Late last summer, a manufacturing client came to us for help with their e-commerce website, which they believed to be underperforming. With over 20 years in the hair care products business, our client was generating over a million dollars in revenue annually and was hoping to expand into online sales — a natural next step for any manufacturer. After all, selling products via the website is almost a no-brainer – it requires no additional sale force and has the potential to bring in as much, if not more, income than offline sales.
Our first task was to conduct an audit on the existing website which was running on the popular Shopify platform. Shopify is an easy-to-use e-commerce subscription service that comes packed with features that endear it to the SEO consultant. (There is some stuff NOT to love, too, but we’ll save that for another post.) It didn’t take much poking around before we discovered one major impediment to online sales that actually had little to do with technical site optimization: products had not been correctly configured to show variants, so if a customer was searching for a hairbrush of a particular size and style they had no real way of finding it beyond browsing through the hundreds of items in the store.
Once the online inventory issues were corrected, we adopted a new theme to better showcase the products and product information. Again, Shopify provides a variety of pre-designed “themes” that can be customized with your own colors, fonts and logos. Shopify Theme designers are generally familiar with best practices for displaying product information in a way that encourages visitors to add items to their cart, continue shopping, and successfully complete the checkout process.
Almost immediately, online sales began to climb. Over the next several months, we worked with our client to pull together the branding for their blog, email newsletter templates and social media channels. No matter what business you’re in, good SEO requires that you focus on providing website visitors with a great experience every time they visit: engaging and entertaining articles, lively product demos, helpful tips, exciting offers – whatever it is that makes you the best in your niche! Don’t be shy to tell the world what it is you do best, and your efforts will be rewarded with solid search rankings and increased sales. Within six months, our client had already more than doubled their historic monthly revenue and it’s only the beginning.
