How to Build an Ecommerce Website Strategy Right Now

You need to find out how to build an ecommerce website strategy, why you should invest in it, how to create an effective one and discover tools that will assist you in your process? Here are all the answers you’re looking for. 

As an online store, you badly need to drive traffic online. That means that your business will appear in search results when people want similar products or services related to what you sell. So, you want to enter ecommerce SEO.  

Indeed, if you have an ecommerce business that requires a customer-focused website or you’re looking to start your ecommerce business, you’re in luck. There is no better time to start your online business than TODAY!

WHY?

Ecommerce sales grew more than 50% during the last two years, estimating around an 870-billion-dollar industry, according to a report by Forbes. 

With so much rapid growth happening everywhere, it’s easy to see why setting up your ecommerce site will be a lucrative endeavour. 

In this article, we will go over steps to kick-start your own ecommerce business. Also, we will discuss some recommendations to establish and track your website success using common digital marketing KPIs.  

Let’s get started!

What is an Ecommerce Business?

An ecommerce business is a business model where people shop for goods and services over the internet — or where the buying and selling are done through a website.

Ecommerce solutions digitally transfer money and data to close these online transitions.

If you’re a skilled craftsperson or entrepreneur, you’ve probably dreamt of establishing your online store and building a business that gives you freedom and achievement. 

We couldn’t be happier because this insider guide will teach you each step to possessing your killing website.

Without further ado, roll up your sleeves and join us. 

Why Should You Need an Ecommerce Website?

It’s clear that growth in the ecommerce world brings many benefits to your business’s bottom line. But what does this mean for a business owner? Is it worth it?

Heck yes!

There are more reasons to build an ecommerce website strategy. An online presence gives businesses abundant opportunities to create connections and generate conversions that lead to growth. 

How?

• Market acquisitions 

Reaching qualified leads in new markets with just a storefront can be hard for many companies, especially startups and small businesses.

An ecommerce site allows you to reach new customers online who you couldn’t reach with traditional marketing activities or brink-and-mortar sales.  

• Strengthen Your Brand Image 

If you sell on an online store or marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, your products are listed randomly and generically, and your customers often order the marketplace’s top brandings.

Honestly, some customers may not even realise that you’re offering your products there. They won’t learn about your brand even if they purchase from you. It’s just an alternative product based on reviews or price.

There is no way to preserve your brand image. 

Otherwise, building an ecommerce website ensures control of how your product is displayed. And that’s how your customers will remember you, not the marketplace.   

• Offer a Unique Shopping Experience 

Online stores are also able to affect the customer journey directly by creating a special shopping experience through stores, categories, videos, or personalised services— or even if you want to establish a blog.

There is no need to press on the shopping encounters to end the checkout either, as you can now reach customers via social media and email marketing. You already have invaluable data about your buyers.

These extraordinary experiences can convince customers to buy later through online shopping offers or exclusive sales. But, unfortunately, a brick-and-mortar store cannot ever support this inclusive opportunity. 

How to Build an Ecommerce Website Strategy?

Ecommerce business has become a virtual extension of any company. The recent surge of businesses operating online due to the COVID-19 pandemic has created new normal and changed purchasing habits.

People have become accustomed to the accessibility and convenience of online shopping for any product or service. Any business that doesn’t adopt this trend gets left behind. 

Our quick guide will give you a comprehensive overview of what you should consider before establishing an online platform. Adapting to digital transformation is key to enabling longevity and growth in your business.  

Fortunately, it’s not as difficult as you might think. But it will require dedication and hard work.   

You first need to recognise that building an ecommerce strategy will entail detailed planning. Learning individual tactics is inevitable, but without evolving an overall plan, it’ll be easy to get overwhelmed. 

Let’s break it down!

Define Your Goals and Objectives

To build an ecommerce website strategy, you need to set your goals and objectives clearly. If you don’t, you will never know whether your marketing efforts and website are actually working—or you should adjust a new strategy.

I hear you! 

Yes, you’re absolutely right. Obviously, your ultimate goal is to increase profits and revenue. But we mean here to think more specifically when writing down your goals. After all, numerous ways to duplicate ecommerce sales.

Think of goals like

• Improving your conversion rate
• Gaining more organic traffic
• Increasing market share
• Expanding customer lifetime value (LTV)
• Leverage brand loyalty
• Lower customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Bringing customers through different marketing channels 

Also, when eliciting these specific goals, define targets within timeframes, for example, a 20% increase in summer apparel sales in Q2.

Pro tip: take your time to check out your analytics and website KPIs and see where there are any opportunities for organic growth. So, you need to investigate key metrics like conversion rates, search traffic, average order value, bounce rate, and repeat purchase. That’s how you will be able to identify where you’re underperforming and then define specific goals to push those metrics up. 

Target the Right Market

Building your branding is often a challenging task. It can be easy to get lost or have an inconsistent identity. That’s why it’s important to target your market as a first step. 

Indeed, it is crucial for a successful launch. It’s not just about attracting more customers but also finding the right ones. Here are some tips on targeting the right market when building your ecommerce website strategy! 

First, determine who your ideal customer is. Think of your audience’s age range, lifestyle, interests, and other factors. Next, collect data from various sources, such as surveys or social media platforms, to narrow down this demographic. Once you understand who you want to target, creating content and advertising campaigns will be easier tailored to this group.

Second, research what channels will effectively reach them. Different audiences use different platforms, so investigate what kind of sites they tend to frequent and how they prefer consuming content.

Start with SEO

To increase traffic to your online shop, you need to optimise it for search engines or Ecommerce SEO. In other words, how to make search engines see your products or service. 

Your ultimate goal is to position your product pages among the top 10 results on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 

That brings more organic (free and non-paid) traffic to your site. 

Why?

Because the organic result is 10 times more likely to get a click compared to a page located in the 10th spot, according to Backlinko.   

How can you get better results?

Many ways can help you invest effectively in SEO, such as:

1. Conducting keyword research and involving keywords in your page URLs, blog posts, and meta description.
2. Optimise your website layout and structure to create a good user experience. 
3. Building backlinks from high authority and reputable websites.

If done well, you can guarantee to show up for popular search terms relevant to your products. That means when your potential buyer searches for good nonstick pans, and you offer the same item, you can find your page easily and place the order.  

Build Pay-Per-Click Ads (PPC)

While building an ecommerce website strategy, you need to bring attention to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising if you rank keywords organically. 

PPC advertising is meaningfully helpful for generating traffic to your website while setting up organic rankings.

Unless you’re an incredible niche industry with almost zero competition and huge amounts of traffic, you will absolutely want to rely on PPC ads to bring traffic— at least at the beginning of marketing your ecommerce website.  

Pro tip: Google Ads will display your product when people search for specific keywords, and if no one clicks on your ads, you will pay nothing. The results will be instant, and PPC ads often pay off if you target the right keywords. 

Create Original Product Content 

 A significant step to understanding how to build an ecommerce website strategy is to create the content for your site. 

Creating original and high-quality content will set you up to stand out and bring success to your online store. Because your message will resonate with your website visitors in a way that makes them want to engage with you, purchase from you and revisit your ecommerce website. 

To maintain a following, be creative and original.  

Prompting original content is an excellent way to strike a compelling idea, make a statement, and make a mark on your customer’s mind. 

However, you should be aware of the type of content you need to produce because there is a fine line between content that deters users and content that encourages them to interact. 

So, why not take an extra step? 

Put in a little effort and have something that will be genuinely compelling.

Then, create an ecommerce website strategy with lasting effect. Building well-written pages can drive profits for years to come. 

But what should I write?

First and foremost, add informative content to your main site pages such as homepages, about, and policies (including shipping, warranties, refund and returning) at the bare minimum. It’s not about how many words you have on each page; it’s about how to inform your customers with all the information they want without redundancy.

Then you can move to populate your ecommerce website’s product content. 

It might seem so hard to fill all products’ pages. 

So, start with individual products, write unique descriptions, and prioritising by highest earners or best sellers.

Pro tip: don’t just drop in the bland boilerplate language of the manufacturer. Instead, explain what it is, its key features, and why it’s the best.

Then find your category pages. This content also poses a great SEO opportunity to rank better in search engines. 

In categories’ pages, you can explain a product type and get your users to access to check out other products. So they can find the exact path they’re looking for till placing the order. 

Also, consider creating a FAQs section on each page or a separate category page to answer all questions related to this segment (such as how to choose shirt size?) 

Now, it’s time to be proactive.

That means building an ecommerce website strategy spawns from your company authority (apparel, for example). Here’s where you can create blog posts that will drive traffic to your website and attract new audiences while engaging and informing existing fans about your offers and pleasant shopping experience through your website.  

Thus, add rich content to your ecommerce blog. For example, you can offer exclusive deals such as product demos or explainer videos on how to place the order— that will be a supreme fit.  

What if you fell short of ideas?

Simply ask your customers if you’re coming up short with what you should write about. Optimise a user feedback tool using pop-up chat interactions to ask, for instance:

• What are you looking for?
• What questions do you have?
• Which product you’re interested in?
• What brought you here today?
• What questions do you have?

Your goal is to zero in on topics your audience cares about and find out the experience you bring to your website because they will tell you so.

In short, for those wondering how to build an ecommerce website strategy, you need to add informative content to categories pages that answer common questions about specific topics. Not only does this drive SEO performance, but it also increases conversions, engagement, and order value.  

Conduct SEO Ecommerce Audit 

During building your ecommerce website strategy, your need to execute an SEO audit to monitor the same elements of your plan.

Running one is super helpful because you’ll get a checklist of adjustments and improvements to what makes up your plan. 

Also, it will benefit your rankings once you accomplish this.  

How?

We have compiled the most important questions you can use as a guide during your audit.

SEO Keyword Research

• Which keywords do you currently use?
• Which keywords do you rank for?
• What keyword opportunities can you take advantage of?

On-Page SEO

• What about descriptive meta-description? Do you have any?
• What about meta titles? Are they related to your page content?
• Do your product descriptions use keywords you pursue?
• Does your structured data meet Google standards?
• Do you use valid product-specific structured data?
• Do your images have well-descriptive, keyword-rich alt text? 
• Do your product descriptions accurately and clearly explain what you’re selling?

Backlinks

• What current backlinks does your website have?
• What websites can you get backlinks from?
• Do you have any broken links?
• Do you have any unliked mentions to fix?
• Are your backlinks from authoritative sources?

Technical SEO

• What is your page speed?
• Is your schema markup clean?
• Are your URLs good enough for search engines?
• What about your core website vitals?
• Are your videos compressed?
• Are your images compressed?
• Has Google indexed your site?

Mobile Optimisation

• Is your text scalable?
• Are your images scalable?
• Do you conduct the mobile optimisation test for your ecommerce website?
• Are your vectors and graphics scalable? 
• Does your ecommerce website automatically respond to different devices?

How Can Profiletree Help You?

Online stores aren’t easy to run and set up. Therefore, you need to build an ecommerce website strategy to beat your competitors— if that is your case, fret not; every business owner has all have one. 

While online shopping is a dominating trend that’s not anticipated to slow down any time soon, it’s still essential to have a well-laid ecommerce website strategy focusing on the customer experience. 

If your customers can’t easily navigate your shopping lists and find what they’re searching for, pay for it, and get it quickly, they will go straight to the competitors that sell products like yours. But unfortunately, generous online businesses are out there waiting for your customers.

That’s why you need to build an ecommerce website strategy that will give you everything you need. 

We will give you access to all the services and tools to have an ecommerce website strategy on hand and start attracting perspectives. Whether you use an existing ecommerce store or build an online solution from scratch, we are here to help you. 

Our expert team will make sure that you start with a solid foundation that includes content strategy, branding, shipping options, products, and an SEO action plan to back you up.

Our roadmap will give you a straightforward approach to running and growing your business.

We will never let you start without a plan that puts you on the right track not to miss anything.

Ready to start your ecommerce website strategy? 

Stop struggling to make sales, and let’s sell online quickly!

Start your ecommerce website today by booking your free call to find a way to reach customers and push up your revenue.