Site Architecture & Crawling

As your business’s website develops over time, the site’s architecture needs to be considered to ensure that Google can regularly crawl, cache and index your pages. Google has little bots and ‘spiders’ which are used to crawl websites, the main one being the ‘Googlebot’ which scans the links from one page to another.

Indexing is how search engines categorise your webpage based on content, links, meta descriptions etcetera. Using an algorithm, they categorise each page in relation to a search term and give it a ranking based on this. Page caching is another method that can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimise your site for the search engines. Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page to avoid potentially time-consuming queries to your database.

Categorisation

For e-commerce websites, categorisation plays a significant part in the site architecture (and makes user experience much simpler). Careful keyword research and planning should be carried out when planning your site categories – attention should be paid when assigning a URL with crucial keywords as this can play a role in ensuring that specific pages get ranked for your preferred terms.

Site Speed

Site speed is also pivotal for an e-commerce website to perform well in the eyes of a search engine. Customers want a website to be slick, quick and allow them the capability of checking out in a few moments. This can be quite a challenge for the garment decoration industry, where there are thousands of products available.

Costs

The costs associated with managing thousands of products on an e-commerce website on a managed server is high and something that needs to be planned for as part of your ongoing online budget – the common consensus here is less is more.

Show your customer a select group of garments rather than offering hundreds of similar ones will not only ensure that the load time isn’t compromised but will also make for a much simpler user experience.

One Last Thought

The best time to take care of the technical aspects of SEO is during the construction phase of the website. Do your research, ask developers the right questions and make sure that the technical bases are covered. Fixing these areas after your site has gone live can be costly and time-consuming.

So, what does this mean for your business?

Your business needs to keep up with the times and prepare for this, with users going away from traditional search to voice search consider how your website will be found via voice. 

Things to consider include:

Aiming for position zero: Something that featured heavily in a recent blog we posted on ‘Featured Snippets’, Google Home & Google Assistant read these out first.

Consider what questions your customers commonly ask and pop up that relate to your core products & services and build content around this. But where traditional SEO in the past relies heavily on keywords & content, simply answer the question.

Keep the answers concise, conversational, almost to the point where it comes across conversational.

Perfecting your local SEO: 39% of voice search users are looking for businesses information, so ensure your Google My Business listing is optimised and complete. Complete your profile so when a user asks to find local businesses your business appears at the top.

Verify and authenticate your business on things such as Google Maps & Google My Business. Little things like a fully completed listing with store times, services and a bit about what you do go a long way to helping you achieve voice search success.

For example, when a customer asks, ‘where can I find t-shirt printing in London?’, ‘what time does the nearest printers shut?’, ‘where is my nearest printer?’, these little things will help your business get found using voice search.

On-page content: Steering away from traditional SEO where content is built around keywords and lots of content creation, content that will be found using voice should be concise, grammatical and answer the question appropriately. It should reflect how you might engage with another user and not a Google bot.

Focus on providing text that your customer may find useful and helpful, things like FAQs, help with print & embroidery, they want the answers and they want them within seconds. On average, each user will not listen to an answer for voice search over 15 seconds, you have that amount of time to get your point across to the customer – its all about “meeting the information needs of the customer”.

Important: There is still room for traditional SEO, do not go rushing to your website deleting pages of content. Just consider if this is authentic content, useful for the user and helps your customer with whatever their query might be.

The factors mentioned in this article also aide traditional SEO, things like writing content in a naturally, engaging and conversational way, optimising local search etc will all help your website get found online and visible in Googles SERPs. 

Focus on the subject line. The subject line is the most important thing to consider, this is the first thing the recipient reads and is make or break for whether they open your email or chuck it straight in the junk folder. First things first it needs to be eye catching, test out your email subject lines and analyse which achieves the highest open/action rate.

Strive for inbox placement. A difficult one to measure, but not all email campaigns need to be actioned straight away, they just need to leave a lasting impression on readers. Just focus on the brand, the core product and services not super salesy jargon – you don’t want a reader to think it is spam and treat your email like junk.

Ensure the email is mobile optimized. Most email software will provide a mobile view of your email, ensure that it can be optimised for any device. Approximately 65% of emails are read on a smartphone/tablet (Marketing Land, 2017) so ensure your email looks the part on any device.

Personalise where possible. Use tags to deliver a personalised message to your customer, use their name, business name etc to give an email a more personal feel. People know emails are being sent to thousands at a time, but you don’t want to make them feel like another name of your mailing list. This encourages better engagement with readers!

Segment your email database. To go one step further and provide an even more personalised touch segment your database. Funnel down your customers and sort them by interests/industries etc into small niche mailing lists and send them a highly personalised email specific to their niche. For example, don’t just send your customers emails about workwear, filter the type of business and got a bit further.

Reduce text and optimize call to action. As much as Marketers hate it, people won’t spend a lot of time reading your email once opened – consumers decided within a split second if it is of interest or not. Be short, sharp & concise with any text to grab any attention. Focus on providing clickable calls to actions and leading them to enquire, order etc.

Make social sharing available. A simple but very over-looked one, ensure your email can be shared using Social Media buttons. Many email providers make this a simple click of the button. This helps grow the reach of any campaign you might send further than your customer database and reach potential new leads. Provide clear share buttons for your readers to engage with!

So why consider this?

It is a lot more difficult technically behind the scenes, but the results are huge. Rich searches appear right at the top of a SERP, in the coveted ZERO position above organic results. So even if you are not ranking organically, it gives you a fighting chance to get seen on Google.

The answers are detailed, displayed in a box and often more eye catching than a traditional search result and due to their eye-catching nature often have a higher click thru rate (which Google can only consider a good thing!)

Voice Command Searches

The benefit of rich results is also evident as the results work seamlessly with devices such as Google Home & Siri, so if a consumer is searching on the move and asks relevant questions searching for goods, rich snippets are played rather than a whole page of results. With an increase in voice search this can only be an advantage for businesses.

How to get the most from rich snippets?

Building and optimising your site around keyword snippets will increase your organic ranking, increase your websites traffic and decrease your websites bounce rate.

To get your business going with rich searches, here are a few basic tips:

• Provide partial answers and encourage click through. Ranking for a rich result is one thing but making sure it does not display everything is another. Ensure it displays just enough to encourage users to visit your website.
• Make sure users get an awesome user-experience (UX). Ensure your website is optimised, up to date with information, details and provides customers a user-friendly experience on-site.
• Embrace organic practices. To rank well and for rich results a website first and foremost must follow Googles SEO guidelines and best practices.
• Write in a natural style. Snippets rely on quality well written content, not content focused purely on ranking. Write in a conversational style, almost like you are talking to a customer. Once this is done keep on top of it and always freshen it up every few months.
• Work with a credible company. Web design companies often promise the world, do your research and work with the right company for your business. Outline why you want your site built in such a way to get found for rich snippets and many will be excited to work on such an interesting project!

What options are available?

There are a host of options out there and different routes – but it all boils down to your budget & what you want from going online. If you merely want an online presence then a simple site should do the trick something visually pleasing, basic, and cost effective but limited functionality.

But if you are serious about the online game, there are businesses out there that offer online web solutions specific to the industry (ourselves included!) These solutions are geared towards garment decorators who know what they are after and willing to invest a little in online success.

To sell or not to sell?

There are a number of brochure sites (sites that don’t sell online) & e-commerce options available, just do your research, visit trade shows, have live demos and get to know the options before making the best informed choice for your business. 

Brochure sites are a low cost way of getting an entry level site for your business online, you can create these yourself using various software Shopify, WordPress etc. Creating these can be time-consuming but often a money saver, the downfall of these is they often look homemade and you get what you pay for. For a more professional alternative, there are businesses out there like ourselves offering both brochure & e-commerce sites for garment decorators. 

E-Commerce gives businesses the chance to sell online but if often a mine-field, there are a number of options out there for your business to consider, Sagepay, Paypal, Stripe and many more, picking the right package is important for your business, check out their offerings, transaction rates and make sure it all adds up.

It is all about picking a site that works for you & your business and that you are comfortable with. Simply do your research and understand what your options are.

One last thought

You are running a business, do you have time to manage a site? Or create one from scratch? There are options out there for your business, your site can be managed for you by the ‘experts’ so you just sit back, relax and take care of the orders!

Want help or don't know where to begin?

Find out how we help garment decorators with their websites. Our team can offer expert advise and arrange a consultation for your business.

We also run an online demo highlight how we can help, to book yours email info@etraderwebsites.co.uk or call 029 2074 1663