Seriously? Are you going to be defeated that easily?

You know, it’s better to see that there is competition in your chosen niche than find your way to the top of a market that isn’t in demand. If there are plenty of other companies vying for the top spot, luring customers in various ways and making a pretty penny into the deal – then this is a ripe market that you can exploit quite easily.

We’ve spoken about SEO Basics before and Why You Need to Know About Search Engine Optimization – so I won’t go over old ground too much, but unless your market is saturated and your competition is in the league of Amazon or Apple (even then you can squeeze in for some juicy, low-hanging fruit) you really have nothing to worry about.

The simple strategy for beating your competition lies within their webpages – they are giving you all the information that you need – you just need to go and have a look.

Simply studying what they have done and doing it better yourself will ensure that your business will rise to the top. Google doesn’t care who is running the site – whoever comes out top in their search, is the one who is best matched for their customers search query.

So, it’s back to basics – see what keywords they are targeting, make sure that you are optimised for them too, make full use of your title tags, meta description, page content and anchor text. These simple things combined with GREAT content will be enough for you to win any battle. Remember that most of your competition is there by fluke – they have optimised unwittingly and have no idea about search optimisation. So you already have the advantage.

Of course, if you’re scared of hard work then forget it, because an ongoing campaign to create great content that is well optimised is a huge time consumer – but if ever you have any niggles or doubts, just look out of your window one morning and watch as Karen dashes out the door with an armful of kids before heading to the office to have ‘the man’ barking orders at her all day….. still seem like too much effort now?

Photo Credit Alessandro Paiver

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Here’s a problem I see over and over – stores who aren’t really sure who they are or what their target market is.

It’s all a bit of a mish mash and it’s also highly off-putting to your customers.

Here’s the thing – we already have an Amazon, so we don’t need another one. Unless you can build it bigger and better (I’m gonna suggest that you can’t) then leave it alone and specialise within a niche.

The main reasons for having a target market to aim for is because you can build a sustainable business with raving fans. You can become the expert within that field and be the ‘go to’ guy that people turn to for specific products or services.

If you try to be a jack of all trades it just won’t work. You’ll never have time to get really, really good at the one thing – you’ll just be average at all of it.

Plus when you consider the social media aspect of it, it’s far easier to build a tribe of fans within one niche than across the board.

Another point to consider is the SEO aspects of building anything other than a niche business. Google will find it very hard to bring you up in the search results if it’s not entirely sure what you are – plus, don’t forget, you’ll only be average at everything so you’ll be crushed in the serps anyway.

So get really, really good at one thing. If you are a store – try and specialise in a certain market and don’t just sell the products SELL the products. If you sell belts then you want to stock the lot – everything from high class leather to gunge belts with skull buckles. You want to be the go to person for a belt, you want to be top of the results pages for belts. You’ll blog about them, tell your fans about the hsitory of belts, the different styles from the different countries, the types of materials – you’ll have passion and you will grow a tribe of followers via Twitter and other social networking sites.

If someone types belt into Google – you’ll come back at the top of the list because everywhere Google looks – you are there – the seller, the expert – the tribe leader!

So don’t try and be Amazon – get good at one thing and then, and only then,should you consider adding a little bit more to your repertoire!

This post is from Tip 23 on the 55 Ecommerce Tips that Rock

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So let’s begin with number 1

Constructing SEO and Customer Friendly Titles

There are two good reasons for thinking about your titles, the first is whether anyone will search for it and the second is whether anyone will click on it.

Before you write a title for your content- this could be anything from a blog post to a sales page, you need to think about what your potential customer/reader is going to be searching for.

Lets consider for a moment that you are looking to purchase a belt buckle. If you put the term ‘belt buckle’ into Google, which one of the following results would you click on?

Both of these are front page results so neither are doing a bad job, but lets look a little more deeply. The top one is more customer friendly as it has a more professional feel. When people are in ‘buying’ mode they are more cautious about where they click and this title and meta description is your chance to shine.

You need to ‘sell’ the click – make the customer choose you over the next guy and there are various ways to do this. In the examples above you can see the use of pipes in the first title. This is a great way to showcase some products without looking like you are keyword spamming. Let me show you the difference without the pipes;

You might think it’s a subtle change and you would be right, but it makes a difference to your clickthrough rate as the version that is seperated with pipes looks more professional.

The bottom example isn’t utilizing keywords at all and whilst it’s good to get your brand out there, it won’t get you clickthroughs if no-one has really heard of you.

The Meta Description

The meta description tags are where you get to reinforce the customers decision to choose you. Again, if we look at the examples above, the top one has a far more enticing description, it gives me more confidence about shopping there and they have also managed to get their company name at the beginning of the description.

The main point, once you have established keywords and optimised pages and actually made it to the holy grail of Google front page (or close) is to now get that customer to click. These few words of blue and green are often a customers very first impression of you – heck – Google is giving you a priority ad space, so it makes sense to really utilise the opportunity.

Top Tips

• Keep your title tag to no more than 65 characters or roughly 8 words. If you go over that it will end abruptly like th…
• Keep your meta description to no more than 150 characters – around 25 words
• Use words that inspire confidence like ‘guaranteed’ ‘unique’ ‘best’
• Don’t fill your meta description with keywords, use this space to sell that page
• Consider adding words like ‘telephone orders welcome’ as it gives customers another way to deal with you but again – it builds the trust factor
• Test your results until you get it right
• Try to weave in your keywords but always write titles for the consumers not the search engines

In the next installment, we’ll dig in to the power of good images and as ever – please feel free to leave any comments below.

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Of course I want to take this a lot further and show you how to get great results – but let’s talk about five things that are the most important to the success of your online business.

So – Number 1 – you must optimize your title tags. Yes, we have spoken about this already and yes we will be speaking about it again, because this is step one in your on site SEO campaign. The first part of telling the search engines exactly what the page is about.

And remember that this is every page that you want to rank for. So we’re not talking about your terms and conditions page, your about us page or returns and so on – we’re talking about the pages that make you MONEY.

Number 2

You need to repeat your main keyword within the page description. So, let me clarify in case there is any confusion here.

First let’s talk about an e-stores home page – the rules are slightly different for what I will be teaching you with blogs.

Your home page – your www.mystore.com page will have the title tags optimised for 2 – 3 main key-phrases that you want to rank for overall – the most. These will be the key-phrases that you have determined will bring the most targeted traffic for what you are selling and the most bang for your buck. They will most likely be keywords that you will initially not expect to rank for, but that’s cool because you are going to be concentrating on those long-tail keywords initially.

Your meta description tag will then also have a repeat of your number one key-phrase in it – again this is what you want to rank for the absolute most for your overall site.

You will then have those key-phrases repeated and optimized again within the content of your HOME PAGE.

Ok – so that the stores home page – so what about the category and product pages?

Your category pages are really important and you will be choosing the ‘theme’ of these and then targeting the long-tail keywords for them. So perhaps your site sells baby clothing but you have a category for baby shoes or maybe more specifically – baby shoes for girls and another for baby shoes for boys, you’ll be establishing the best long-tail keywords for these and then optimizing them in the same way as the home page – title tags, description, header tags, content and anchor text.

Finally you’ll be at your product pages and these again will be optimised via title tags (containing the product title and keywords) – you’ll need to be descriptive and specific and you must do your research for this as a small tweak can make a huge difference.
Going back to selling baby shoes, let’s imagine that you have some little baby shoes for a girl made from pink leather and they have bits n bobs stuck on for decoration. Now you may have them in your store with the title tag ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ and sell one or two pairs a week, that’s great but a quick bit of research and you might find that that phrase ‘Pink Shoes for Baby Girl’ only gets searched for 15 times a week in Google. So even though you may be ranking highly for it – no one is looking for it.

Then you notice that the search term ‘Baby Girls Leather Shoes with Embellishments’ is having a high search rate of 100+ searches a week and as that is the product you are selling – you change the title tags, the description and start to optimize it differently – and now you are enjoying sales of 30+ a week.

Now, I’ve pulled those figures out of the air to give you an example of how keyword research can make a dramatic difference but the truth is, whilst those figures are made up, I’ve only used small numbers to portray how highly effective this is, the truth of the matter is; a store who recognises the value of this and makes the changes correctly can enjoy an increase of thousands over their product range.

Your description will likely be pulled from the first sentence of your product description depending on what shopping cart your use. IF and this is a BIG if – you have the ability within your shop platform to change these titles and descriptions – then do it.

If you have the ability within your shop to write one title for Google and one for your on-site customer – then do it as you can use more keywords to drive traffic to that product but less within the titles of your store – so it doesn’t look offputting to a customer.

If you don’t understand that – don’t worry, we’ll be looking at that in more detail.

Now not all of you will have that software available, so use your noodles. You have to tailor to both the search engines and the customer. Your description, if pulled manually by the search engine will likely be the first sentence of your product description – so make it good.

Number 3

Make use of your header tags as Google uses them to reinforce what your page is about. So a title of a page will be in <H1> tags but you can also use <H2> <H3> and so on until about <H6> although there’s really no need for you to take it that low. It’s best to use it in order of importance too, so as you write your description for your products or your text for your category page, think about breaking it up a little with some header tags and add in 1 or 2 of your researched keyphrases in a way that flows for your customer and doesn’t look odd.

Ok – so number 4 then – links and anchor text. This is actually number 4 and number 5 – but let me break this down a bit.

First of all we want to use descriptive anchor text to pass from one place in our site to another – (now apologies again if I am boring you and repeating myself – but this has to become a complete no-brainer for you!)

So, back to that anchor text then – you want to let Google know exactly what the page you are linking to is all about – and Google reads anchor text. If you send Google to a page about lemons with the anchor text lemon – it’s worth more to the rank of the page of lemons than if you just said – click here.

Now every link to the page of lemons is a good thing – but tell Google its lemons, and it finds lemons and now we are starting to get a lemon page that is ranking.

I mean its logical, loads of people – links – have told Google there’s a great page about lemons – Google has noted all of these links and thought – d’you what, that page is about lemons and it’s pretty damn popular. It’s getting a load of links!

Now, this can be done internally as well as externally. A link from a page in your site with a page rank of 1 is worth more than a link coming in with a page rank of 0.

But this does move us neatly on to number 5 – which is links part two! A page will rank higher in the search engines based on the amount of links it has pointing to it! FACT!

Now – Google is pretty good at finding spammy sites and getting rid of them but they do enjoy an initial rise because of the sheer volume of links that point to them – orchestrated of course by the spammer or website owner! Once some nice person from Google HQ has looked at the page and decided it’s not actually worthy of the high ranking it seems to have – it starts to vanish!

But – if it’s a nice product page that clearly sells what it is optimized for – it’s left to enjoy its high ranking status.

So the upshot of it is – you need back-links – and you need a lot! We can do our on site and off site SEO but without the power of 5 – as just discussed – we’re fighting a losing battle.

So – we will be drilling down into all of this. I will show you the way – and if you implement it, you’ll soon be heading up the Google highway to riches!

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Here are a few ways that you can consider tweaking your customer service to encourage long-term loyalty from your buyers.

Feel free to add your own thoughts and ideas in the comment box below this post.

1. Treat Your Best Customers With Respect

I was in a restaurant recently with my family and I witnessed a scene that is becoming typical of frazzled business owners.

Whilst I was queuing to get some more drinks, a lady in front of me asked if she could have a word with the manager. When the manager returned the woman very calmly explained that the service she had received from her waiter had been terrible and that he was unhygienic and rude. She also went on to say that she had been coming to the restaurant for many years and this was the first time she had ever complained but she felt she ought to bring it to the managers attention.

Fair Enough?

I though it sounded fairly reasonable for this lady to discreetly air her concerns but the reply from the manager was quite remarkable. He tore strips of this woman and the whole thing escalated, he started off by suggesting that she was wrong because he personally hired all of the staff and they were highly trained individuals, he took the whole thing as some sort of personal attack and ended up having half of the restaurant hearing this verbal onslaught – a big, big mistake.

The woman quite rightly ended the conversation by saying that she would never return to eat there again and that she would make sure none of her friends would either. The manager told her that he didn’t want people like her in his restaurant and the whole situation seemed to nose-dive into a toe-curling display of playground mentality.

The whole situation could have been avoided if the manager had just taken responsibility. What he should have done is apologised to the woman for the bad customer service she received and either discounted her meal or given it to her for free, the latter being the choice I would have made here. Not only did he lose one of his loyal customers he lost the respect and possible custom of every other diner within earshot. He also lost the friends of the lady that dined there and any further people that she would have recommended the restaurant to.

Had he given her an apology and a free meal, that woman would have been raving about the restaurant to her friends who in turn would have told their friends – and so on. The knock on effect from something like this can be incredibly powerful.

So, rule number 1 is take responsibility for your mistakes whether you personally made them or not. By saying ‘sorry’ you are diffusing a situation – even if you feel the customer is wrong. Think twice before letting them know that you are too damn important to need their business!

For the price of that one meal the manager could have increased his business, instead he has probably lost quite a bit.

2.  Make Everything Dead Simple

We all want and need simplicity – we’re busy and we don’t have time to jump through hoops. If you want me to be your loyal customer, don’t make me try – I can’t be arsed! Hand me the loyalty card on a plate and I’ll come back but don’t make me beg for it.

Last week I decided to buy some wrapping paper and be a bit more organised for Christmas this year. I tend to buy most stuff online these days as I find it easier and cheaper, so I went along to a very well known site that sells some great Christmassy products.

I must have spent about 30 minutes on there choosing various rolls of paper, tags and ribbon. I then had a mooch about and found some gorgeous Christmas table wear (black with sparkly lime bits – I fancied a theme change) so I decided to buy the whole set. this comprised of a table-cloth, table mats, a runner and napkins. In total the bill came to about £80 and I headed off to the checkout to pay.

I filled out the usual name and address forms and was then taken to page 2 where I was told that they may use a credit agency to check my background – weird, i just wanted to pay in total, I wasn’t opening an account, but I ticked the ‘ok’ box and carried on. On the following page I was faced with a barrage of questions of which I don’t remember them all except the top two, which were ‘Are you a Home Owner?’ and if so ‘How Long Have you Lived There?’

WHAT? Are you Serious?

I want to buy some wrapping paper here – do you need a blood sample too?

They lost the sale – i just do not have the time nor the inclination to fill out utter crap like that! I would have happily given them my card details and paid but I don’t need to give them a full history – I wasn’t opening an account and there was no where on there for me to just hit the ‘no account – pay in full’ button!

How many sales are they losing each day? I dread to think what their cart abandonment rate is like. And do you know what I did later that day? I phoned my mum and bitched about it to her and she has now been put off ordering from them too, I’ve also had a moan to a couple of girlfriends about it and I’m obviously still pissed off because here I am ranting again! What if I named the company in my blog post? What if I went on Twitter and moaned about it too? This is powerful people – don’t make your customers jump through hoops – they don’t like it, you lose the sale and then they go off and bitch about you!

Stand By Your Products or Service

You sell great products right? Or maybe you are service based, in which case your service is second to none? Well, stand by it and give out a good guarantee. If customers know that you are confident enough to offer a long or even lifetime guarantee, they will be more inclined to buy from you. If your service or product is excellent, they won’t ever need to ask for a refund!

“But What if They Do?” I hear you cry….

You have to weigh up the pro’s and cons – but let me lay it out clearly for you.

There will always be the odd p#@s taker who will ask for their money back after 2 months and quote your guarantee back atcha, but in comparison to the larger proportion of loyal buyers you are creating – it pales in comparison.

Lets imagine ten people come to your website one day to make a purchase (let’s hope it’s more than ten, but we’ll go with that for this example). Now, they all kinda want your product but consumers will normally go through the motions of justifying their purchase to themselves. One justification to encourage that purchase is a loooong guarantee. You are so damn confident in your product that you are willing to stand by it. That sheer amount of faith in your own product or service will cement a customers decision to buy because they know that if they are really not happy – you’ll give them their money back, so they are not losing a thing.

Those ten people will happily recommend your product or service to their friends and even if it was only to one other person, that’s another ten people recommending it to another ten people and so on and so on.

For the one or two p@#s takers who decide they are strapped for cash one month and ask for their money back, the new band of loyal customers that have arrived since, will more than make up for the few refunds you find you give out.

(If you’re giving out a lot of refunds – you might want to check the quality of what you are selling).

And don’t forget, not everyone that asks for a refund will be p@#s takers, they may just find that you’re not offering what they need right now, but by giving them their money back in a friendly manner, you are ensuring that they will return and possibly buy a different product or service from you in the future.

Let me give you an example of something that I am doing soon. Over at Web Mums, we are creating numerous online courses for mums to either enhance their online businesses or to get up and running (head over and sign up for an early bird discount ). The courses are affordable but packed with high quality content that people can use to maximise their businesses – but – we will be offering a 100%, no questions asked, lifetime guarantee!

We’ll be doing it because we want our customers to feel confident in their purchase and we are confident in our products and service. Will we get refunds? Yeah sure, we’ll get a few but at the same time we’ll be building a loyal base of customers and at the end of the day if our customers aren’t happy – then we don’t want to take their money!

So have a look at your systems you have in place for customer service and loyalty and see if there are a few areas where you could maybe offer more. You’ll soon be encouraging a loyal customer base that will buy from you for years and recommend you to all of their friends.

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Setting Up a Shop

Setting Up a Shop the right way will determine your long term success. If you already have an eCommerce store and are wondering why you have few customers, low conversion or little traffic then perhaps it’s time to consider some aspects of running an online store that often don’t occur to a new estore owner.

How to Get Customers

Often overlooked, but kinda essential, customers that buy stuff are crucial to a stores survival – without them your store is a failure!

I don’t even want to mention how many stores I see come and go within the Mumpreneur niche and it’s normally because of a lack of understanding of how to get an ongoing stream of traffic.

You do need to know about keywords and SEO – tedious and boring but actually essential. If you don’t know what people are searching for then you can’t optimize your store to meet their needs. It’s no skin off their nose as they’ll just buy from your competitor.

When I say keywords (and feel the draft from you yawning), I mean that you need to be finding out what people are typing into that little search box over on Google – we’ll call this a key-phrase, you then need to check and see who else has optimized for that key-phrase as you want a high search volume (from the customer) vs a low competition. Once you start optimising your own store for the actual keyphrases people are searching on, you’ll soon start to rise up the ranks in the search results pages! You want to be on page one of Google – don’t settle for anything less!

Now obviously there is a lot more to it than that, so if you think you can handle learning about keywords then pop your name and email in the boxes below and I will send you my ‘Mastering Keyword Research’ report, which goes into all of this a bit deeper. This does mean that you’ll be on my newsletter list, but you can unsubscribe if you feel that you’re not getting any value! (pffft…as if)!

How to Get Customers to Buy Something

So now that you are the keyword queen and have established how to get tons of targeted traffic to your store, it’s only a matter of time before you retire to your counting house and wallow in a stash of cash – right?

Hmmm – well back up missus – not so fast! These folks are not buying anything, so now what? There are numerous reasons as to why your customers are not converting as well as you think they should but one of the main ones is TRUST. If you don’t come across as the respectable establishment that you are, then I’m afraid that no-one is going to be parting with their credit card details today thank you!

Some of the main things that you can do to show your integrity as a merchant is to have a ‘trust’ sign, something like McAfee security badge which shows that they have verified you and test your site regularly. This isn’t any ol’ badge, if the customer clicks it, they will be taken to McAfee and shown your details are on their records – sweet!

Make sure that you have a business telephone number

Pref a 0800 or similar as your customer wants to know that they can contact you. For the shy ones who hate to talk, consider having a ‘live chat’ service. If you can be available as a live person for customer service in your busy periods, you’d be amazed at how many more sales you can convert.

And if you have all this covered but you still don’t seem to be converting then you need to start testing your landing page. It could be anything from bad product images to the wrong kind of ‘Add to Cart’ sign. Simple tweaks can yield great results.

But start with the keywords, download that free report cos it will help you understand what’s involved far better than a short blog post. And make sure that you have Analytics installed because you can’t test what you can’t measure!

Read the report and then come back and let me know if it helped you!

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2)     You must ensure that the images you use in your shop are of high quality. Customers will be quite put off by low quality pictures as they will perceive the product to be the same.

3)     Establish who the competition is, look at what they are doing and then do it a whole heap better. Also look out for opportunities of joint ventures and collaborations.

4)     Make sure that you have your payment terms clearly displayed on your home page. This is a convenience and an added trust factor for your customers.

5)     Have you started to capture email addresses from your customers? Make sure that you have a sign up box with a special offer for customers or you are leaving money on the table.

6)     Use a picture on your ‘About Us’ page where poss and an introduction video is even better. Write a great page as it’s often clicked and checked by a customer prior to them making a purchase, so use it to build trust.

7)     High traffic is irrelevant – it’s conversion that counts. Concentrate on using targeted keywords for targeted buyers.

8)     Consider using promotional items like fridge magnets in your parcels. Most people do actually pop them on the fridge and therefore have a constant reminder of you and your business.

9)     Put your most important info above the fold on the home page. Images, Special Offers, Contact Details and Secure signs have all been tested and proven to work well.

10)  Consider using a blog. Ecommerce sites are not consistently updated but blogs are, so by putting out fresh content that leads to your site, you are also keeping your site regularly spidered and indexed by Google.

11)  Don’t send all of your links to your home page. Spread the link juice throughout your site so that different products rank well in the SERPs

12)  Don’t add anything like ‘We’re a Brand New Store’ or anything to suggest that you are a newcomer to the business.

13)  Give your customers the WOW factor. Ways you can do this are by sending a free gift with their purchase, sending their purchase FAST, email a thank you to them or follow up with a special offer. Anything that makes them think ‘Wow, what a great company and a great service’.

14)  SEO is important but build your site for the customer and not the search engines. Any long paragraphs of keyword stuffed text will not only put a customer off, it will also get you penalised by the Search Engines.

15)  Never, EVER, ever have hidden text/keywords on your site. You will get your arse kicked and may even get de-indexed.

16)  Social Media creates a natural footprint for your customers or potential clients to check you out. Don’t say anything online that you may come to regret because once it’s out there, you can’t retract it – so use social media wisely!

17)  Don’t be boring – use your blog to inject a little bit of personality to your brand, whilst also building the trust factor.

18)  Don’t make your customers jump through hoops to buy from you because – they won’t! Making them register to see things like shipping costs is old school and detrimental to your business.

19)  Educate your customer and help them make that decision to purchase. If your product enable you to do a demonstration via video or even pictures, then add it to the product description or on ‘how to’ article pages within your site (with links to the product). This will dramatically increase your sales.

20)  Difficult customers that are dealt with in the correct manner, can often become your biggest and most loyal customers, so be patient and be nice!

21)  For SEO purposes, make sure that your product names are in the title tag of the corresponding page – before your company name if you are using it here.

22)  Become an expert within your niche. Don’t just sell the product, blog about it, the history, facts, stats etc. People like to buy from an expert and will actually pay you more for it than a competitor!

23)  Don’t try to sell everything, be niche specific. You are not Amazon so do not try to be, focus on niche products to a niche audience.

24)  Create loyalty by finding ways to reward existing customers, special offers, competitions, bonus points, discounts & freebies etc

25)  If you offer a live help or chat service, make sure that you actually log in to it and be on hand to answer queries. If you consistently get too busy, consider dropping it so that customers are not left waiting.

26)  Make sure that you constantly update for FAQ’s page with any new queries that come in. Not only is this great for the search engines it also saves both you and your customers precious time.

27)  A good place to remind customers about your newsletter is on your ‘thank you’ page after their purchase. They are already committed to you through their purchase and are in the best frame of mind to now sign up. Add an incentive like 10% off your nest order to clinch the deal!

28)  Keep the customer informed about the progress of their order BEFORE they have to come and ask you. It shows that you are a professional, caring company and adds an additional layer of trust. Plus, if there were any problems with their purchase, they are far less likely to kick off if they have already had contact from you and decided that you are a good company to buy from. Folks don’t like to admit they are wrong and tend to go with their initial appraisal.

29)  Utilise free services such as Google Base as these can bring you highly targeted traffic and more links within the SERPs.

30)  You don’t have to sell your products cheaper than the next guy (who probably isn’t making any profit). People pay extra for a professional and excellent service.

31)  Include promotional flyers in your parcels. Discount vouchers to encourage return visits, catalogues to showcase your other products etc

32)  Have a search facility, customers like to be able to search for what they want rather than wading through tons of pages. On the flip side – only have this available if it is a good search facility. Searches that result in shoddy results could mean that your customer won’t find what they are looking for even if you sell it.

33)  If you often get asked a lot of questions about your products then include a keyword rich FAQ’s page, very good for SEO purposes.

34)  If you hold your own stock the ship orders FAST. You’re now in the shadow of eBays ‘want it yesterday’ mentality. Within the past couple of years, people have gone from waiting a few weeks for their purchase to now expecting it within a few days of ordering. If you can’t meet those demands – have a clear and precise shipping policy so that you’re customer is aware. It’s also wise to include this information again on their receipt and any follow up emails.

35)  Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and go through your buying process to the very end. Is it easy? Are there steps you could eliminate? Are there add-ons that you could insert?

36)  Raise your profit margin and encourage larger orders by offering free shipping for multiple item orders or orders over a certain amount. You could also factor the cost of shipping into your products and offer free shipping on everything. If you do this right then the rise in sales will counteract any loss made on shipping and you will be in profit.

37)  If you are selling the same product as someone else, add something to the title tag that makes yours stand out from the competition.

38)  Try new things in your store. Promotions, layout, offers etc But test, test and test some more. You need to fail in order to succeed so fail fast and move forward.

39)  Your internal links are incredibly powerful. Learn how to structure these correctly to optimise your store to its full potential.

40)  If your thumbnail image says ‘click here to see a larger image’ make sure that a larger image actually appears!

41)  Study your after-sales care. One-off buyers do not create a business, you want to create a base of loyal, returning customers that rave about you to their friends.

42)  Remember the 80/20 rule. 20% of your customers prob make up around 80% of your sales – so work on creating the ultimate customer experience.

43)  Be contactable. Have your companies telephone number clearly displayed on your stores home page and make sure that all of your calls get answered or dealt with swiftly.

44)  Use testimonials if you have them. Electronic signatures and video also add the extra trust factor.

45)  Have a prominent area to feature special offers or products. Keep it either on the same day each week or do it daily so that customers become accustomed to where it is and look for it.

46)  Try and incorporate a reviews section. If you can do this on each individual product and get the software for customers to leave reviews themselves, then this is great for customer confidence. If a product gets continually bad reviews then stop selling it. Since companies like Amazon and eBay introduced reviews and feedback, it’s become a mark of trust that buyers like when they can have it.

47)  Make your site easy to navigate. Customers won’t hang around to dig for a product so hand it to them on a plate. If they want some green earrings, they won’t want to go through a process of clicking like this:- home page >> jewellery with stones >> silver jewellery with stones >> earrings >> earrings for pierced ears >> green earrings – keep it as simple as you can! Less clicks = more sales.

48)  Respond to customer complaints swiftly and politely. Bite your tongue if need be as your reputation is your livelihood.

49)  Make sure that you have a prominent and strong guarantee and refund policy. Offering a great policy will increase your sales.

50)  Avoid having flash banners that tell folks you’re in the top 50 of something or other. It looks lame and most people know that these ‘trophies’ are just meaningless. Unless it’s a badge worthy of showing – don’t show it. Also avoid those entire ‘listed in the blah, blah’ directories – so what? Your customer couldn’t give a hoot and it makes your site look cheap.

51)  Add a best-sellers section to your website. It encourages more sales as people are naturally curious to see what other people are buying and also use that as an endorsement of the product to buy it themselves.

52)  Make sure that your spelling and punctuation throughout the site is faultless. Use a spell check to make sure as it’s something that will make your site look very unprofessional. And it’s not even that you’re a bad speller, most folks won’t condemn you for that – but they will condemn you for not being bothered to ‘check’ your written word. If you can’t be bothered with that then maybe they can’t be bothered to buy from you.

53)  Use an 0800 number for your biz if you can or at the very least have a separate line so that your business calls can be answered in a professional manner, rather than your 2yr old as you’ve nipped to the toilet! If your company is getting very busy then consider hiring someone to answer the phone our re-route your calls to a call centre.

54)  Don’t make customers fill out unnecessary fields in the buying process. If billing and delivery addresses are the same, let them check a box to say that rather than having to type it all out again.

55)  If Google isn’t indexing all of your pages then you probably don’t have enough links OR you have some duplicate content issues. Double check the pages that are not being listed and find out why. Address the problem and re-submit (or add) an XML site map to Google.

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