Since the beginning of the pandemic, e-commerce websites have grown significantly worldwide and 2020 saw Irish retailers receive a revenue increase of 159% for online sales, this has grown an extra 4.4% in 2021 and is predicted to increase further in 2022. It is therefore essential for companies to have a digital marketing strategy which uses all necessary mediums including Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), content marketing and email marketing to help build traffic to your website, which should in turn, translate to sales.
Here at Lambourn Digital, we understand this process can be difficult and have an expert team specifically focused on helping Irish SMEs grow their digital presence.
Here are some useful tips and tricks to help!
If you have any queries, feel free to give our Guys & Gals a shout.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO refers to ranking your website highly on the unpaid search results on Google. If your website does not appear on the first page, then 90% of your audience will not view your website, no matter how good the content and products sold. It is therefore essential for your website to rank highly on Google in order to gain traction. To achieve this, there are several steps and complex actions required to meet Google’s 200+ ranking criteria and reach the first page. These include:
1. Keywords
Keywords are specific words or phrases that determine the topic of the website’s content and are often what is put into the search engine. After adding keywords to the meta title tags, meta description and website content, it will allow Google to deem your website relevant to specific queries and post it in the search results. Selecting the correct key words however, can prove difficult as it is highly competitive and several websites use the same key words and consequently, ranking top of Google’s organic search is difficult to achieve. It is therefore important to invest some time into keyword research and find words with high search volume that have not been as frequently targeted by competitors.
2. Link building
Google determines a website’s credibility by the amount of other domains that have linked to it. If multiple websites link back to your company’s site, it is likely to rank highly on the organic search as a result. It is therefore important to complete backlink research when optimizing the SEO of your website. This has been made more complicated by the Google Penguin update which determines the credibility of your website through the quality and not quantity of your backlinks. Quality of backlinks are decided by multiple factors including the authority of the website, the relevance of the backlink to your website and how the website ranks on Google. This process can become complicated and very time consuming but it is an essential part of the SEO process. Without relevant, authoritative backlinks your page will not rank on the first page of Google and your business will not generate leads or revenue it could otherwise achieve.
There are also a large number of other factors which influence a websites ranking and need to be accounted for in the SEO optimization process. These include the quality of content, website speed, ensuring your website is mobile friendly and having an SEO friendly URL structure. Once all these factors have been accounted for and your website is ranking highly, the increased traction should result in sales and enhance brand growth. As Google is constantly crawling websites and deciphering its ranking, SEO requires continuous work to maintain a websites organic position at the top of Google’s search results. SEO can feel complicated and almost like a full-time job in itself. But it’s worth it! With an estimated market value of $70 billion, when done correctly, SEO can have a significant impact on sales through e-commerce websites.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click is a paid form of advertising which predominantly refers to Google ads. These have proven to be highly effective in generating revenue for e-commerce businesses in a short time period. Although recent years have seen the rise in paid ads on other platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, Google’s advertising revenue has increased by 41% to $53.1 billion over the past year and is predicted to continue to grow throughout 2022. Google ads is therefore a highly effective platform in which to advertise your company’s products and services and enhance your digital presence going into 2022.
PPC Model
As previously established, Google ads runs on a PPC model. This is where marketers select certain keywords to bid on and the successful company will appear on the paid ads section of Google when a search query containing a particular keyword is used. Each time the ad is clicked, the company will pay a small fee. This is often referred to as cost per action.
Ranking
Google ranks all Google ad campaigns out of 10 (10 being the highest) analysing factors such as ad relevance, your click through rate (CTR), position on Google and targeted keywords. Those campaigns deemed successful, will have a lower cost per action enabling a company to gain a higher return on investment. It is therefore important to spend time optimising the quality of your campaign to obtain a high quality score and a low cost per action.
Negative Keywords
One way of increasing the relevance of your Google ad is through using negative keywords which act as a filter tool preventing your ad from being shown when an irrelevant search query containing your keyword is entered into Google. For example, a tech company that are selling brand new apple watches and have bid on the term ‘apple watch’ may want to include ‘refurbished’ in their list of negative keywords so people looking for refurbished apple watches do not view their ads and the company is not charged for clicks that are unlikely to generate sales. This targeted approach filters out any unwanted traffic lowering the price and increasing the return on investment.
PPC is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies and is deemed 50% more effective than organic search results. When executed correctly, they can generate a huge amount of traction to your website resulting in increased sales.
Check out our Blog on How to make Google Ads work for your business.
Web Design
Another important aspect to growing your e-commerce sales is through developing a user-friendly, up to date website. It is essential that your website is easy to navigate and consumers can easily find what they are looking for. To achieve this follow the tips below.
✔️ Ensure the website is uniform and follows a consistent layout
✔️ Have a simple design
✔️ Place important content at the top of the page where it is easy to view
✔️ Use language appropriate to your audience
✔️ Ensure the web pages do not take too long to load
✔️ Ensure the website is compatible with mobile devices and all web browsers
✔️ Ensure the website is constantly updated
✔️ Include a call to action on each page
Creating a website which is well designed and easy to navigate is essential to having a digital presence. With e-commerce predicted to grow over the coming year there is no better time to enhance your digital presence which, if done correctly can significantly increase sales. To make this process as easy as possible, we are launching our very own CMS specifically tailored for businesses to develop the perfect e-commerce website to help companies sell their products and services.
Here are the Top 5 Reasons Why Your Website Needs to be Modern & Kept Up to Date
Our Services
Here at Lambourn Digital, we understand that developing and maintaining a digital presence can be time consuming and somewhat intimidating. We have a team of digital marketing experts to help in the development and execution of a marketing strategy tailored specifically to your company’s needs. We are a Google Partner Marketing Agency and with experts in SEO, PPC, social media marketing, graphic design and website development we are able to help your company in whatever way required. Our Guys & gals are your own Digital Marketing Team.
We also work directly with clients throughout the whole process keeping them informed on their website’s progress helping them understand what we are doing and the motivations behind it. We also take this a step further and offer training courses to our clients to equip them with the knowledge of all things digital.
In 2022, the need to go digital is greater than ever. If you have not yet taken the steps to become digital now is the best time to do so!