I'm probably not the only one who has woken up hazy eyed to a postman struggling under the weight of Amazon packages, bought during an ill-judged bout of late-night clicking.
This isn't entirely my fault, no I’m not blaming the wine! Amazon's website design plays a huge role in this process. The site is a perfectly honed conversion machine.
It's important to remember that before their warehouses started springing up across the globe, Amazon started as a small online book retailer. Despite the company's ambiguous relationship with SMBs, there's an awful lot aspiring digital marketers can learn from Amazon's finely tuned retail experience.
Learning from Amazon's Retail Experience
Those online shopping sprees are aided by Amazon's excellent site design. It only takes a few clicks and hey presto I've bought the next gadget for my kitchen that will no doubt be in a charity shop come this time next year. Once payment details have been entered once, it only takes a few clicks to buy something, no messing around with rentering payment details. This makes it very easy to purchase something quickly, which is unsurprisingly great for improving sales and a key reason why the company is the largest retailer in the world.
TIP for SMBs
So how can SMBs compete with this convenience? There are currently over 295 million active PayPal accounts worldwide and this is only set to grow. The number of PayPal accounts is increasing by 16% percent year on year. If you are selling through your website, offering payment services such as Paypal will help to build trust with visitors, making payment quicker and more convenient which will improve sales. Depending on your location, products and objectives, you may also want to consider other payment services such as Apple Pay, Masterpass, Visa Checkout, Google Pay, Stripe, Square, American Express.
Optimize Your Purchasing Processes
All websites conducting e-commerce must regularly assess their customer purchasing process, to make it as quick and easy go through as possible. Make sure that a user can find and click on what they want to buy In as few clicks as possible. Every product listing should feature an easily clickable link to buy. This an essential part of ensuring the best possible outcome for conversions.
Focus on The User Experience
Ask your friends and colleagues, who don't know your website, to go through a dry run of buying something on it. This will give you a better idea of the purchasing experience. Just because you think your website is easy to use, doesn't necessarily mean it is. Using a website every day can blind you to its nuances and usability issues.
This is also links to another reason why Amazon is so good at depriving people of their hard-earned cash. Amazon has created an engaging user experience. This isn't just about site structure, this is also down to the great technical setup of their website.
To make sure your website has the best user experience possible you can start with the technical side of things. Make sure your website has fast page load speeds and provides a great user experience for desktop and smartphone users. The rankingCoach application can analyze your website and help you to get this right.
What SMBs Can Do That Amazon Cannot
Part of the reason why Amazon is so successful at bringing its customers back is down to the company's ability to build connections with the customers that keeps Amazon on their minds. SMBs with physical stores need to learn from this. Physical stores must think beyond digital marketing as something that ends when the customer walks into the store.
Promoting your other marketing channels in-store can create more vital channels for maintaining connections with customers. Especially as smartphones now make it possible for visitors to follow you there and then. So why not place a sign in your store that says: Want to support local business? Follow us on Instagram, Twitter Facebook, etc. All businesses with physical premises also need to make sure they can be found on all of the most important online maps. The rankingCoach application shows the user exactly how to get this right.
Learning from Amazon's Competitors
In the world of SEO there is a whole area of keywords built around offering alternatives to big brands, ‘alternative’ can be used as a great part of creating valuable long-tail keywords that rank well on Google. Check out this high ranking site's meta title -
20 best alternatives to Amazon Music Unlimited as of 2020’,
The website with this meta title is doing well in the ranking because the modern consumer doesn't just look up brands to buy; they also use them as a benchmark for comparison. People these days are savvy consumers who want to ask a few questions about products before they buy them, what the alternatives are is one of them, so make sure you have that covered!
Using the term ‘alternative’ as a key part of a long tail keyword is not just a good idea for using with Amazon. It can be applied to all kinds of products, for example, a site selling jeans could optimize for the term 'quality alternative to Levis"
Have fun experimenting with SEO phrases using the word 'alternative' in the rankingCoach's keyword tools to find some great keyword niches for your business!
We hope you have enjoyed reading this article from The Blog by rankingCoach.
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