The answer is ‘probably’.
Crush recently rebuilt and relaunched wineracks.co.uk and the client has seen sales increase over 160 fold. In the client’s words “We’d be lucky if we get any sales in a month on the old website” and now they average 16 orders a month.
The old site was not so old, and the agency that designed and built it had made a good looking website.
So what went wrong, what was changed, and what worked?
Making a ecommerce website profitable is a complex game in 2021, as the all digital markets are maturing. In particular, competition is fierce, coming largely from the new breed of digital first reseller ecommerce sites being set up that neither manufacturer nor stock products, they are simple shop fronts run by ecommerce geeks. These guys have little overheads, and can just focusing on SEO and CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation).
So what went wrong
- Simple building an ecommerce website is not good enough against the new competition
- The site load speed of the old website was bad, damaging SEP rank significantly.
- The customer experience was not properly planned so become really confusing.
So the old website kind of look ok but it was failing to rank on Google or Bing and then failing to convert the traffic into paying (or enquiring) customers.
So what did we change
- We researched the competition and recommended a website that would compete with the digital-first reseller websites
- We moved the website to our hosting on specialist servers to increase the load speed across the website
- We worked with the client to reorganise his brick and mortar business into a digital business
What worked
- The site load times were fast, quicker than the competitors despite using large images which was a big win for SEO ranking
- The new website structure also allowed for better returns on SEO effort
- The organisation of the products and services by plotting easy to follow customer through the website resulted in an immediate upturn in conversion rates
The lesson
Too many ‘SEO’ agencies focus on the easy to do elements of Search Engine Optimisation, but either ignore or are simple are not aware of some of the more technical work needed that is often vital.
To succeed in today’s online world websites need to an agency able to advise and deliver an fully holistic service of everything that is needed for SEO and CRO success.
- Technical SEO (building a website with Google rankings in mind)
- Clean and well written code
- Correct mark up language
- Server and hosting knowledge
- Business planning and analysis
- Customer journey maps
- Website UX design
- Keyword strategy
- Content planning ad writing
- Meta data management
- Google Search Console
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Analytics
- Benchmarking
Next Steps
Now Crush has proven the value of rebuilding the client’s ecommerce website we have been commissioned to do the ongoing SEO work for this client.