you’re barely converting any leads. What’s going on and why is your website failing to do its job?

If you find yourself in this situation, the most important thing is not to panic – yes it’s frustrating that your website isn’t doing what it’s meant to do, but there are lots of simple ways to remedy this. Believe it or not, fixing a poorly running website is easier than you think, it’s just a case of knowing what to concentrate on, and where to focus your time, money and effort.

Bearing that in mind, below are a few tips and suggestions for the ways in which you can ensure that your website is a success. For everything that you need to know, have a read of this.

Start with an audit

Not sure what’s going on with your website? The best thing that you can do is to start out with a website audit. There are tools online that you can use to do your own website audit, or you can opt to outsource the task to a specialist. How you go about this is up to you, what’s important is that you’re able to gain the visibility that you need to understand where the fundamental issues lay within your website, thus allowing you to fix these issues.

Upgrade and enhance your SEO strategy

A key aspect of improving how your website ranks in search engines like Google is SEO, and if your site’s SEO isn’t working effectively this means that your site won’t rank highly in search engines. This is extremely problematic as research shows that as a rule of thumb, internet users tend to navigate towards the top few sites listed in search engines, rather than navigating further down the page, so you need your site to be ranked in the first few sites within the search engine. Working with SEO specialists, like Smoothstack, can help to make increasing how well your site ranks in search engines a little easier.

Focus on your content

Remember, content is only king when that content adds value. It’s all well and good churning out website content, from on-page content to blog content, but if that content doesn’t offer value to your audience, then it holds no value. The key to creating high value content is to think about the kinds of information that will be valuable to your audience, as well as ensuring that all content is interesting, insightful and relevant. Not sure how to create content that adds value? Work with a content specialist to learn more about achieving content success.

There you have it, everything that you need to know about helping to ensure that your website is as successful as possible and ranks well in search engines.

This Is The Reason Why Your Off-Page SEO Strategy is Not Working.

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, This Is The Reason Why Your Off-Page SEO Strategy is Not WorkingAll powerful SEO strategies involve in-depth analysis, bespoke planning, and thorough implementation.

Although this may sound simplistic, there are two main categories to every search engine optimization strategy: off-page and on-page SEO.

Staying true to its name, on-page strategies involve specific elements that occur on your actual website. While it can be time-consuming to optimize these factors, website owners have full control over their implementation.

In contrast to on-page strategies, off-page SEO isn’t quite as simplistic.

In this article, we’ll discuss what these strategies involve, why it’s important to your website, and how you can optimize off-page elements in order to increase traffic flow and grow a larger audience.

What does off-page SEO refer to?

Off-page SEO involves the different elements that impact a site’s visibility on search engine results. Instead of existing within your site, these strategies take place other places online.

Many people consider this to be the hardest category of SEO because these factors are outside of a website owner’s direct control. It is very difficult to influence the posts that other bloggers write and the links that they use.

Search engines develop their algorithms to take many different factors into account. These algorithms take information from other sites to help analyze your website’s authenticity and credibility.

This is a clever method of ranking content that relies on the perspectives of many different websites to rank others within a search engine. It makes sense that websites with many external links would be seen as credible. No reputable or authoritative site would be willing to link to a page that isn’t offering quality value.

Google, along with all other search engines, must rely on these links to determine the credibility of a site. It is irresponsible and nearly impossible to judge the quality of a site only from its internal contents.

Although earning these external links is a greater challenge than tweaking factors on your site, it’s a critical component of off-page SEO.

Link Building

Because of Google’s reliance on external links to judge a page’s quality and authority, websites that achieve many of these links have a proclivity to rank higher in the search results.

For website builders, this should highlight the importance of earning external links as part of any SEO strategy.

Before jumping into this strategy headfirst, there are some important nuances to understand.

Many website owners place too much of their focus on the quantity of links instead of their quality. While an impressive number of external links can look good to the Google algorithm, these numbers are meaningless if all of the linking sites are of poor quality.

Google prefers to see links from websites that have already established a reputation for being credible, authentic, and authoritative. Receiving links from these sites will have a greater impact on the ranking of your site.

Domain Authority

Domain authority is measured on a ranking from 1 to 100. This scale rates the credibility of your site based on the quality of its backlinks.

Your site will rank higher on the scale in direct proportion to the number of quality links that it earns.

Website Authority Checker offers free evaluations of a website’s domain authority ranking.

Sites with higher numbers will have an easier time ranking in the search results.

The best way to improve your site’s domain authority is by receiving more quality links from credible and reputable websites.

Social Promotion

It is much less clear how links from social media platforms influence a website’s ranking on Google and other search engines.

Matt Cutts, an employee for Google, revealed in 2010 that the iconic search engine was using links from several different social sites to determine a website’s ranking.

This claim was contradicted in 2016 when Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said that social links weren’t taken into account when ranking for SEO.

While it’s not definitive that social links have a direct result on a site’s SEO rankings, there is a proven relationship between rankings and social signals.

Even if there is no direct impact from social shares, a strong presence on these platforms is still indicative of a healthy ranking in search engine results.

How do off-page and on-page SEO factors work together?

There is no reason to choose between off-page or on-page SEO strategies. Both of these factors are most effective when used in tandem.

On-page strategies help determine which queries and keywords for which your pages will rank. On the other hand, off-page strategies help determine where your site will rank.

In order to achieve the best SEO results, you should use a balanced combination of on-page and off-page factors.

What are some useful tools for improving a site’s off-page SEO?

Off-page factors that influence your site’s ranking can be difficult to control. Fortunately, there are some great tools that can aid in the process. The following tools will help you improve your off-page SEO factors:

  • Ahrefs – is one of the most useful tools for identifying link opportunities. After entering a domain, you’ll be provided with a detailed report that highlights all of the external websites that link back to that domain. This report will also show individual pages to which the domain links. This is an excellent tool for evaluating the sources from which your site’s links are coming.
  • SEMrush – is a popular tool amongst the SEO community. While SEMrush is a powerful tool for researching keywords, this site can also be used for finding opportunities to build more links. Both of these tools will also allow you to see where your competitors are getting links so that you can reach out to those sites as well. Additionally, understanding the keyword research tool can help increase your site authority. Indeed, learning how to conduct effective keyword research to drive online leads creates valuable traffic, which increases your business reputation and authority. Therefore, applying SEMrush keyword results to content generation can also assist linking strategies for off-page SEO.

Start Off-Page SEO Strategies Today

There are many elements that make off-page SEO significantly more challenging than on-page strategies.

However, these off-page factors are necessary for people who want to improve their SEO ranking.

These off-page indicators help search engines determine a page’s reputability and credibility. When a page has more backlinks, Google feels more comfortable recommending it to users.

If you need help improving your site’s ranking, consider using Local SEO Search, a digital marketing agency

About the Author

StrategyDriven Expert Contributor | Katrina FernandezKatrina Fernandez is a hardworking individual who always gives her best. As a degree holder, she aspires to establish within the media industry. Expert in building online partnership, she’s been working in digital marketing services, Local SEO Search Inc. for several years.