What is missing?

[al3ks]

Hi

 

I have built my first real e-commerce site with oscommerce 2.3.1 and now I'm struggling to understand why I'm not getting much sales.

 

I have looked around these forums for advice, I have focussed on SEO- installed various contributions such as header tags, sitemap, SEO urls, I have looked at meta tags and descriptions and even product image names.

I have also looked at optimizing the page loading times, reducing image sizes, cleaning the stylesheet etc.

 

I have looked at ways of advertising, google Adwords- The traffic increased and more people visited the site but still not many sales.

 

I know that a new site needs time to be found by people etc, but the site is running about 3 months and not much going on- even when traffic goes higher the sales stay low. We get good feedback about the site from friends etc.

 

This is my site: knnutrition.co.uk

 

So I don't know what I'm missing, can you spot a big mistake or something? I'd appreciate any advice and suggestions from you guys.

[Guest]

@@al3ks

 

I suggest checking your prices. As a new website with no customer base, you shouldn't list your products at SRP. I found several sites in the UK with the 500g Soul Ripper for 28.00 with free shipping, you have it at 31.99 and it is a featured banner on your front page. Anyone that would use your products, and your target market is small for the products you sell, will know what they can get it for and won't risk trying a new site if they aren't saving money.

 

If you are an authorized reseller of the products you are offering, I suggest contacting your supplier(s) for promotional discounts and products that will help build your customer base. There is one site offering that product in 20g trial packs for FREE. So, the company must offer some kind of promotional support.

 

 

JMO

 

 

Chris

[sapguy]

I think your site looks pretty good.

 

Just getting traffic to your website is hard and takes time. Then, to hold on to as many shopping carts as possible through the checkout process I would recommend allowing customers to check out without creating an account.

 

Keep in mind, YMMV but conversion rates for "new" online stores are in most cases below 1-2%. This is from real visitors looking to buy what you have to offer, not bots and stuff like that.

 

When Yahoo and LinkedIn fail to protect passwords properly these days, the average customer (or at least many I would at least say) trust us less, and we all know how people seem to use the same passwords everywhere. Creating an account == lower conversion rate imo.

 

These days, I just don't think these bullet points below gets anyone excited either. I would recommend creating a simpler checkout process.

• Easier & faster shopping experience
  
• Recieve product update notifications
  
• Get special customer discounts
  
• Manage your account, orders and other
  
• and many more!
  

[Praful Kamble]

@@al3ks

 

Addition to Chris's and Petter's comment I would like you to define a proper robots file to allow all web spiders to crawl the site.

 

And also recommend to use the Google feed or any other feed,

[vkd1980]

@@Praful Kamble

 

can you share dos and don't on Robots

[Praful Kamble]

@@Praful Kamble

 

can you share dos and don't on Robots

 

Check out this. Better Google it.

[♥14steve14]

You mention that you are getting visitors, what you have to do is to find out why they are leaving the site without buying. That sound easy, but it may not be. You have

google analytics installed so you must have a certian amount of data to use. You just need to interpret it correctly.

 

I dont know if you have installed it, but recover cart sales may also help you if customers are adding to the cart and not buying.

 

Your sire dos take a while to load, and this is probably due to image file size. Either add a small image to the products which has a small file size, or add a thumbnail add on.

 

For some reason when you click view source on your home page yo have the same bit of code twice. You may have added it twice.

 

Your page also does not look right. It looks like it should be centred on the page, which only parts are. Some of it is not aligned correctly. I used ie9. It does look fine in firefox.

 

On your product info page some of the heading text is impossible to read. You may have to alter the colour in the stylesheet somewhere. You also have a spelling mistake on more than one page. You have 'Recommended doze' should it not be 'Recommended dose'

 

Your account login page did not align correctly, and your create account page looks like the address area in not large enough. My address would not fit as my house has a name,, and a sub town. At least add the suburb bit back.

 

Finally go to http://validator.w3.org/ and put your sire in. On your home page you have 129 Errors, 140 warning(s) . I am sure many of these are minor, but the first two is important. 1. Unable to Determine Parse Mode! 2. No DOCTYPE found, and unknown root element. Aborting validation.

 

I hope this helps you get some sales.

[al3ks]

Thanks I appreciate all your feedback guys. I will take your advice and work on it now.

[dgmlance]

@@al3ks

 

Some additional tips for you. Get a autoresponder setup on your site for the following reasons;

1. With a valid e-mail address you can regularly communicate with your customers and promote a special which will help sales.
   
2. Make sure you on a weekly basis at least send an e-mail that educates them about sports nutrition and what each product does - this teaches them and it gives you an excuse to have a link in your footer
   
3. Create a product e-book to start of with - do a bestsellers list and tell people what each product does and why you stock it. Offer the e-book as a free download when they sign up - it motivates people to give you a e-mail address to get infromation they want.
   
4. Even if the e-book is only 10 pages do a good write up of the products and again with links to your autoresponder to get updates and links to each product you are discussing
   

I am talking from experience very few nutrition site give you e-book that tells you what each product is used for and what purpose it does. they all expect you to check online. Make it easier for people to reference your site and give them a reason to come back by updating the book and telling people by e-mail.

 

I do buy protein and nutrition but use vegetable products which are more expensive than whey but that is my choice. I had to look for a lot of information online and an e-book like that would have made my life a lot easier.

 

The last bit of advice, give fantastic service. Really do that bit well, use good packaging that wont disintegrate and add in flyers or anything as a reminder of your website. Add in a thank you note. Make it personal and people will overlook price because they feel looked after.

 

There is nothing worse than having a website that works well but the service sucks and the delivery people trash your order, this has happened to mates of mine. It also costs you money and you lose customers that way.

[al3ks]

Thanks for the feedback Lance, really appreciate it.

[Irma Garrish]

There are many innovative ways to increase traffic to your website.

• Compare your price with other competitors.
  
• Create social network and connect with people. (facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin)
  
• Add your business in some local business directory. (dmoz, yahoo, google)
  
• Announce your website launching or other features which you specially offer for your customers thru valuable press release website.
  
• Easy way to build brand loyalty is a customer rewards program. (Offer discount coupons or rewards)
  
• Customer satisfaction is the most important part of increase your sales, so always keep in touch with your customer thru phone, email support or live chat support.
  

Above all points helps to make big brand and increase your sales. There aren’t any ways to increase your sales or traffic instantly. But once you build your brand, you will be seen that your transactions are automatically improved.

[Jack_mcs]

al3ks

 

I think probably the biggest problem you have is that you are not using an ssl certificate. More and more shoppers are understanding the security risks of such shops and simply won't use them. Don't bother with validating the site. It won't affect SEO unless something is broken. And a robots file is only for asking the search engines not to list certain pages. It doesn't help with getting pages listed. Plus, with over 4,000 of your links listed on google, that is not the problem anyway. The second main problem you have is that you are using your domain name as the main keyword of all of the pages - big mistake. The third is that there is almost no text on the pages for the search engines to use. I suggest installing Header Tags SEO so that you can easily control that. And fourth, you need to move all of the css and javascript to external files. There is way too much of it in the files.

[Guest]

I agree with Jack_mcs above about installing Header Tags SEO. At present your home page nondescript tag is :

<meta name="description" content="Nam ut superiora omittam, hoc certe, quod mihi maximam admirationem movet, non tacebo." /> Get this changes asap as this is what users will see on search engine listings.

 

On all other pages the description tag is blank. Again I agree that you are wasting characters in your title tag by using your company name here. Unless you have a really famous brand and someone is specifically searching for this name then it just wastes characters in this very important area.

 

Good luck with your site.

[al3ks]

al3ks

 

I think probably the biggest problem you have is that you are not using an ssl certificate. More and more shoppers are understanding the security risks of such shops and simply won't use them. Don't bother with validating the site. It won't affect SEO unless something is broken. And a robots file is only for asking the search engines not to list certain pages. It doesn't help with getting pages listed. Plus, with over 4,000 of your links listed on google, that is not the problem anyway. The second main problem you have is that you are using your domain name as the main keyword of all of the pages - big mistake. The third is that there is almost no text on the pages for the search engines to use. I suggest installing Header Tags SEO so that you can easily control that. And fourth, you need to move all of the css and javascript to external files. There is way too much of it in the files.

 

Hi @@Jack_mcs Thanks for the comments and advice, I have taken all your points into consideration. About the store name in the title tag- I have turned it off so now when you are on a category/brand page it shows just the category/brand name in the title which usually is one word. Would that be bad SEO practise, as in too short or too brief? I have seen some sites that have it that way, but in Google usually there are rather long titles in search results.

 

Also, I use Header Tags SEO but as for meta descriptions and tags it only allows me to add them for category pages, how can I do the same for other pages?

 

Anyway I appreciate your feedback.

[al3ks]

I agree with Jack_mcs above about installing Header Tags SEO. At present your home page nondescript tag is :

<meta name="Nam ut superiora omittam, hoc certe, quod mihi maximam admirationem movet, non tacebo." /> 

Get this changes asap as this is what users will see on search engine listings.

 

On all other pages the description tag is blank. Again I agree that you are wasting characters in your title tag by using your company name here. Unless you have a really famous brand and someone is specifically searching for this name then it just wastes characters in this very important area.

 

Good luck with your site.

 

Thanks for your feedback, I didn't notice that meta name tag - now fixed. Do you know how long it usually takes for search engines to check the site and update the info from it?

 

Also linking to the other reply, do you think very short titles are fine?

[Guest]

The time to get all your pages listed is really variable, but if you have a lot of pages an xml sitemap can be really useful, and may well help to get all your pages listed faster. There is at least one contribution that can add this to your site for you.

The description tags actually don't help with search engine optimisation on Google as such, but they do show up on searches, and if they are well written they give information about your products and this makes it more likely that users will click on your links and visit your site.

Short titles are okay, but you may not be using all the useful keywords about your products if they are too short.

[Jack_mcs]

Hi @@Jack_mcs Thanks for the comments and advice, I have taken all your points into consideration. About the store name in the title tag- I have turned it off so now when you are on a category/brand page it shows just the category/brand name in the title which usually is one word. Would that be bad SEO practise, as in too short or too brief? I have seen some sites that have it that way, but in Google usually there are rather long titles in search results.

 

Also, I use Header Tags SEO but as for meta descriptions and tags it only allows me to add them for category pages, how can I do the same for other pages?

 

Anyway I appreciate your feedback.

A keyword with two or three words is usually better because it can describe the item more specifically. One-word keywords are good if they are something someone would search for. It is OK (recommended) to have more than one keyword so there's no reason not to have both, except that it is extra work.

 

On a properly installed shop, it should be possible to alter the titles and meta tags of all of the pages so it seems yours is not installed correctly.