Increase Sales in 2016 by Optimizing Your Store for Conversion
By Phil Grier
Aabaco Small Business Product Support
![image](http://web.archive.org./web/20161014001504im_/http://67.media.tumblr.com/f53a3bbc26de632eb9403b49d86dceb3/tumblr_inline_of00icpZ0D1s0qtrd_500.jpg)
Photo by SwaloPhoto
This article is the first in a 3-part series on optimizing your online store to improve sales. We are reposting this series with minor updates as the content is very relevant, particularly as we enter the holidays.
It happens every holiday season. We’ve grown accustomed to the house being in whatever state it happens to be, and then we learn friends or family are coming over. Suddenly, everything that’s wrong with each room is striking. Look at this trash, how did that get there? Is there toilet paper in all the bathrooms? Are there enough chairs out? We all go through this effect to some degree and it happens because we are shifting our perspective from how we use our house to how our visitors will. What might be OK on a random workday might not work with the in-laws in town.
It’s the same way when looking at your site for opportunities to boost conversion. You are really familiar with your site. It’s just your environment, and it’s easy to not notice obstacles have in the way of getting orders. So for this exercise try to look at your site from a different perspective, like someone who has never seen it, or like you are getting ready for an inspection. This will put you in the right headspace to optimize for conversion. It may help to get friends or family to give you some honest feedback.
Each area of the site, like rooms of a house, serves a purpose. People visiting should have a primary focus on each page, and conversion optimization is mostly done by looking at the purchase funnel from the perspective of your visitor’s intent on each page, and how easy those goals are to achieve. To do a review of your site, let’s start at the top and follow the visitor all the way through purchase. This is by no means a comprehensive checklist, but will put you in the right headspace to look at your site through new eyes and increase sales.
In the header, the goal is trust: your logo, search, customer service contact info, trust marks, and perhaps a tagline. The header is your first impression and if it’s not attractive you will lose people this early in the funnel. To help, have a logo, a phone number or email to reach you, and try to keep it clean and uncluttered. Just south of the header, most sites then have some kind of navigation menu. The goal of navigation is to allow shoppers to quickly get to any product page within 2 to 3 clicks, but it’s easy to overwhelm people with options too. Consider your average visitor, your most popular sections, and let logic dictate the order of pages in your navigation. It’s tempting to put things in alphabetical order sometimes, and that’s better than chaos, but often it’s optimal to put the most searched pages within easy grasp. You probably wouldn’t like going to a grocery store that put the flour on a shelf 6 feet off the ground, after all. Your navigation should serve your customers and meet their needs, and for that you must know your customers.
Now what do you do about the home page as a whole? Watch for next week’s post when we’ll talk about maximizing “curb appeal” for visitors.
A bit about Phil:
Phil Grier is a 8-year veteran of the Aabaco Small Business team, he has spent much of this time working with our retailers to improve their online stores and increase their sales.