1. @annstanley
Creating an engaging and
user friendly website that
converts, and is found in
search engines
by
Ann Stanley
May 2012

2. @annstanley

3. @annstanley
Introduction

4. @annstanley
How to double your sales?
• Multi-channel management:
– Sell through other channels eg Amazon, eBay, Play.com etc.
• Increase traffic to your website:
– Buy more traffic eg PPC or ad serving
– Improve your search traffic through SEO, Google Merchant Centre,
Google Places
– Use other marketing techniques eg Affiliate marketing
– Make sure your site is mobile friendly to take advantage of 20-30% users
using mobile

5. @annstanley
How to double your sales
• Improve your conversion rate:
– Reduce your bounce rate
– Give buyers the confidence to buy from you
– Provide the information to make the buying decision easy – especially if it is
endorsed by other customers or social connections
– Personalise the user experience so your site is more relevant
– Improve the buying process so you reduce shopping cart abandonment
• Increase sales from each customer:
– Increase average order value
– Encourage customers to buy again or more often (email, loyalty, promotions, social
media)
– Build a community of advocates (sharing, social and incentives)

6. @annstanley
Ecommerce landscape
On-site Sales
On-site sales
Sales from Search from other sources
marketing
(email, affiliates, display ads, social, mobile,
(PPC, SEO, shopping comparison,
Merchant Centre) voucher sites)
Conversion
optimisation
Other
Shopping platforms off-site sales
& market places
(Social, Mobile, drop shipping,
(Amazon, eBay) daily deals sites)
Off-site Sales

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Part 1:
Changes to your site to
increase search traffic

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Top UK sites by visits and
where consumers start shopping
Source:
Hitwise week
ending
19/05/2012 http://go.channel
advisor.com/UK-
Website-2011-
Consumer-
Survey.html?ls=We
bsite

9. @annstanley
Panda?
LSI – Latent semantic indexing
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2104571/Google-Panda-6-Months-Out-Still-Has-
People-Baffled

10. @annstanley
Google’s Panda update and the
need for ‘good quality content’
• In February 2011, Google implemented a rolling algorithm
update known as ‘Panda’, which ‘penalises’ sites that host
poor quality content and/or provide a poor user experience
• With every update, Google becomes more sophisticated at
judging the quality of content on a site
• Many ecommerce websites were badly affected

11. @annstanley
This was followed by the Penguin
update on the 24th April 2012?
Designed to penalise
search spam!
• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes
• Cloaking, “sneaky” redirects
or “doorway” pages
• Purposeful duplicate
content

12. @annstanley
Optimise for the user –
not search engines
• Making sure a site is optimised to provide a rich, relevant and rewarding
experience for visitors is the best way to avoid penalties, which means:
– No duplicate content - use Canonical tag and Webmaster tools (plus other
technical ways) to ensure Google only indexes pages once (eg. when products
are listed in >1 categories, pagination issues, repeated content in tabs)
– All pages should have unique, relevant and useful content (including the 1000s
of category, sub-category and product pages on ecommerce sites!)

13. @annstanley
Optimise for the user –
not search engines
– Good levels of interaction on site (low bounce rates, inbound links
to ‘deep’ pages, social mentions etc.)
– No spam (keyword stuffing)
– Avoid link schemes and develop “Natural links” – a higher
proportion of links should have anchor text with your brand name
or URL (not just your keyphrase)

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Ecommerce optimisation –
unique content on category pages

15. @annstanley
User-generated content
• User-generated content, or UGC, is still a great way to add
unique and relevant content to web pages – especially
product pages in the ‘post-Panda’ search environment.

16. @annstanley
Video integrated with product
pages

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Ongoing ‘Fresh’ content
(blogging with social plug-ins)

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Google’s “Search, Plus Your
World”

19. @annstanley
• Pinterest is a social platform that allows users to ‘pin’ images and
videos they like into pre-determined categories or ‘boards’. Since it’s
launch last year Pinterest has become the fastest site ever to reach
over 10 million monthly unique visits. Therefore, if Pinterest is not part
of your social strategy – it should be!
• There are many social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg,
StumbleUpon and Delicious that are currently enjoying record traffic
(Reddit recently announced it has tripled in size over the past year
and now serves 1.6 billion pageviews per month). Again, with these
kind of figures, if these sites are not part of your social strategy then
perhaps they should be!

20. @annstanley
Pinterest

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Part 2: Good design (and
other ways) to improve
conversion rates

22. @annstanley
The key to getting the best website
Design
first impressions counts
We need to get
a balance
between these
elements
Content Functionality
what the site says what the site does
to the user and for the user and
search engines your business

23. @annstanley
Is your Bounce rate over 30%?
2/10 seconds to make the right impression:
– Load speed
• Also impacts Google rankings
• Platform issues
• Images/file size
• Servers/technical issues (often blamed?)
– Do I like what I see (design/layout/images/colours) or do I
have the “yuck response”?
– Am I on the right page (relevancy)?
– Are things in the right place (conventional design) and does
this site look trustworthy?
– Can I be bothered? Is it worth me spending more time
reviewing this page/site?

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Komodo –
old design vs new design

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Analytics results
Bounce rates
Page views

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Homepage designs

27. @annstanley
Common homepage themes
Above the fold:
• Conventional layout and “sandwich”
design
• Header with additional menu, search,
basket
• Top mega-menus
• Delivery messages
• Billboard image with great photography
• Rotating sales message
• 2-3 offers or calls for action (often on side
of main image)
• Carousel of brands
Below the fold
• Images of each category
• Text?

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Branding – lifestyle & aspirations

29. @annstanley

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Different homepage styles

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Category and search
results

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Burburry uses magazine or
catalogue approach

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Next use a horizontal scroll or carousel
approach for product listing

34. @annstanley
John Lewis show colour options

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My-Wardrobe has 2 versions of
each image

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Example of landing page
A:B test using Google Optimiser
Using models for the product photos raised purchases by 44% and increased the average
order value by 67%.

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Product pages

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asos use drop downs for options and display
recommended products on the side-panel

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Selecting variants or options
Table to select variants
(where availability is
displayed for each option)
Drop down to select
variants for simple
choices like colour and
size (this approach of
“parent and child” is also
used by Amazon)

40. @annstanley
Variant issues
• Parent-child relationships have to work for both your website and
any marketplaces you want to sell on
– Smaller websites may prefer each colour to be treated as a separate
product
– Amazon and larger websites will treat product/style as parent and
colours and sizes as children
– If you want to sell on Amazon you may have to aggregate your
products/variants into a “pseudo-grandparent”

41. @annstanley
Only have a separate variant page if
you have unique content
– but link back to other variants eg for alternative
colours

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Shopping cart optimisation

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Shopping
cart
abandonment

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Calls for action – the blur test
Contrast may be
more important
than colour?
Ref: Dr Mike Baxter
www.slideshare.net/TheInternetConference/improving-the-ecommerce-user-experience-dr-mike-baxter

45. @annstanley
Shopping Cart Example

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Shopping Cart checklist
 Strong calls to action and button
 Isolate the checkout – no navigation bar to encourage them
to leave
 No compulsory registration
 Single page checkout or “Progress bar” to see the steps
 Repeat your offer/benefits on the first page
 Clear form design – simple & easy to use

47. @annstanley
Shopping Cart checklist
 Minimise the information input required
 Avoid losing information already entered – have a summary
always displayed
 Thumbnail images of products in cart
 Stock management and delivery – no nasty surprises
 Checks for errors and validation – eg correct email address
 Reassurance and Trust (anti-spam, security, guarantees,
returns, credit cards taken)

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Mobile and the
effect of different devices

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Activities differ by device
(Data from AdMob )
Report can be found at http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/

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Designing for mobiles
• The growth of SmartPhones now means that around 30% of all
internet visits are currently made on a SmartPhone.
• The use of mobile devices to access the internet is due to
overtake desktops in 2014. So it is essential that your website is
optimised for mobile devices.

51. @annstanley
Designing for mobiles
• Mobile devices such as iPhones and Android phones will
display the standard version of your website, by letting you
zoom in and out of certain sections of the page, with the
different elements of page in miniature (i.e. they will be in the
same position as if you were viewing the page on a desktop).
• However it is possible for your site to be built with a separate
CSS specifically designed to work on different size screens –
we call this device responsive design

52. @annstanley
Device responsive design
• Same url for all devices rather than a separate mobile site or sub-domain
• User detection agent (distinguishes device)
• Liquid or responsive design suitable for each size device/operating
system/browser
• Mobile design often has a single column with most important
content/features moved to the top and in some cases some content
hidden

53. @annstanley
Amazon.co.uk responsive design
or Amazon.co.uk App
Main site – with adaptive CSS Amazon App

54. @annstanley
Key take-aways
• There are 4 main ways of increasing sales but increasing organic
traffic (from all devices) and improving website conversion rates
are the most cost-effective!
• Panda and Penguin may have affected your organic traffic:
– Deal with duplicate content issues
– Add unique content (category and product pages, user-generated
content, multi-media content)
– Use of blogs and social sharing
– Avoid spam (keyword stuffing and dodgy links)
– Site interaction and social signals now influence your search rankings

55. @annstanley
Key take-aways
• Improve on-site conversions with good design:
– Reduce bounce rate (load times and first impression)
– What’s hot in homepage design?
– Product page and variant page design
– Calls for action – blur test
– Test new ideas/designs using Google Optimiser
– Shopping cart optimisation

56. @annstanley
Thank You
Ann Stanley
@annstanley
ann@anicca-solutions.com
www.anicca-solutions.com