Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

This is the second post in our series, 5 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Sell. You can also read post #1 about payment types.

2. It’s hard to place an order

Have you ever left a checkout line because it took too long? Or have you abandoned an online shopping cart out of confusion?

So have your customers! If your shopping cart system is difficult or hard to use, you’re losing sales.

Gather some data

Most popular e-commerce systems have some valuable data that you need to examine. You should be able to see shopping carts that your customers abandoned.

If you don’t know how to view this information, contact your support team. They’ll help you find out.

With this data, you can tell if your ordering process is turning customers away. Some customers might abandon carts due to other reasons, but a portion of them can be attributed to your order process.

Clear instructions

People hate guessing when they’re trying to buy something. They put their thinking into the purchase decision. If you make them think too hard during checkout, they’ll just leave.

Make sure each step of your checkout process has clear instructions. Walk the customer through it in plain English, even if it seems really easy to you.

Friendly errors

Cryptic error messages just confuse buyers. Unless they’re really motivated to purchase right now, they’ll probably give up.

Since there are lots of errors that could happen during checkout, make sure the messages are friendly and informative. Give the customer directions on how to fix the error. And if possible, provide an alternate order method, such as a toll-free phone number.

Few steps

People like simplicity. You can’t draw out the order process over too many pages. But you also shouldn’t put every field on one page.

Strike a nice balance of 2-3 order pages. But also provide a visible key that shows the customer what step he’s on and what is left. People like seeing the big picture.

Always confirm

Data can get lost or mangled before it gets entered in your system’s database. That makes the process uncertain for the user.

To put your buyers at ease, confirm their information before the order is completed. Show them the address they entered, their total, the payment method chosen, etc. Make sure they’ve entered everything correctly.

How can you improve your order process?

Why aren’t people buying from your website? Our series, 5 Reasons Why Your Website Doesn’t Sell, will tell you why!

1. You Don’t Accept the Right Payment Method

How many payment methods do you accept? One or two? You’re losing sales!

What happens if a store doesn’t accept the payment method you want to use? You don’t buy from them. It’s not a coincidence that most brick & mortar stores accept cash, credit cards, and checks. These are the common payment methods!

What’s in your e-wallet?

Which payment types does your website accept? Sit down right now and make a list. Break it out as detailed as possible, including which types of credit cards, etc.

If you only accept 1 or 2 payment types, you’ve got work to do. If you accept 3 or more, you could still benefit from adding a couple new ones.

Let’s go through payment types you should be accepting.

This one’s a no-brainer. People use credit (and debit) cards to shop online. But are you accepting enough brands?

At minimum, your website should handle Visa and MasterCard. To gain more sales, try adding Discover and American Express.

Electronic checks

Not everyone has a credit card. And some people might just prefer to pay straight from their bank account. Using an e-check makes that possible.

An e-check uses the account & routing numbers from the purchaser’s checks to send a payment to you. Your shopping cart system will ask the purchaser to simply copy the numbers from an actual check. It’s easy!

PayPal

Frequent online shoppers typically have PayPal accounts. This allows the buyer to have a single online method of payment wherever he goes.

PayPal has been around a long time, and it’s not going away. In fact, PayPal even supports mobile phone payments!

Bill Me Later

This option enables buyers to pay you without a credit card or any other online account. Buyers simply select Bill Me Later at checkout, and they’re done. They obtain a credit line from Bill Me Later, and you get your sale today!

Any more?

Since you probably shop online, think about payment methods you’ve run across. Perhaps you even use them. Offer those on your website!!

What good online payment methods did we miss?

Everyone wants better search engine rankings and more organic search traffic. More traffic brings increased revenues and makes your site more valuable. But you won’t get that traffic if your site is stuck in Google’s supplemental results. Fortunately, we’ve rounded up the tips to break free!

What are supplemental results?

Google has two content indexes. Supplemental results are the B-list. As Google explains, there are fewer restrictions on the supplemental index.

But supplemental results show up after results from the main index. Also, Google doesn’t regularly update the content in the supplemental index. In other words, it’s not somewhere you want your pages.

Jim Boykin even coined the term “Google Hell” for this index. We clearly want to keep your pages out of there.

Are my pages in supplemental results?

A quick way to check your site is to enter this search at Google (instead of “example.com” enter your site’s name, such as “google.com”):

site:www.example.com * -asdf

You should now see some pages that say “Supplemental Result”

How to get out of Google’s Hell

Link to your pages. A page without a link to it is considered “orphaned,” and Google doesn’t look too kindly upon that. Spread the link love around your own site and get links from other sites. Don’t just focus on the home page, since every page needs its own Google juice. Google’s own Matt Cutts claims this is the best way out of supplemental results.

Remove duplicate content. To be on the A-List, you need unique content. If you stole somebody else’s content, shame on you. If you’re duplicating your own content, stop. WordPress users should use post excerpts everywhere.

Hunt down copiers. Somebody else might be duplicating your content, getting their own page in the A-List. You can use a service like Copyscape to find infringers and shut them down.

Put your robots.txt to work. This file talks to search engines. It can tell Google not to index parts of your site that might contain duplicate content, such as print versions of articles. In addition, there are several WordPress pages you might want to block.

Add more content. Pages with little or no content can end up in supplemental results, because Google doesn’t think they’re valuable. Beef up the content, impress Google, and provide more value to visitors.

Direct all requests to www. For most servers, “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” bring up the exact same page. Google could consider this duplicate content, since two URLs bring up the same page (for your entire site). A simple server tweak can redirect all requests to either www or no-www.

Write unique title and meta tags. If every page of your site is titled “My Site,” you’re not as well positioned for the A-List. Tailor every title, description, and keyword tag to the actual content for each page.

Make your site shallow. How many levels deep is your site? In other words, how many clicks away from the home page does it take to get to the lowest peon web page? If it’s more than 2 or 3, you’re not passing enough link juice to your pages. Simplifying the architecture will please Google and your visitors.

Use search-friendly URLs. Google isn’t a fan of long, complicated URLS. Make them reasonably short and actually readable. Instead of “domain.com/?adfasd=09098″ use “domain.com/page”

Report a page to Google. Andy Beard took an interesting approach to supplemental results. He reported one of his own pages to Google as a paid link. It ended up pulling all his pages out of supplemental results.

Create a sitemap & submit it. You’ve got to tell Google where your pages are, especially if you’ve changed things following these tips. Make a new sitemap and submit it for Google to index. You’ll find the webmaster tools helpful with this.

Any more questions?

What have we left out of this guide? Is something not clear? That’s what the comments are for.

We’d love to talk over issues you might have and help other people with supplemental results problems. Let the conversation begin.