With any website there are a multitude of hurdles to get over to get the website up and running. The process of laying down a design for a website and getting development underway can be a somewhat arduous procedure. However, particularly for an ecommerce site, the work does not end there.
Once a site is up and running it is vital to keep it in perfect working order as the alternative is to attract few new clients or start losing the clients you have. Ecommerce is a fickle business and in order to stay on top, promote yourself and most importantly turn a profit, it’s imperative that you take any advantage you can get. Fortunately there are a massive selection of tools available that provide assistance in monitoring and optimising your site. Here are a few of the more vital ones at your disposal. (Fortunately, some of them are free!)
Keyword Analysis Tools
Keyword analysis plays a major part in the search engine optimisation of your site. Good use of keywords will allow you to funnel more specific traffic to your site, filtering out the most likely buyers from the browsers. By determining the right kinds of keywords you can determine what kind of competition you’re up against for search terms and which search terms can separate your site from the herd. Fortunately there are a multitude of keyword tools available on the web. Some of the top ones are Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Adwords Keyword Tool. The former two offer more features but a have a paid subscription while the Adwords Keyword Tool is free.
PPC
Pay-per-click campaigns can form the backbone of your websites promotion. Some sites sell advertising space, however the most prominent way to run PPC is through a dedicated service such as Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo’s Search Marketing. These major search engine providers run advertising through their own search engines as well as websites who have opted into the program. These services assist you in quickly and easily creating your advert, choosing your keywords, setting your budget and deciding where to display. Alternatively you can turn a profit yourself by renting advertising space on your own site. Just make sure that you don’t allow adverts for your direct rivals!
Website Optimizer
Website optimizer is a free tool from Google that allows you to optimise and tweak your web pages more efficiently. It is important to not only maintain your site but try to constantly improve it. Website optimizer allows you to run two versions of the same page simultaneously by alternating them between users. That is to say that you can compare the success of two variations of one page to determine which is the most successful. Through this, your site can be constantly running comparisons and therefore be ever adapting and improving.
Analytics
Analytics is possibly the most vital tool you can employ to manage your site. It allows you view in-depth statistics on how users are interacting with your site. Through this you can determine which parts of your site are letting you down, which products are drawing the most attention and how people are finding your site among a multitude of other features. You can find out about setting up an analytics account in one of our previous articles as well as several others that provide more in depth discussion of how to utilise analytics for optimising content and optimising for your clientele.
With the use of these tools you will find keeping your site in prime working order a far less laborious process. Furthermore you will be able to make improvements that will help bring more traffic to your site and hopefully generate more sales!
