The number of online shops is on the rise as the shopping culture is changing rapidly. Whereas our parents used to shop only in physical stores, we are increasingly ordering products online from the comfort of our armchairs. Not so long ago, we used only PCs to do this, but nowadays more and more purchases are also made on tablets and mobile phones. Anyone who has not yet launched their products or services in an online shop is missing out on a very big potential. They are missing out on a completely independent sales channel, which is practically indispensable for the possibility of sales promotion in modern times.

Perhaps you already have an online shop but are still far from achieving satisfactory results? If so, you are probably one of the many online shop owners who often wonder how to boost sales. Setting up a system and traditional product presentation is far from enough for a successful online business, time and resources should also be devoted to search engine optimisation, advertising and other areas of increasing your online presence.

Below, we’ve put together 10 sales boosting tips that will take your online shop to a whole new level. Try to follow as many of them as possible and boost your sales figures as soon as possible.

1. Clear navigation

It doesn’t do you any good to have a great offer if your visitors can’t find it. Since time is money, you can’t count on visitors spending a lot of time looking for the products they want. It is therefore very important to implement clear navigation in your online shop to ensure that visitors can easily browse the site.

The main menu can be placed horizontally at the top of the page (above or below the page header) or vertically in a side column. If your online shop is large, it makes more sense to place the navigation in a side column, as it is more transparent and you will be able to add more product categories or subcategories.

Place the following items in the main menu:

• Home
• Main categories of the offer
• Offer subcategories (in the drop-down menu)
• About us / About the online shop
• Contact / Contact details

To boost sales, it is highly recommended to add a “special offers” or “specials” item to the main menu, as discounted products usually reach a much higher demand than regular sale products. If you lack space for this item on the main menu, design a banner ad and place it in a prominent position.

2. attractive and sales-oriented item descriptions

Spend enough time writing product or service descriptions, as good sales content has a major impact on driving sales. Never copy content from other online shops – you will be infringing copyright and you will also be penalised by search engines for duplicate content by being removed from search results. All website content should be unique, attractive and sales-oriented.

Each product should have its name highlighted at the top and a short description below the name outlining its main features and benefits. This description should be only a few lines long, as it should grab the visitor’s attention as quickly as possible and persuade them to read the longer description. The long description should describe the product in detail and the use of a table of technical specifications is recommended.

Don’t forget the possibility to rate products and user reviews!

3. Use high quality images

In addition to interesting, grammatically correct and sales-oriented content, your online shop should also be complemented by high-quality images. You’ve probably heard it said many times that we humans are visual creatures. When we visit a website, the first thing that catches our eye are the images, which we subconsciously use to form an opinion about the website.

There have been many studies that have shown that sharp, high quality images have a positive impact on sales promotion. Never go for low resolution images as your online business may suffer at the expense of these images.

However, when using high-resolution images, you need to be careful about their size in terms of file size. What can you do to make images take up less space while still maintaining quality? Avoid using .png files (except in the case of animated images) and use .webp or .jpg instead.

We also recommend using free online tools to further optimise your images – type the search phrase “Image Optimizer” into Google.

4. Optimising your website

Optimising a website can be thought of in two ways – as improving the user experience and as adapting the site to search engines to achieve better rankings in search results. Both are certainly important for driving sales, but since we have already introduced the first way with the initial three points (clear navigation, good sales-oriented content and the use of high-quality images), in this section we will focus on optimising your online shop for search engines.

Written in a slightly more understandable way, this is about getting your online shop ranked as high as possible for the various search queries that people enter into search engines (most commonly Google) on a daily basis. So if you sell fireplaces online, you want to be ranked on the first page of search results for the keywords ‘fireplaces’, ‘fireplaces for sale’, ‘cheap fireplaces’, ‘pellet fireplaces’, ‘wood-burning fireplaces’, etc.

As optimising a website is a very broad concept that requires a good knowledge of search engine algorithms, here are just the main tips that will be most useful for you to promote your sales effectively:

• The main keywords are best ‘captured’ by categories or sub-categories, so on each page where you list products from a (sub-)category, add a shorter piece of content that mentions the keyword a few more times.
• Each product should have a unique description, as duplicate content will have a negative impact on search engine rankings. If you have several identical products in your online shop, where only certain characteristics (e.g. colour or size) change, use a‘canonical‘ tag to let search engines know that one of the duplicates is the primary content.
• Give all images appropriate ‘alt‘ tags to tell web search engines what is in each image. Also, make it clear from the file name what the image represents. This means saving the image as ‘fireplace-on-pelet.jpg’, not as ‘image01.jpg’. This will help your images rank higher in image search results, which again has a positive impact on increasing sales, as you will also be attracting potential customers to your online shop via the image search engine.
• Label all items, categories and static pages with ‘meta‘ tags, the most important of which are the meta title and meta description. The meta title should not be too long and should include a keyword and the name of the webshop (example: MCZ Vivo 80 pellet stove – Kaminko d.o.o.), while the meta description should be about 150 characters long, in a way that invites the web user to click on the link that appears in the search results of the web search engine.
• Make sure that the webshop is mobile and tablet friendly.

We have listed just five basic elements of web optimisation that, if implemented correctly, can have a significant impact on driving sales. We recommend that you contact an expert as soon as possible to optimise your online shop.

5. Website advertising

Website optimisation, which we wrote about in the previous point, is very important for attracting visitors for which we do not have to pay. Although this may initially seem like enough, in most cases, continuous advertising is also necessary to effectively promote sales. You can advertise your online shop in a variety of ways, the most popular of which are Google Ads and advertising on social networks Facebook and Instagram.

Whatever advertising you choose, you should always measure the results of your campaigns and monitor and adjust your campaigns at all times, as this is the only way to make advertising profitable. You should be aware that the costs associated with advertising can be very high, but if you earn a lot more as a result of good promotion, it is not even a question of whether it makes sense to advertise.

Without a doubt, it is by far the best combination of both optimisation and website advertising. However, it should be stressed that a hastily and unprofessionally produced advertising campaign is throwing money out of the window, because effective, profit-generating promotion requires experience. You can do it yourself, but you will most likely be making a loss initially, or you can turn to someone who has been doing it for a long time and knows how to create a successful advertising campaign.

If you would like to dedicate your resources to web optimisation or online advertising, which we strongly recommend for your sales promotion goal, we would be delighted to hear from you. Send us an email at info@neoserv.com or call us on +386 59 335 000.

Read the second part of this article, where we present the remaining 5 tips for boosting your online sales!