{"id":5013,"date":"2019-04-25T08:06:13","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T08:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hetzner.co.za\/insights\/?p=5013"},"modified":"2024-04-17T13:29:14","modified_gmt":"2024-04-17T11:29:14","slug":"four-steps-to-grow-and-scale-your-e-commerce-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xneelo.co.za\/insights\/four-steps-to-grow-and-scale-your-e-commerce-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Four steps to grow and scale your e-commerce business"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having an online business can be both satisfying and rewarding, especially when you start seeing benefits like steady sales and profit, a growing customer base, and great reviews. But with success comes a lot less time to focus on the future. Once your online business has been up and running for some time, you can get trapped in the monotony of the day-to-day running of the business. So how do you grow an e-commerce store? We thought we\u2019d share some simple suggestions to inspire you to take action to grow and scale your e-commerce website. <\/span><\/p>\n

For this guest post, we asked <\/span>e-commerce expert Warrick Kernes<\/span><\/a> to share a few tips on how to grow your e-commerce business \u2013 a few secrets from someone who\u2019s been-there-done-that. <\/span><\/p>\n

Over to Warrick.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1. Increase your website traffic<\/span><\/h3>\n

When business owners tell me that they aren\u2019t happy with their sales, the first thing I ask about is their traffic. What has your traffic been like over the last three months? Where is your biggest source of traffic? Which pages are receiving the highest traffic?<\/span><\/p>\n

As an online business owner, you need to know the answers to these questions if you want to increase your sales. It stands to reason that sales are largely driven by the amount of traffic you\u2019re getting to your site. In general, if you increase the qualified traffic, you\u2019ll increase the sales. Of course, you need to get high quality traffic. You do this by attracting users to your site using SEO and paid ads.<\/span><\/p>\n

Paid traffic sources include adwords, Facebook ads, Google shopping, remarketing and display ads, and can be a great way to proactively find your customers and show them your products. This method works but it requires budget. The downside of paid advertising is that when your budget runs out, the traffic stops. Because of this, we recommend doing a combined approach of paid ads and SEO.<\/span><\/p>\n

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a long-term game: creating content which ranks on Google and draws customers to your site for months and years into the future. <\/span>Good SEO<\/span><\/a> has relevance and authority.<\/span><\/p>\n

The relevance of your content determines how and when it will be shown as a search result. <\/span>Well-written, relevant content<\/span><\/a> will be full of keywords relating to your products and it will ideally be evergreen (content that won\u2019t date) so that the content is still relevant into the future. The authority of your content and your website determines how your site is ranked on Google. If you can create content which is shared or linked to from popular (high authoritative) websites in your market, this will increase the authority of your website. Building your website authority and constantly releasing relevant content is a great way to get up to the top of page 1 on Google. This will naturally increase your sales.<\/span>
\n<\/span>
\n<\/span>Read more advice for increasing your website traffic here.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

2. Increase your conversion rate<\/span><\/h3>\n

The conversion rate of your website shows how many visitors to your site complete an order. SA\u2019s average is lower than most people might think \u2013 <\/span>just 1.5%.<\/span><\/a> This becomes a very important metric to monitor: if your website\u2019s current conversion rate is sitting at 1% and you can increase that to 2%, you\u2019ll double your sales from the same amount of traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is a never-ending game of tweaking and fine tuning your website to see what works best. Not sure where to start? Here are a few key areas:<\/span><\/p>\n