Traffic

Driving traffic to your website seems like a pretty basic knowledge, but stay with me to understand the reason.

Customers start their journey somewhere far from your website in search for a product. The primary goal is to be found. And in order to do that you would have to be seen in search engines and social media.
Make sure that your website is also mobile-friendly to maximize your impact.

Your SEO  needs to be of high quality and so does your content if you want it to be worthy of a customer look. Make sure that you connect links to your previous articles so that your customer stays on your website if they have extra desire to know more and follow links. These days there are just too many good products so no one wants to spent time on something that is too complex to understand or that has too simple visual design.

Also, social media! There is no better, faster and cheaper way to reach targeted audience these days. When I said cheap, I meant ‘’if you have a modest budget in can help you’’, but there is an option to pour mountains of money on social media targeting. But if you have mountains of money, someone else is probably doing that for you. If you have no one to rely on, make sure that you are well informed about social media and digital marketing (example: how frequent you should post etc.)

Website Efficiency

Based on your customers movement through your website, your algorithms should be programmed in a way to make a meaningful suggestion to customer (the ‘you might also like’ section in most websites). Pay special attention to your search engine, because if that doesn’t work well, customers generally assume the product does not exist.

There are two problems most website search functionalities face:

• Product descriptions often vary widely between individual products. Due to the IT processes (and technologies) that are involved in moving supplier data into the customer facing website, a lot of this rich information is often lost or normalized, and thus the website can’t include this data in it’s search. A “schema-agnostic” database with search capabilities, however, can load all product data with little or no effort required, and can ensure all this information can be included in the search, ensuring products won’t be excluded.

• Slightly more challenging, is that search algorithms don’t understand what the terms being entered by the customer mean. If a customer searches for “high-definition TV,” a search algorithm doesn’t know that “high definition” is a phrase that has meaning and shouldn’t be broken down into separate searches for “high” and “definition.” The question is: How do you extract this kind of knowledge you have in order to inform the website’s search results? Using a technology called “semantics,” it’s possible to encode this kind of information and match not only the search phrases, but also the product data. For example, a TV might have an attribute called “1080p,” which could be matched as a synonym for “high definition.”

By choosing a schema-agnostic database with search and semantic support, it is possible to take your product data and start to embed your industry knowledge and start to provide a complete and accurate search. This doesn’t have to replace any existing technology (at least initially), and could just be used as an improved search service for your website.

Thanks to MarkLogic