June 2012 Post Archive - Spiderscope Blog

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Increasing organic click through with star ratings in Google

Customer reviews are a powerful tool for establishing trust, enhancing conversions and helping SEO. It’s a no brainer why these have become so important for eCommerce sites and a good set of customer reviews will do wonders for your site.

However, it amazes us how many times we see customer reviews poorly implemented on sites, where businesses don’t reap 100% of their potential. One of the most common areas we see that isn’t implemented well is the star rating.

 

Star ratings on customer reviews

Specifically, when talking about the star rating, we’re talking about the rating that each reviewer will give a product or service. This isn’t necessarily in the form of a star (it could be a number, text or any other form of rating) but will determine the score that the reviewer applies in the review.

Using this effectively can be a great benefit to your search results and can increase click through rates for your product pages.

You may have seen in Google results when searching for products that star ratings are sometimes included directly on the results page. See below:

These star ratings come from the reviews on the product page. They represent the average review score as calculated from the reviews left on each product page. This has two main advantages:

1. It can give users a good impression about your product or service before they have even landed on the page.


2. They can appear bolder, bigger and more eye catching than competitors, which can lead to more click through.

Data suggests that most companies will see a 20-30% rise in click through from search results that display star ratings like this. Not only that, but these clicks are more likely to stay on the pages longer as they know what to expect before clicking on the click – another big positive.

 

How to get star ratings to appear in Google for my site

Star ratings like those in the screenshots above won’t come automatically. Whilst it’s possible that Google could crawl your reviews and extract value from them; we’ve never seen the result pages update with star ratings without applying the needed code.

Basically, in order to give your site a chance of displaying results like this, you’ll need to ensure your customer reviews are encoded with rich snippets. This involves editing code and can be tricky for sites that are using custom or specific customer review systems, as it will most likely involve editing templates; which is not for the average user.

The benefits of deploying rich snippets are obvious for you to see and will help your listings in search. Combined with other rich snippets like product encoding and special offers, you can really make your products stand out against your competition and see your click through rates soar.

 

Customer reviews on your site

Customer reviews are becoming a critical component to all eCommerce sites and the increased visibility that can be gained through Google is something that you should not miss out on.

If your site isn’t taking advantage of customer reviews or rich snippet encoding to generate attractive listings in Google, then you should consider our customer feedback system. Alternatively, you can contact us today on 0800 081 1688 and we can discuss the best way to enhance your site.

 

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Online Sales Increase from Optimised Shopping Cart

If you’re selling online, then it’s probably fair to say you’re interested in increasing your online sales. Everyone is, right? It’s amazing though, that while everyone wants to achieve this goal, they’re not willing to look at (or are unaware of) the details which prevent orders and cost sales.

Many of our customers rightly assume that the way to increase sales is to increase the amount of traffic a site receives. Of course this is a valid method to achieving more sales; however, often times you can see quicker sales increases by looking closer to home.

Obviously, there is a lot to ensuring your site is performing optimally for sales, spanning a wide range of areas that are too much to cover in any single blog post. But the one thing every eCommerce site has in common that affects sales is the major barrier to entry: the shopping cart.

 

Common shopping cart issues that prevent sales

There are many different shopping cart implementations and software around. Many of the customers that we help day in day out, use custom designed shopping carts. There’s nothing wrong with a custom designed shopping cart, but we often find these aren’t optimised to provide an optimal customer experience.

In the past we have helped our customers increase sales simply by making small adjustments to their shopping carts to enhance the user experience. For example, we have come across shopping carts that:

• Alert users with scary (system error lookalike) pop ups when performing actions such as adding an item to the basket or checking out.


• Switch between designs, layouts or templates on each step of the checkout process.


• Provide extremely unhelpful validation messages when user input is wrong.


• Require full user registration before placing an order. Handled correctly, this is fine. But it’s not when you require a full range of unrelated details and then require users to click links in emails and log in manually before an order can be placed.

These are just some common issues that we have come across when optimising shopping carts. But sometimes, a shopping cart is so bad that it is just better to start from scratch.

This is why we have spent time developing our improved shopping cart system that places emphasis on user experience in a way that enhances and increases the chances of making a sale.

 

Increasing sales with an optimised shopping cart

Our shopping cart uses a modular design which ensures that it can fit and work with a wide range of eCommerce websites. While it would be best to have a full system that manages your products and site, this isn’t needed for our shopping cart and one of the core features is that it can stand alone.

We’ve used our experience to create a checkout that delivers a fantastic user experience, meaning that you’ll no longer lose sales because of a long or complicated checkout procedure.

 

Features of an optimised shopping cart

• An up to date, professional cart design that establishes trust and impresses your customers. Ensuring your cart looks professional goes a long way to improving sales. If your cart looks like it was designed in 1995, then it will cause your potential customers to start asking questions.


• Step by step navigation to guide the user through the checkout. This gives the user a clear indication of what step they’re on and how long the process will be. Customers can easily navigate back and forward to amend or update their orders.


• Optimised data requirements. Our checkout can be configured to ask for only the required details to complete an order. These days customers don’t want to fill out huge forms, so making sure the data you’re collecting is streamlined will go along way.


• By default, our cart is configured to only ask for a billing address with an extra checkbox to add a different delivery address. This means there are less forms on the page, which gives the impression of a quicker checkout.

 

Can I really increase sales with an optimised shopping cart?

Yes. Of course the shopping cart is only a single part of increasing online sales; however, we have found time and again that ensuring your cart is optimised and user friendly can have a dramatic effect on increasing your sales.

If you’re an eCommerce site owner and think that your checkout could be optimised, then please contact us. Even if your site has an already existing shopping cart, we’re sure that we can help generate more sales from your existing traffic. Contact us today on 0800 081 1688 to discuss how we can deliver more sales for you.

 

 

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