Good website design is important in converting your site visitors into customers. Your website must be simple but well designed, user friendly, and should enhance the experience of your customers. It does not matter how great your content is, or how good your products are if your eCommerce website is poorly made. You will always be losing potential customers when you do not optimize your site for sales.

Since the internet is vast and accommodates many commercial websites, including manufacturers and distributors alike, it is very easy to get trampled underfoot by these stronger and bolder competitors. To be able to create an online website that ranks well, you need to invest well in all the necessary tools that boost your website visibility. In this guide, we shall outline such key tools that will enable you to create your own shopping website that will stand out among the less astute merchants.

1.    Keep the user in mind

Every detail of your website, from the product images to page layouts potentially add to the user experience of your customers. It is therefore important to have your customers in mind in all the decisions you make in designing the website. Remember, the success of a good website is measured by the volume of visitors who are turned into customers, and maintaining the customers into repeat and loyal customers.

Your website must avoid confusion or overwhelming your visitors at all costs. The content must resonate with the targeted customers and navigation around your website should be an easy, enjoyable, and enriching experience.

The navigation bar and site maps are tools that greatly ease and minimizes time in locating what visitors are looking for on a website.

2.    A great “about us” page

Once a visitor clicks on your website, it means they are interested in your products or services. A great “about us” page is crucial in proving and telling the customers that they have made the right choice by selecting you. What your entire website is about must be clearly spelled out here, which include: who you are, what you offer, testimonials and all the achievements. This page plays a big role in building trust with your visitors.

When your “about us” page is properly done, it will definitely lead to converting your traffic into sales. Information such as contact email address and your social media channels must also appear on this page. However, avoid cluttering this section with too many details. Keep it simple and easily comprehensible.

3.    Sites speed

Experts have observed that the majority of website visitors expect a page to open up in at least 2 seconds! Other research has concluded that more than 50% of visitors are more likely to leave a page that takes more than 2 seconds to load. Therefore, the importance of speed in loading your webpage is very important. Below are some tips that can be used to improve your webpage speed.

• Reduce unnecessary plugins
• Make use of content delivery networks
• Use images of the right size
• Invest in browser caching

4.    Use SEO friendly URLs

Before determining whether your URL is SEO friendly, let’s shed some light on why SEO is important in the overall ranking of your website. Search engine optimization, when properly done, improves your website's visibility to online users. This results in more customers visiting your page hence higher chances in converting the page traffic into sales.

If you are not sure how to find SEO friendly keywords, or how to use them on your website, here are a few tips on how to incorporate them on your website.

• You can use an SEO tool to find keywords that have high monthly search volume
• Try typing the SEO keywords that you consider using to see other results that you will be competing with. If the results are big brands, consider changing your keywords to something that will bring less competition.

A good URL, therefore, must be readable, have keywords, and should always try and match to the title of your page. It must contain between 60 to 70 characters.

5.    Image optimization

Human beings are known to be visual creatures. We have the ability to understand visual information a lot faster than words. Therefore, with regard to this supernatural ability, product images have a strong and great impression on customers. Using high-resolution pictures would instantly attract your customer’s attention.

Try to optimize your product images together with texts so as to improve your website's ranking on search results. These tips below will help in your image optimization.

• Use vector formats
• Try to minify and compress SVG assets
• Choose the best raster image format
• Experiment with optimal quality settings for raster formats
• Eliminate unnecessary image metadata
• Use scaled images
• Make use of automated tools and infrastructure to maintain constant and premium images.

Also, it pays to display your product images from different angles so that your buyers can have various views of the product. Since they are not able to physically examine the product prior to purchase, your customer will only feel more secure when they can have a complete visual understanding of the product. These tips will further boost your customer’s confidence with your products.

• Install a 360-degree image tool on your goods so that buyers can have a complete view of your product.
• Enable a zooming option for your customers to fully analyze your products before purchasing.

By taking these details into account, you would have greatly eased your customer’s pain of not been able to physically examine your products like they could in a brick and mortar store. You should also include videos of your products where necessary.

6.    Social media integration

The easiest way to market your website is through social media sharing. Therefore, always ensure that your website is adequately integrated with your social media platforms to increase its visibility. Include quick links for liking, sharing, pinning, and following for your accounts. There are various ways to do this and many options to choose from. You can create an online store with WordPress and use social warfare in sharing your website. Consider a great VPS WordPress hosting to provide maximum protection to your data. It is good to create a social media buzz around your products by encouraging campaigns that promote sharing. Here are some tips to promote social media platforms sharing:

• Do not only focus on media sharing with buyers. Engage other complementary brands in your industry or those you have partnered with, and encourage them to share your website and products.
• Promote the chain of sharing. When someone mentions your brand on any of the social media platforms, always continue with the conversation by retweeting or commenting underneath the post.

Encouraging these social icons on your website design promotes and encourages a long term relationship with your customers. Just make sure that your links open up in a new tab to avoid people from leaving your webpage.

Conclusion

Before setting up an online store, first, invest in a quality website design that put to use all the above tips. Know how to do SEO search for your keywords so as to boost your visibility. These simple strategies enable merchants to become more aware of his shortcomings and hence give them an edge over their competitors.

About the Author

Patrick Watt is a content writer, writing in several areas, primarily in business growth, value creation, M&A, and finance. Other interests also include content marketing and self-development. Say hi to Patrick on Twitter @patrickwattpat.