As a small retail business, appealing to your target audience is everything.
To ensure a rewarding personal customer experience, hire friendly staff, have a welcoming environment, and nurture a favorable customer base. But what about the online perception of your business? Is it the same?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns are proven to create an attractive and fascinating online environment for your retail business.
Summing up, SEO components add up to two words: “user experience”. Although SEO can be complex, your SEO campaign will be successful if you offer the best user experience compared to your competitors.
We put together this article to provide basic ways your business can leverage SEO and maximize online user experience.
Make sure your website is secure
Google states that security is a top priority when ranking websites. An HTTPS website is essential for SEO. HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol used to send data between your browser and the connected website.
On an HTTPS site, all communication between your browser and the website is encrypted. This helps protect against eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle attacks when someone tries to intercept your communications.
To check if your website has HTTPS security, look at the URL. If it starts with https://, it’s a secure website. If it starts with “http://”, it’s not. Google also displays a lock icon in the Chrome browser when you visit a website to indicate a secure site.
Increase website speed while staying mobile-friendly
Mobile-friendly websites offer a great online user experience. You only have a few seconds to make a first impression, so your website needs to look great on desktop and mobile.
Almost 61% of website traffic in 2020 was from cell phones. You can Check if your site is mobile-friendly here. If your website looks weird on the phone screen, people are most likely clicking away and switching to another.
To ensure your site is mobile friendly:
● Use responsive design
● Optimize images
● Limit pop-ups
● Use large font sizes
● Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per page
● Use lots of white space
● Keep menus short and sweet
Additionally, here are a few ways to increase your website speed. Overall, you want a website that loads in three seconds or less.
Websites with lots of videos and large images should compress them or use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a group of servers around the world that serve web pages based on the user’s geographic location.
Also, use Google Analytics, a free service that provides detailed statistics about website visitors.
Google Analytics is essential for understanding your audience, their needs and how they interact with your website. Understanding this data can improve your marketing efforts, website design and user experience.
Intuitive website design and navigation
Your website should be easy to navigate for users and search engine crawlers. A well designed website will have a logical structure with easy navigation that will allow visitors to find what they are looking for quickly and easily.
To make your website more intuitive:
● Use meaningful titles and meta descriptions
● Organize your content into categories and subcategories
● Use breadcrumb navigation
● Add a search bar
● Add a sitemap
● Make sure your pages are mobile-friendly
Creating an intuitive website design takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. User experience improves and it helps your website rank higher in search.
Improve the relevance of content
Content relevance has a significant impact on your SEO. To ensure that the topics you write about are relevant to your business, product, or service, you need to write helpful and valuable content for your audience.
Try this for content creation. Construct an ideal customer persona. Give them a name, age, occupation, some interests, and other places they visit frequently. Then ask what types of searches would they google?
If you think this way, you should generate topics that are of interest to your target audience. From there you will see the articles you want to write.
Suppose you own a coffee shop. An article that would likely generate a lot of interest from your customers might be “The Seven Types of Coffee: Everything You Need to Know.”
The content of this article would be both relevant to your business and something coffee lovers would want to read.
Another way to ensure you’re writing relevant content is through performance keyword research using a tool like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or Moz Keyword Explorer.
With these tools, you can see how many people are searching for a specific term or phrase and how difficult it would be to rank for that keyword. A more expensive but all-inclusive tool is Ahrefs, according to Digital Authority Partners.
Use videos and pictures
Four times as many consumers would rather watch a video than read its content. Using high-quality images and videos that are relevant to your business is one of the easiest ways to enhance the online user experience.
Embedding images and videos on your website will also help improve your SEO. Because the pages of the site are more visually appealing, people will engage for longer. The longer they stay on your site, the better for your SEO.
Videos are also a great way to share your company’s story with visitors.
They allow potential customers to connect with your business before they even set foot in your actual doors. How-to guides, product demonstrations, and customer testimonials are other possible ideas for using video effectively on your website.
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Small retail businesses can improve their online user experience by employing SEO techniques like optimizing website content, easy navigation, and incorporating relevant images and videos.
Applying these tips will help keep visitors on your website longer, resulting in higher ranking in search engine results.
Finally, high-quality images and videos help attract and retain potential customers as they learn more about your amazing products and services. We hope your small business thrives online and in person.
