5 Conversion Tactics for Increasing Revenue that Help Your SEO

What if your customers bought more and what if they bought more often. Think that you’d see a nice revenue boost? Of course you would 🙂 Here are five tips to consider.

1) Gather expert reviews and customer reviews about your products

Customer reviews and expert reviews are pure awesome from a CRO perspective AND an SEO perspective. On the SEO side, it’s user generated content (UGC) that is pure naturally optimized content on your site. It is an opportunity for you to speak through the voice of your customers to give the really skinny on your products and their features. Product reviews tend to naturally use the product name in the way that customers search it online. Pure awesomeness. On the CRO side, it is well known that online reviews help customers make purchase decisions.

You have no idea how frequently I look at ecommerce website and I see lonely customer rating/ customer review sections on product pages. It makes me sad because it is such a good opportunity to increase revenue and average order value.

So, how do you get more real reviews?

After a customer has made a purchase, some of this would depend on the type of product and your business of course, wait a designated period of time and send the customer a nice email saying that you thank them for their business and that you would very much appreciate a short review of their experience with your product in exchange for a 5%-10%-15% or whatever coupon on future purchases. The reason why this is great is because not only do you get your user generated content but you also build customer loyalty by keeping in touch and offering the coupon.

If you have managed to build up a social media community, this is one of the great ways you can leverage your community. Have a contest for existing customers to review your products and enter them in a contest for a fabulous prize if they leave a review. On the thank you page, for when they leave a review, have them fill out a short form with name and email and enter them in the contest. On the implementation side, how easily you can implement this will depend on the software you’re using for ratings and review, if it is a paid software or your own custom code but either way, it is worth a look.

2) Build a community around your brand and products

For an ecommerce based business, the importance of having a social media strategy cannot be understated. Although many ecommerce managers and marketing managers know this, building a community is no small feat. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes dedication. Also, for some ecommerce businesses, it seems that their particular product line or business type is not social friendly. With the right strategy, any product or service can be made social friendly.

So, how do you build a community around your brand?

Talk about a loaded question 😉 but here are some of the basics:

Brainstorm your audience – Knowing your audience is key. Understand though, it will not just include your customers, it will include industry experts, similar industries, bloggers that write about topics similar to yours, and more. Identifying a specific ‘hit list’ of thought leaders and communities to reach out to as well as well as broad segments of communities to build brand awareness to are key.

Explore what platforms and venues you should target – All businesses have limits or resources and time to dedicate to community building. Although in a perfect world you are super active on every single major social network – there are about 186 active social networks  according to the source of all truth in the world wikipedia – you probably don’t have the bandwidth to be active in all of them. So choose your battles wisely; mainly, choose your battles by first doing research on where your target audience are, which you should have identified as per above 😉

Be consistent and meaningfully engage – If community building is a mission that you choose to accept in house, make sure that you make it an accountability of someone to post frequent interesting content, consistently, as well as engage in community watering holes. Also, if this person will be a part of multichannel marketing strategies, make sure that they execute on them in a way that is ‘social friendly’ and does not take away from the community. What this generally means is don’t substitute engagement for advertising.

3) Collect media mentions and feature them

Collecting media mentions and featuring them can be easily done if you’re active on twitter or if you collect reviews from partners or industry experts. Gather these reviews and feature them on site. How you feature these review will vary based on how you feature other important elements on your site, such as you unique selling proposition and special campaigns – deals and specials – you’re featuring. Make sure not to bury your media mentions and expert reviews on a testimonials page but feature them in a way that maximizes consumer trust.

4) Get trusted experts to contribute to your blog

There are huge benefits to getting trusted experts in your space to contribute to your blog. Firstly, trusted experts tend to have a following in social media therefore, if they contribute to your blog, they are likely to share that content in their network and get you brand impressions along with traffic to your site.

5) Avoid straight from manufacturer descriptions if at all possible

If you’re an ecommerce site, product descriptions are an area where you can really stand out against your competitors. Shine with fully detailed specifications, better photos, and even videos. Creating unique product descriptions and adding custom secondary media gives you an opportunity to make your site more sticky to customers and if you include primary and secondary keyword mentions, the amount of search engine food on page for SEO.