Most eCommerce marketers I speak with have one of two problems.
Either:
1) Their high-converting pages don’t get much traffic, or
2) Their high-traffic pages don’t get many conversions
Today, we’re going to solve the second problem.
You’ll learn:
- How to convert underperformers, like blog posts, into your best selling-pages
- Which products to feature that will speak to your visitors
- One simple technique to fix a dismal bounce rate
Let’s start!
Editor’s note: This article comes from years of experience helping clients sell more using high-converting content. If you’re interested in more sales at your eCommerce store, send us a message.
1. Learn your customers’ buyer motives
The first step to increasing conversions is to understand the buyer motives that make someone visit your page.
I recommend looking at your analytics tools to see your top referrers. Are these from social media? Search engines? Other pieces of content?
If it’s primarily from search traffic, what are they searching for? What other results are on the page? What sites are ranking better than yours?
Every visitor visits your page for a reason. It’s one of the following:
- They want to solve a problem
- They want to achieve a result
- They want to answer a question
Which is it for your page?
Let’s look at an example.
Say our eCommerce store sells unique pencils and pens, and our most popular article is one we published a few years ago about the most creative pencil designs.
At first glance, the motive is just inspiration. But the data says otherwise.
Our biggest group of visitors comes from search engines with keywords like “teacher present” and “back to school gift.” Sure enough, traffic spikes in August when school begins.
So the visitor isn’t just looking at neat pencil designs. There’s a buying motive behind its popularity—people reading this article are looking to buy back-to-school gifts for their teachers.
We can refocus our piece on creative pencils with the most creative pencils for gifts. The original piece was full of collector’s items—now, every pencil is something a visitor could buy today.
And there’s no other guide like it online.
2. Boost sales with product selection
Here’s an open secret:
One of the best ways to get visitors to buy a product from an underperforming page is to feature products on that page.
(Shocking, I know!)
There are plenty of plugins that do this automatically. And you can just select products at random.
But you’ll see better results if you choose products related to what your visitors want to buy. And we can find that out through the buyer motive we discovered earlier.
In the example above, that’s easy—feature gift-ready pencil kits.
But what if your popular content isn’t related to what you sell? What if, for example, our store with the winning piece on pencil designs sold framed art prints?
I don’t recommend stocking pencils just because a blog post does well. But our motive can guide us to the best featured products.
We know our visitors are looking for back-to-school gifts. So what if we included our top three teacher-friendly prints?
We’ll almost certainly find that visitors are suddenly buying.
That’s the power of a buyer motive.
3. Boost engagement with copywriting techniques
Even your most popular pages might have dismal engagement scores.
One of the best metrics to measure here is how long a user spent on the page. Longer stays mean higher engagement and better chances a casual visitor will turn into a customer.
If you see low engagement time scores—under a minute—on content pages, it’s time to take action.
Use proven website copywriting techniques to increase engagement. One of my favorites is the hook-and-line technique, which teases something to come.
Other strategies for boosting engagement time are making your content more skimmable, adding subheads, and including media like images and videos. If you can include product previews with buy buttons on the page, this can be another way to break up walls of text.
4. Slash your bounce rate with link teasers
Bounce rate is the number of users who visit one page and disappear.
It matters to your bottom line because your most popular pages usually aren’t great at converting. You should try to move a visitor to another page, like a product category page or buying guide.
One of the best ways to do this is through what I call “link teasers.” These are internal links early on in a piece of content—usually in the intro. They hint at a more interesting page.
Let’s take a simple example.
You run a store that sells fans (the cooling-you-off kind), and your highest-traffic page is “8 Energy-Efficient Ways to Beat the Summer Heat.”
You’ve already made “energy-efficient fans” tip #1, replacing the conversion-killing “open the windows.”
But we can move visitors to other pages in the intro paragraph. What about this?
The summer heat is unbearable.
You’ve already cooled your patio or porch, and now you’re ready to heat-proof your home.
But there’s no need to rack up a high energy bill doing it (we’re all about those budget-friendly options).
The solution? Energy-efficient ways to cool off.
Each of those links piques curiosity and leads to a high-converting product or category page. (Those links go to category pages for patio fans, top-rated ceiling fans, and budget-friendly fans.)
A chunk of interested readers will click on those links, transforming a dead-end article into a buying hub.
What to do if there’s too much content to optimize
The process we’ve just gone through is great if you have a few pages to optimize.
Spend an afternoon on each page, and you’ll see results.
And that’s what I’d recommend you do for the top 3–5 pages on your site.
But what if you’re one of the eCommerce stores with dozens or even hundreds of pages that need optimizing?
Sure, you can spend days doing the work manually. But I’d recommend working with someone experienced in content optimization that can do a fantastic job on each page—the same quality of work you would do if you had the time.
If you’re looking for a partner who knows eCommerce SEO, consider working with us.