- E-Commerce
- How to Prevent Abandoned Shopping Carts
- Checkout Options for Your Online Store
- A Look at Your Online Customer Service
- General
- Your Wholesale Business & Angry Customers
- The Essential Elements of Great Customer Service
- Is It Time for a Business Makeover?
- Marketing
- Marketing Plan For Your Wholesale Business
- Effective Email Marketing for Your Wholesale Business
- Blogging and the Wholesale Business Owner
- Search Engine Optimization - SEO
- The Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization
- Basic SEO Tips for Online Wholesalers
Start the New Year Off Right with a Facelift…For Your Wholesale Website!
By Sarah Pearson Published: 13/01/2009
Any wholesale business that conducts its commerce online - from the smallest of small businesses to the biggest of corporations - knows that its web presence is extremely important. You know that a well-designed website is key to making sales, so you want to make sure your online presence is easy for your customers to navigate as it entices them to buy. With that in mind, though, just getting that great site up and running is not enough to keep it consistently effective.
Over time, if you are not careful, your website can end up worn out and run down. Whether it just begins looking outdated due to recent technological advances or it is becoming cluttered with advertisements for past promotions you are no longer running, to keep your site successful, it needs a once-over and facelift on a regular basis.
The start of a new year is a great time to do this, though it is not a bad idea to do it periodically throughout the year, too. First, eliminate anything on the main page and in your sidebars that is no longer applicable – coupons, discounts and other promotions you are no longer offering, products that have been upgraded or dropped completely, links to pages on your site that no longer exist as well as links to OTHER sites that no longer exist. Anything like that needs to go, because nothing irks a visitor more than clicking on what they think will get them 15% off of an item only to find out that the offer expired 6 months ago.
This is also a great time to take stock of the marketing end of things to make sure your site is still holding up its end of the bargain. Get out your reports, from stats to AdWords, and then close your eyes, take a deep breath, and open them again to look at your website like a potential customer would. Use the reports to determine what keywords and phrases are bringing visitors to your site, and which pages they most often enter by. Figure out which pages get the most views and traffic, and move your site structure around to focus more on those. Less visited pages should still be accessible, but you want the big guns to be right out front when those people land on your site – more eyeballs means more sales. Update your PPC campaigns accordingly, because this is the kind of targeted traffic you are looking for.
Giving your website a facelift is smart marketing. Even repeat customers will find renewed interest when they return and discover that your site has a fresh look, and cutting the clutter and focusing on the areas that are most popular will work towards making new visitors into those repeat customers.
