Since 2020, websites can no longer afford to ignore search engine optimization.
93% of all Internet experiences start with a search engine and 39% of eCommerce traffic across the world comes from organic search. Most businesses have recognized this and adapted accordingly — 61% of companies named SEO as their biggest marketing strategy priority. In short, you need to be prioritizing SEO and be a top result if you want to have any chance of driving organic traffic to your website. But if you aren’t an SEO expert, where do you begin?
Fortunately, there are plenty of great SEO tools available. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number of plugins you can install that will really help you out. Finding a great host for your WordPress site is sure to speed it up and boost your SEO rankings. However, there’s much more that goes into it, including which keywords you target for product pages and blog posts, how large your image files are, and whether or not your content is readable. That’s why you need a good SEO plugin for WordPress.
Now, are you looking to get your WordPress SEO off on the right foot, but feel overwhelmed by the number of SEO plugins available? Keep reading.
7 Best SEO Plugins
Here are the 7 best SEO plugins we picked for you. Have a look at each and see what plugins you think will work best on your WordPress website.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most famous SEO plugin for WordPress. It is developed by Joost de Valk and his company Yoast, which offers excellent and actionable SEO features. With 5 Million active installations on WordPress, Yoast continues to wow the WordPress world with impressive updates, a beautiful interface, and the most user-friendly option for making your blog posts and product pages stand out.
One of the best parts of Yoast SEO is the ability to create and manage your XML sitemaps. This is much easier than having to code your sitemap on your own, especially if you don’t have much of a technical background.
Yoast SEO helps you identify and avoid duplicate content, so you won’t have to worry about being penalized by Google, and it offers templates for titles and meta-descriptions, which will make your pages more appealing in SERPs.
You can also gain access to Yoast SEO premium from that website, which offers more advanced features like keyword optimization for five keywords on a page, previewing what your page will look like on Twitter and Facebook, and internal link suggestions for sending users to other locations on your website. Keep in mind that that’s a small portion of the premium features provided.
The premium plugin sells for $89 per site, making it a desirable deal for anyone. However, those on a budget still receive the free plugin, which beats out most other SEO WordPress plugins by a long shot.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is yet another robust WordPress website SEO plugin to automate single pages or posts. It comes with a user-friendly option for beginners and experienced users alike. The plugin creates meta tags for all of your articles, posts, and custom sort automatically and optimizes your website to rank the content on the search engine. In addition, the plugin also supports Google Analytics which works perfectly to track traffic on each page of your website and post.
This plugin was designed to help you improve your WordPress website and its search engine content — increasing the chances of finding your website while people are searching for words you’ve written about. Provided that your website covers subjects that people are really looking for, good SEO will help your audience grow.
All in One SEO’s free version has a fantastic collection of features, most users won’t need to upgrade to it. But if you want more advanced features, then All in One SEO Premium is recommended. All in One SEO Pack includes a comprehensive collection of features to turn into your SEO powerhouse. Setting up and using the SEO tool may not be the simplest, but it will definitely help you better manage your SEO webpages.
SEO by Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is designed specifically for people who aren’t experts in SEO. Other plugins have different ways to access and implement SEO suggestions, but SEO Squirrly brings this to the next level. Take a look at its live SEO assistant feature.
The SEO Live Assistant is such a helpful widget because it allows us to optimize the different pages of a website, as it suggests keywords, makes it easy to embed images, and lets you know how well optimized your content is for your target keywords.
Its keyword generation tool is superior to others because it extracts tons of ideas from different sources. It is incredibly helpful to understand what questions people are asking, and thus, to make the content more engaging and conversational. Finally, the analytics for measuring the performance of the articles – along with the weekly SEO audit – aid me to identify the areas that need more work and the opportunities that are ready to exploit.
Its artificial intelligence enables it to identify the gaps that are keeping your site from ranking as well as you’d like so that you can focus on the activities that will give you the fastest results. The idea is to achieve big breakthroughs from fewer activities, saving you time and money.
Rank Math
Rank Math is a fast-growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It allows you to manage all of your on-page SEO needs for every type of content on your website. It pulls off the rare feat of being feature-packed and user-friendly. There’s even a setup wizard that guides you through the installation process, and it has the nicest UI of the bunch.
With Rank Math, you can manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, products, or other taxonomies. You can also control noindex/nofollow/noarchive meta tags of all taxonomies in general and individual posts or pages in particular. This WordPress plugin will tell you which keywords you’re ranking for, and also show you how many impressions you’re getting for various searches. Rank Math also identifies any errors that Google sees on your site. All of this information is easy to access, read, and digest.
It also allows you to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, control access to plugin features based on user roles, have an inbuilt 404 Monitor, Redirections, Rich Snippets, Local SEO, Automated Image SEO, Internal Link Building recommendations, etc.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. If you have been running a blog for some time, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress site. You can then fix those links without even editing your posts. This plugin monitors your site searching for any broken links, missing images, and redirects. You can edit and fix the broken links directly from the plugin’s dashboard, (without having to update each post or page manually). Or you can remove the broken link but leave the text in place.
It’s good to know that the plugin can keep a watchful eye on your website, notifying you of any broken links. This allows you to focus on what you do best, such as creating content, while never having to worry that broken links are working against you.
All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are a Google feature that displays search results in a more attractive way to boost click-through rate. They are often interactive and can display photos, star ratings, price, author, etc., so earning placement in a rich snippet is important because you’d be standing out from the competition.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets is a schema markup plugin that lets you create eye-catching search results with rich snippets. This plugin allows you to compete for more of these snippets by implementing schema codings such as Review, Events, Recipes, Article, Products, Services, and more. The best part is that you don’t have to be a web developer to use it.
Rich snippets benefit all websites, but they are especially important for eCommerce sites. Users won’t have to go through as many steps to read a review of your products. They can see the star rating from the search engine results page. Adding rich snippets will tell search engines exactly what information to include in the search results.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework bills itself as being the fast WordPress plugin. Available for free from WordPress.org, this plugin allows users to use SEO in an automated and accessible way. It’s easy to transfer SEO data from another plugin instead of starting from scratch and the plugin is simple to set up.
Its interface blends naturally when integrated with WordPress, so it feels as though it’s supposed to be there, as opposed to appearing obtrusive. Some features of this SEO plugin include preconfigured settings, easily sharing content to social media, supporting custom post types, and there are no advertisements. In addition, the plugin works to prevent 404 errors, automatically updates search engines with sitemap changes, and much more.
The post SEO settings are controlled with a few tabs, one of which uses a colored scale to show exactly how close you are to making your post search engine-ready. With the scale, you can instantly tell where you need to put in some work for your SEO, unlike some of the more cluttered versions of Yoast.
As you may have already assumed, the interface is perfect for beginners. The API is also open for advanced users to get their hands dirty. The plugin began as a project within the WPMUDEV community, but it was eventually released to the masses for free. The SEO Framework plugin is all-inclusive, and it offers more advanced functionality with the help of extensions.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for your website. There are a wide variety of SEO plugins available, but the key is to find the best plugin that fits with your business, products, or services so you have the most success.
A good quality WordPress SEO plugin is a must for any WordPress site. You may find that your framework comes with SEO settings built-in. However, it’s best to use a plugin instead of the built-in theme SEO functionality because you may lose those SEO settings if you change your theme in the future. Just watch how many plugins you install because you don’t want to cause bloat in your WordPress site.
If you have a WordPress website, there are countless plugins at your disposal. However, I think it’s best to focus on the top eight that I’ve covered above. There’s something for everyone on this list. Some of these plugins are for specific SEO features, while others encompass a wider range of SEO elements.
The motivations of online shoppers which lead to their purchasing decisions are subject to ongoing research. While purchasing behavior is affected by the needs of the consumers there are many more factors in place which determine where Online Shoppers are going to make their purchases.
These factors are not random nor are they hiding any mistery but actually follow logic which determines how much sales an online shop can attract. By knowing which factors are relevant and how they play together allows shop owners to apply the right strategies and tactics to maximize sales in their online shops. Therefore, we wrote this article tries to shed more light on all the factors which at the end determine how much sales an online shop can create.
As you can see, we could identify many factors and elements which are affecting sales. This comes very close to reality as web shops need to pay a lot of attention to many details that are important when it comes to sales. All the factors and elements can be grouped together in four areas:
Audience
Traffic
Website Conversion
Average Order Value
We are now going through each area and examining the factors which are affecting sales in different ways and approaches.
Audience
The first section is about your Target Audience. This includes studying and understanding who they are, what they do, how much they can spend per purchase, and other important factors that may affect their purchasing decision. Defining a powerful target audience is key to forming a solid base to sell something to.
Below are the things we need to take note regarding our audience:
B2B or B2C?
Who is your target audience? Businesses or consumers? Are you selling B2B or B2C?
B2B: Having businesses as customers can be beneficial as businesses normally are much more willing – and have a better ability – to spend more money than consumers can. So this allows your business to sell higher-priced ticket items including services. Selling to businesses normally requires a more sophisticated sales approach as every expense is part of a budget and requires approval. Also, the relationship and reputation of your webshop might play a much more important role.
B2C means that the purchases are done by private consumers. Private consumers normally have less spending power and therefore are much less willing to spend money as everything comes out of their own pocket. Pricing ticket normally tend to be lower. B2C companies may benefit from meeting the household decision-maker, particularly for big-ticket items like vacations or new vehicles, but they don’t have to cater to only one family member to see results. They will show advertisements to anybody who may be interested in buying and have a good chance of doing so. Also to mention consumers are much more receptive to emotional arguments than businesses who rely more on rationale decision-making.
To be successful, both B2B and B2C marketing must be hyper-targeted, but this can be a difficult task for B2B companies in particular. B2C promotions will reach out to any potential consumer who is interested in their product, even if they aren’t the intended buyer. Even if the ad appealed to anyone other than the primary customers, a woman who sees jewelry she likes could submit the connection to her significant other, resulting in sales.
Age Group
Your target audience’s purchasing power may root in which age group they belong. They may be a part of ages under < 18, 18-25, 25-40, 40-65 and > 65. Different age bracket has different goals and needs. You may have to ask yourself which age group does my target market may come from and that information will help you optimize how to do your marketing better.
Defining your audience’s age group may also help when you decide to use ad targeting as it can help you narrow down your audience target in your campaign ads. Just make sure to do your research and see at what age group your products will most likely be bought and use.
Spending Power
In connection with the age groups, the spending power is somewhat a bit similar to it. Spending power may depend on your audience’s income level, educational attainment, and employment. If your products are typically at a higher price point, you may need to target audiences that match the income level required to purchase them.
Therefore, you need to do some extensive research and planning first. If you plan to sell these to students, you need to keep your price point at a low level for them to afford it. If your products target businessmen, entrepreneurs, online store owners, you need to decide how high you will set your price point at as it will be a fair price, but also not high enough to overprice.
Interests
Your products may vary in different categories. It may be specific for a certain industry, need, interest and others. For example, if you are selling WordPress Themes and Plugins, your target market should be in the same niche industry and is supposedly operating WordPress websites. You need to analyze which audience group your products will most likely be purchased to better optimize your marketing strategy.
Problems
In order to build the perfect product to offer your customers, you must first need to know and understand the customer’s problems and needs you needed to address. This will give you a clear picture of what direction your product must be developed into as to be useful enough for people to buy it.
For example, selling digital images or logos sells the problem of somebody needing a design solution, therefore you need to provide tons of sample images and graphics, and may also offer customization.
Another is selling a WordPress plugin normally solves a problem within an online shop (e.g. page conversion, design problem, navigation, etc.) The point in developing a good and saleable WordPress Themes/Plugins is that you need to sell something which solves a significant problem, saves time, energy, and provides something valuable to your users.
Traffic
The next section will be about understanding our traffic sources. This is very important as the traffic channels are our way of curating visitors which in the future may turn to customers. Remember that more traffic leads to more sales. This is the foundation of our revenue flow, therefore we need to know and understand these traffic channels better and make sure we on the right track in optimizing and making use of these channels. They are as follows:
Direct
When a visitor arrives at a website without first clicking on a connection on another website, this is known as direct access (direct traffic). This traffic usually comes from people who already know your brand and the products you’ve been offering. This traffic may come from past customers that went back to repurchase another product or to renew their subscriptions.
In order to get and maintain direct traffics, we must build a good relationship with our customers by offering them the best products, easy to use platform, a trustworthy website, excellent customer service, and technical support. If it turns out they got satisfied with your product and services, they will surely come back for more.
There are other ways of getting direct traffic but the bottom line is we need to make a long-lasting impression even just for visitors, so they will come back right on your website and continue with the purchasing decision.
Social
Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. As we already know, Social Traffic comes from various social media platforms like the most popular ones – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This is the most common traffic sources everybody on the eCommerce world is using as this may come very cheap at first but can bring huge amount of revenue to an online store.
To start with Social Media Marketing, one needs basically to prepare a pitch along with an eye-catchy image that will be posted or shared on various social media platforms. There are many free and paid courses on the internet that can help you be better at Social Media Marketing and make the most out of it. After preparing the material to be posted or shared, one usually needs a software or tool to automatically publish content on social media platforms. This can save us a lot of time and help us concentrate on other important tasks in building and growing our eCommerce store.
Your consumers are still engaging with brands on social media, and you’re losing out if you’re not connecting directly to them on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Great social media marketing will help the company achieve phenomenal success by cultivating loyal brand supporters and even generating leads and sales.
E-mail
The highly successful digital marketing technique of sending emails to prospects and consumers is known as email marketing. Prospects become clients, and one-time consumers become devoted, raving fans, thanks to powerful marketing emails.
Setting up your email marketing is essential as it is one way of building and growing your connections and staying in touch and updated with your audience. One basic way of implementing email marketing is through email automations. You can use any tool or plugin that will help you setup and do the process for you. You can either build a welcoming campaign, abandoned cart recovery email, newsletter, educational email and other types of email marketing campaign applicable to your business.
Building an effective email campaign might be tricky at first especially on a business startup. You might need to test out different types of email campaigns and see which of them actually works. You can measure it by monitoring the number of opens, link clicks, and purchases. There are also email marketing tools out there, either free or paid, that you can use to automate this process a lot easier and faster.
Organic Search
Organic search refers to a search engine’s search results that are unaffected by paid ads. The importance of organic search results to the search term determines their ranking. There are several ways how to make the use and benefit more via the Organic Search.
Keyword Research – is the process of researching common search words that people use in search engines like Google and creatively incorporating them into the content so that it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERP). In search engine optimization, keyword research is a critical step (SEO). Once optimized for keywords, you can also check your Keyword Rankings to see if you need extra work in optimizing and making your content better, and also to check your competitors.
Competitor Research – Identifying the rivals, determining their strengths and weaknesses, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their goods and services are all part of competitive analysis. You will see how your own goods and services react to those of your biggest rivals and what kind of challenge they pose to your company by looking at them. It also aids in the identification of market patterns that you might have overlooked.
On-Page Optimization – is the method of optimizing web pages in order to boost a website’s search engine rankings and attract organic traffic. On-page SEO involves optimizing the headlines, HTML tags (title, meta, and header), and photos, as well as publishing appropriate, high-quality content.
Off-Page Optimization – refers to actions taken outside of your own website to influence your search engine traffic page rankings (SERPs). This is all about creating backlinks. Backlinks are used by search engines to determine the quality of the content linked to, so a site with a lot of high-quality backlinks will typically rank higher than a site with fewer backlinks.
Domain/Page Authority – these are scores developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific domain/page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). In order to make your DA PA higher, you also need to improve your contents, optimize for SEO and create backlinks on high quality sites.
Referrals
Google’s form of disclosing visits to your site that came from sources other than its search engine is known as referral traffic. If a user clicks on a link to access a new page on another website, Analytics reports the click as a referral visit to the second site. The originating site is referred to as a “referrer” because it directs traffic from one venue to another.
In order to increase your referral traffic, you need to create more backlinks to high-quality websites, bookmarking sites, and publish contents on social media posts such as Facebook and Twitter short links, get published on Online Directories and Review Websites, comment on blogs and forums, and others. Referral traffic may also take the form of tracking code embedded in other websites, such as AdWords banner advertising, to provide a referral code tied to a particular marketing campaign.
Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is a form of advertisement in which a business pays third-party publishers to send traffic or leads to its goods and services. Affiliates are third-party publishers who are paying a fee to find new ways to market the brand.
This is also one great way to let traffic flow on our website, by establishing a good Affiliate Program. There are free/paid tools that you can use to automate your affiliate program and set up all the processes for you. You need to properly set the terms of your program, at how much commission percentage you will give fair for both parties, instructional materials and guide how to promote or advertise your products, prepare images and banners ready to be posted to third-party websites, and many others.
As a result, a good affiliate marketing campaign necessitates some preparation. Especially if the contract agreement pays for traffic rather than sales, the terms and conditions must be strict. In affiliate marketing, there is the possibility of fraud.
Website Conversion
The next section is talking about your website conversion. When anyone performs a pre-determined and desired action on your website, such as signing up for a newsletter, posting a blog post on social media, or purchasing a product, it is known as a website conversion. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who complete your desired action.
Now, let’s get to know some of the important factors that affects your website conversion.
Design
Layout, without a doubt, determines whether or not a landing page can convert. Designers working on UI and UX should include usability, user interaction, and key performance indicators, or KPIs.
Businesses do not want to risk potential leads that use computers other than desktops to reach the landing page. As a result, the designer must consider how the website would appear on screens of various sizes. Furthermore, Google is a major supporter of responsive design. As a result, responsive design is beneficial for both conversion rate and SEO.
Remember that, conversion rates are negatively impacted by excessively embellished, unstructured, and cluttered webpages.
Content
It’s time to think about content that will support you on your way to conversion rate optimization after you’ve taken care of a friendly interface and navigation. A content strategy, like every other marketing strategy, begins with defining the target audience. When you know who your readers are, it’s far easier to figure out what they’re interested in.
Share useful knowledge that your future clients will seek out. That’s how you’ll demonstrate your knowledge and ability to assist. That’s how you’ll earn people’s confidence.
Navigation
Your site visitors are used to those common navigation elements in UI and UX design, regardless of who your buyer personas are. If your landing page design is difficult for your visitors to understand, you will have a hard time converting them into leads.
The place to test your differentiation strategy isn’t on your website design. For easy navigation, use a consistent interface. People are used to that, so don’t throw them off. The CTAs on your screen must be linked to one another. Your conversion rates will suffer if you have too many competing CTAs.
Clear the screen of clutter. Make the most of the empty room. Examine what your visitors see as they click through your pages. To encourage conversions, a CTA button should always be available.
Finally, make your checkout process easier. Don’t forget about smartphone users.
Page Speed
The capacity of a website to generate leads and drive sales is heavily influenced by its loading pace. When a user tries to access a website that takes a long time to load, they are much more likely to look for another source for the material, information, or products they want.
When we talk about results, we’re talking about load times, or the first potential barrier between a user and your brand’s web material. It is recommended that a webpage load in no more than 2-3 seconds, studies have shown that consumers give up after only a few seconds and press the “back” button. They actually think the website is inaccessible or that the browser is malfunctioning. For potential customers to stay on your website, quick load times are important.
That is why using a good hosting server as well as an excellent caching plugin is important for your website as it automatically helps and unloads your website.
Security
If you don’t serve up your pages safely, you may be leaving conversions on the table, depending on how important perceived protection is in your industry. According to a survey conducted by GlobalSign, a web-trust certificate provider, 84 percent of website visitors said they would abandon a purchase3 if the data was going to be sent over an unreliable link.
Aside from changing your links to HTTPS, third-party security vendors also have a security seal, or SSL badge, that you can use with a little Javascript on your ecommerce sites or landing pages. Testimonials and trust seals offer your customers additional assurance that doing business with you online is safe. They’re also often linked to higher conversion rates, but your mileage can differ depending on your use case.
Lastly, you should always monitor your website’s backup and firewall to prevent harmful attacks on your website, protecting your customers personal information in the process.
You’ll need more than just appealing prices and appealing images to boost your conversion rate. On one side, you’ll need to position yourself in your customers’ shoes to make the user experience as seamless and reliable as possible. Keeping an eye on how these same parameters are evaluated by the major search engines, on the other hand, will help you prevent SEO and conversion killers when doing the above.
Average Order Value (AOV)
The average dollar amount spent each time a customer places an order on a website or mobile app is tracked by the average order value (AOV). Simply divide gross sales by the amount of orders to get the company’s average order value.
Knowing your company’s average order value will help you determine your overall online marketing activities and pricing plan by providing you with the metrics you need to assess individual customers’ long-term value. The AOV serves as a benchmark for consumer conduct, allowing you to set targets and assess how well those objectives are working.
When it comes to growing website traffic, some advertisers overlook the fact that increasing AOV is more impactful – and profitable. Increasing traffic is normally costly, whereas increasing AOV is not. Because each order has a purchase cost, increasing the AOV is a way to drive direct sales and income because the consumer is already purchasing from your shop.
Products
Let’s talk about your products. These are the main factor that will lead revenues towards your business. Creating your products depends on your chosen business niche. You must remember that in order to sell your products, it must have a substantial benefit, features that can help solve customer’s problems, excellent quality and unique advantages compared to your competitors.
Before putting your products for sale, you must prepare necessary contents and materials that will introduce your products. These are your product page content and documentation. Preparing these two important materials plays a huge role in securing a sale. Is your pages well explained? Is it easy to understand? Does it explain all benefits and uses of your products? Does it show enough images to showcase your product’s features? Do you offer help and support? If you are be able to address these questions, therefore your products are ready to be published.
Pricing
Setting your price points should be well-thought and decided by taking into considerations the many factors that help in building your product. You must consider the time, effort and money spend in developing your product, adding up your desired profit.
Remember that in deciding what price point to set may also depend on the current market. You must check the pricing of your competitors and decide whether you go low or higher depending on your product quality.
Many business owners introduce different price tiers for products and on a subscription basis whether recurring or one time. You can also make use of this pricing structure and see what best fit your products.
Upsells
Upselling is a sales tactic that involves persuading buyers to buy a more costly, improved, or premium version of a preferred item, as well as other add-ons, in order to make a larger sale. In order to increase order value and benefit, eCommerce companies often combine upselling and cross-selling techniques.
This focuses on assisting the consumers in ‘winning’ by suggesting premiums, enhancements, or add-ons that will ultimately provide more value and make them feel like they got a great deal; it will turn out to be a consumer satisfaction strategy that also produces additional revenues.
In order to use upselling properly, you must take note to only upsell what is necessary and related to the product the customers is going to buy. The more upsell options you provide to consumers, the more likely they are to accept one. As a result, promote your upsell wherever it makes sense. You don’t want to confuse your customers by allowing them to see your upsells. If you show your upsell popup at an inopportune moment, they might not buy anything at all. You’ll have a lot better chance of making a deal if you show it at the right time.
Discounts
One of the most common strategies used by small businesses to increase revenue is to give a discount. But there’s a catch: unless you do your research, your discounts can end up harming your brand or reducing your income.
Setting discounts on your pricing is a tactic that will increase sales volume, attract new buyers, and provide you with more benefits. Still, there are downsides to discounting. When you give discounts, it’s also possible to end up with little to no benefit. While some of your reduced sales may come from consumers who would not have purchased otherwise, you may also lose profit margins from customers who would have purchased regardless of the discount.
To not abuse discounting which can end you up with nothing, you can start with the basics which is the Bundle Discount and Seasonal Discounts. Bundle discount, rather than lowering the sale price of a single good or service, you lower the price of a collection of products purchased together for this discount. While the Seasonal discounts are event-based discounts are usually associated with a particular date or season, and they are often repeated. This involves discounts offered during holidays, such as New Year’s or Valentine’s Day promotions.
You can do discounting by promoting a campaign via newsletter. Prepare it very well with the right and catchy content enough for your viewers to not ignore it. Also, you must decide carefully what discount amount to use, how long it will run, how many times it can be used and for what specific products.
Conclusion: Continuously Improve the Factors affecting Sales of your Online Store
Despite that these factors looks overwhelming and seems a lot of work, you really need to work through all these and try to improve them as much as possible to improve your online store sales. Like in order to increase sales you need to focus on working on your Audience, Traffic, Conversion and Order Value, sticking to these main topics to get a good increase in your sales. Then the challenge is to break-down all the factors working all the way down on the topics affecting these elements.
You might also first need to plan carefully and prioritized which you think are the factors urgently needed to be implemented on your online store. Some will have higher priority (e.g. ) while others might first appear less relevant. However, all play an important role in defining how much your sales are going to be for your online shop.
Freelance Services Marketplace like Upwork and Fiverr, offering a convenient, reliable, and easy way to access global freelance talents, has become a very popular business model among website and platform owners. These websites offer access to hundreds of millions of freelancers who are experts in different skills and categories. You can literally find a solution to any kind of idea you have; there is always a Freelancer waiting to be hired.
These online marketplaces for freelance services act as a mediator between employers and employees helping them to build business relationships with each other. Every day these platforms help millions of their users to find suitable work or workers, giving huge profits to their owners. Previously considered as mere side gigs and extra jobs, freelance work has now become a major employment option.
The Growth of the Gig Economy and Freelancing
Freelance Services has grown immensely over the past decade and is expected to further increase in the coming years. With such growth, it is predicted that freelancers will account for as much as 80% of the entire workforce worldwide by 2030. With 57.3 million freelancers in the US alone (which makes around 36% of the total country’s workforce), there is no denying the fact that it is now the reality we live in.
The above illustration shows the actual growth and statistics of Freelancing in America. So in summary, here are the top reasons why people prefer working as Freelancers:
Open for more opportunities – a lot of people are choosing to spend more time working in the Freelancing field since they believe it offers way more opportunities.
Balanced lifestyle – working remotely also enables people to manage and balance their lifestyles well.
Values skills and training – remote jobs actually value a person’s skills and training over formal education.
Offers future growth – people started to be more optimistic about their future in the Freelancing field.
Flexible working hours – people preferred working remotely because it gives them flexible working hours.
Tons of helpful resources and guides – there’s a huge repository of documents, guides and help as almost everything can be looked upon the web which makes working easy.
Internationalization – customers can access a huge talent pool from different parts of the world.
Requires specialty – huge demand for specialists as some tasks requires in-depth knowledge to work with.
Yet, despite a large number of existing freelance online platforms, none of them are absolutely perfect and can cater and offer a wide span of features and opportunities. That represents an opportunity for website owners to join in and develop a freelance marketplace that can close the existing gaps and build a better platform.
Why using WordPress?
If you are to build your Freelance Marketplace, why not use WordPress? WordPress has become more than just excellent content management tools and makes it quite affordable to start any website. Various plugins offer endless possibilities to enlarge their applications for website creation. Moreover, it is a great content management tool and you will need to work on getting traffic through a great web presence and SEO.
Open-Source Software – WordPress is freely available online as an open-source website creation tool written in PHP.
Highly Customizable and Flexible – WordPress meets the demands of its mass of users with a flexible programming framework. This allows designers and developers to create and modify various layouts and applications.
Rich Eco-System of WordPress Plugins and Extensions – There is a rich Eco-system of WordPress plugins and codes available that can help you improve and optimize your WordPress Freelance Marketplace in any way you want. There are many WordPress Freelance Marketplace Plugin you can use for the job.
SEO Optimization – Several WordPress Plugins are offered to optimize your Website for Search Engines and content marketing more.
Many Freelancers and Programmers know WordPress – Many Freelancers and PHP programmers are familiar with WordPress, the same goes for many virtual assistants, content marketers and other people you will need to hire to operate and maintain your website.
A domain name is the foundation of your website. It’s how your website visitors navigate to your site, and it plays a role in how people discover you online. It’s often the first impression that potential visitors get of you and your website as well—so registering the best domain name possible is important.
A great domain name is a concise, easy to type, and memorable URL that reflects your brand or your website’s subject matter. Avoid using hyphens, strings of numbers, or unnecessary words to make it easy for your visitors to remember and find your website. Remember: A great domain name is one that your visitors can type correctly on their first try.
You can use GoDaddy or NameCheap to look for and buy your chosen Domain Name.
(2) Get a Minimum VPS or a Cloud VPS Hosting Account
A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet.
We strongly suggest that you get either a VPS or a Cloud VPS Hosting Account. VPS hosting is one of the most popular hosting services you can choose for your website. It uses virtualization technology to provide you with dedicated (private) resources on a server with multiple users. While Cloud VPS hosting is a great option for website owners who want a scalable and high performing host behind because the resources on Cloud VPS are spread out amongst a bunch of different physical machines. This increases the power of your server whenever you’d like to meet varying traffic needs.
Bluehost is an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider and one of the largest hosting companies in the world. They know WordPress inside out and have the most beginner-friendly WordPress installation process.
(3) Research your Market Niche and Competitors
In building your Freelance Services Marketplace, you should decide whether to create a Generalist Freelancer Marketplace(offer talents in every possible category) or a Specialized Freelancer Marketplace(offer selected talents that have a specific set of skills).
Of course, there will be a lot of competitors in either category. So the next step would be to look for your market competitors and find out what they do best in their services and also where and what they lack. This is to give you a clear vision of what to do and improve on your platform and therefore steer clear of your competitors in the long run.
(4) Define your Unique Selling Proposition or USP
USP is a factor that differentiates a product from its competitors, such as the lowest cost, the highest quality or the first-ever product of its kind. A USP could be thought of as “what you have that competitors don’t.” A successful USP promises a clearly articulated benefit to consumers, offers them something that competitive products can’t or don’t offer, and is compelling enough to attract new customers.
At this point, you should have come up, decided and defined your own USP. Do you think your platform can excel among tons of your large platform competitors? What features your platform has that makes it stand out among the rest? Can your platform do it better? Would it offer a more user-friendly, excellent and smooth project execution and process?
Users are overwhelmed with options, and they want to quickly understand what makes one platform different than another. Knowing the right way to position yourself and the website can mean the difference between standing out and blending in.
(5)Install WordPress
Next, would be to install WordPress on your website. Fortunately, this is free to use and download! WordPress is well-known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances, installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete.
If you are looking for a summary on How to install WordPress manually, here it is:
Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org
Unzip the file and upload it to the public_html (or similar) directory
Create MySQL Database and User
Configure the wp-config.php file.
Run the WordPress install
(6) Install Freelancer Marketplace Plugin and Easy Digital Downloads
After installing WordPress on your website, the next thing is to install and configure Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) on your WordPress website. You can download it right on your WordPress Dashboard, moreover, it is also a free plugin!
Starting your own Freelancer Marketplace with WordPress would never be easy without the right tools and software, to begin with. To help you with that, you can use the WordPress Freelance Marketplace Plugin for WordPress.
This Freelancer Marketplace Plugin will help you build a freelancer marketplace for WordPress and Easy Digital Downloads. It offers a comprehensive collection of settings and configurations to give you total control over your own freelancer marketplace. This will be your starting point in creating your dream freelancer marketplace using the ultimate freelancer marketplace solution.
(7)Get a transactional email delivery service such as Sendgrid or Mailgun
Since the Freelancer Marketplace Plugin has tons of built-in emails to be sent out to different users every time an action has been made, therefore, you will surely need the help of a third-party transactional email delivery service. Why? When you succesfully onboard many users in your platform, they will be tons of emails that will be sent out to each one of them and this will definitely slow down your process, worse, some of these users won’t even receive the email. To maintain a fast and stable page speed with this plugin, we advise you to use an external email service such as SendGrid or Mailgun.
(8)Configure and Customize your website
After having the above tools and plugins installed, you might need to configure and customize your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress website any way you want. Using the Freelancer Marketplace Plugin, you will have tons of pages you can use, setting configurations to customize, features and functions to better present your platform and many others.
(9) Install Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular digital analytics software. It is Google’s free web analytics service that allows you to analyze in-depth detail about the visitors on your website. Google Analytics is a very important digital marketing tool but seriously underused by most businesses. It allows you to measure the results of individual campaigns in real-time, compare the data to previous periods, and so much more.
You can simply install GA Google Analytics Plugin on your website, or use the built-in Google Analytics Tracker of any plugin that you are currently using, if available. Then, visit the Google Analytics website to signup and finish the configuration.
If you want to see which channels your visitors are coming from, your conversion tracking, customer engagement statistics, and others – this is the perfect tool for you!
(10)Get a Mailchimp Account
In order to send Email Newsletters or even Email Education Series to your platform users, MailChimp would be one of the best tools to use for the process. The purpose of email newsletters and series is to give those on your contact list updates pertaining to your platform, products, and services. This is an excellent way to keep in touch and maintain a good connection with your platform users.
To help you with the job, you can get a MailChimp Account and integrate it with your website using the Mailchimp for WordPress Plugin. To simplify this process, below are the steps to connect your WordPress website to Mailchimp.
To connect MailChimp to your WordPress site, the first thing you will need is a MailChimp account.
Next, you’ll need to connect your MailChimp account to the plugin. To do this, you’ll need to get your API key from MailChimp and paste it within the plugin.
The first thing you need to do in your MailChimp account is set up an email list. On your MailChimp dashboard, click on ‘Create A List’ button.
MailChimp comes with a built-in basic subscription form. The next step would be to create a signup form to put on your WordPress site.
Put the Signup Form anywhere on your website, either using a shortcode, widget or a third-party plugin.
If these steps are still a bit confusing to you, simply look on the web the complete steps on how to integrate and connect your Mailchimp Account to your WordPress website.
(11) Setup Social Media Channels
Social media has become an integral part of today’s marketing landscape. It is one of the best ways to connect with people who already love your platform, as well as reaching those who haven’t heard of it yet. Creating an account for different Social Media Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube remains a very great way to establish your brand and build an audience.
Keep in mind, depending on your target market, there will be different social networks of relevance. E.g. management professionals you most likely find on LinkedIn, developers there are many on Twitter and Youtube, etc. Try to figure out which social media networks your target audience is most active and these should be the social media channels to focus on.
(12) Reach out to partners who like to post first projects on your marketplace
Now, you have your Freelancer Marketplace with WordPress all set up and configured. The next important step is finding and inviting prospective customers and freelancers to onboard on your platform. The first thing you can do is build a list of companies, agencies, and even individual website owners that would most likely be in need of freelancing services.
Simply by using Gmail, Mailchimp, or any other Email Services Tool you prefer, you can send them out an invitation asking them to check out your Freelance Services Platform, and if they are interested, they can even post their own projects in which they needed help with.
(13) Market the marketplace to Customers and Freelancers
Once your Freelancer Marketplace has been launched, doing promotional activities is important in gaining the attention of future customers and freelancers. Below are a few strategies you can try to promote your platform:
Content Writing / Guest Blog – Content marketing is a very useful way of introducing your Freelance Marketplace to prospective users. This involves using various types of relevant content in order to present your platform and it’s features and functions. It’s affordable and incredibly effective when done right.
SEO optimization on your landing pages – Another important consideration when marketing a website is SEO. Investing time in SEO will help potential customers and freelancers find your platform through organic search. Doing keyword research can help you find the proper keywords to use on your landing and blog pages.
Email Marketing – One goal of your marketing strategy should be to build up an email marketing list. An email marketing list can become a very effective tool for communicating with your audience and incentivize them to come back to revisit your platform.
Paid Advertisements – if possible (FB Ads, Google Adwords)
Join forums, social media groups and interact with people on your same niche, to get backlinks and etc.
Opportunity in Niche Freelance Marketplace
Since there are many significant marketplaces for freelance services out there that are difficult to compete with, what you might want to do is to focus on a select niche segment where you feel it’s challenging to identify suitable talent pools. Here you could create an edge by leveraging your expertise and network in the best possible way.
It is without a doubt that a freelancer marketplace business model is extremely scalable and can be applied to various business types and domains. That is why one good opportunity is to build a niche marketplace where you can specialize or even vet freelancers for certain tasks that could be an attractive model to various customers. Another good strategy is that you can have the opportunity to better monetize your digital product marketplace and earn more revenue by selling digital products and offering freelancing services at the same time.
Conclusion: Totally ready on your Freelance Services Marketplace journey
You might have thought that building your own online marketplace for freelance services in today’s very competitive eCommerce field would be impossible for you, well it won’t. What we need is to be fully equipped and ready with all this knowledge and strategies that would give us an edge among thousands of our marketplace competitors out there.
Just make sure to apply and implement these features well on your Freelance Marketplace, as well as the proper marketing and management, soon your marketplace would be up and running, along with many customers and freelancers working with you.
It is very important to work your first impression with customers. If your website is unappealing to your audience and difficult to navigate, then it’s likely to increase the bounce rate. Your website navigation should instead help customers find the products they want quickly and easily.
Good navigation on your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress websites improves the online shopping experience and helps merchants increase sales and profits. Setting up your WordPress websites with Easy Digital Downloads could be your smartest move if you are into eCommerce and have excellent digital goods ready to offer for download.
Even relatively small differences in global navigation — i.e., the navigation that appears on almost every page of a site — may significantly impact users and their ability to find products. They have increasingly shorter attention spans, so you need to be able to quickly attract their attention – and make the shopping experience pleasant and easy.
Why improve your website navigation?
It can be safely said that navigation is one of the most critical parts of your store’s design. Good navigation provides an improved user experience leading to more sales and revenue. On the other hand, poor navigation frustrates the users leading to a higher bounce rate.
As mentioned before, poor website navigation has a higher tendency to increase the bounce rate. As a matter of fact, studies show that 76% of consumers say the most important characteristic of a website is ease of use. The objective is to help shoppers get to what they want faster and without running into unnecessary complexity that can clog up the path to purchase.
Navigation can make or break your website’s overall performance when it comes to retaining visitors, keeping them engaged and driving them through the conversion funnel. Strong site navigation makes it easy for visitors to quickly find the information that interests them. It also helps search engines index your important information efficiently and effectively.
So in summary, webstore owners need to once in a while check and optimize their site navigation because:
Site navigation is very important to customers until they reach their purchase decision.
Excellent Navigation leads to more sales and revenue for your webstore.
Increased your Visit Duration and Decreased Bounce Rate
Keep your clients and visitors happy and coming back for more, thus you won’t lose your customers.
Good navigation makes the whole process easy and smooth. Bad navigation is frustrating and can lead to a loss of sales.
Although it may seem negligible, having organized and easy-to-follow navigation for a website is very beneficial and important for the overall user experience.
How to Improve Website Navigation for EDD
Even relatively small differences in global navigation — i.e., the navigation that appears on almost every page of a site — may significantly impact users and their ability to find products.
To improve your EDD WordPress site navigation, consider these suggestions.
1)Search Feature
Search is one of the most important tools for EDD WordPress website navigation. It should be included at or near the top of every page on a site. For this, you need to select a good EDD theme that already offers an on-site search bar or install a search plugin instead.
When using an in-site search feature, the search results page must always produce relevant results. It must compensate for misspellings, show related items and even produce results for products you don’t have while displaying similar products you offer.
2)Accurate navigation titles
Visitors should have a general idea of what they should find on a page even before clicking any navigational link. This is true whether it’s the main navigation link or an internal text link. Use accurate text to describe the linked page so visitors know what they’re going to get. Cryptic or misleading navigation text confuses and annoys visitors, possibly to the point of site abandonment. Make sure all link verbiage, whether textual or in an image, accurately portrays the corresponding pages.
3) Clickable links and pages on the navigation
When using multiple categorical divisions in your navigation, all heading elements should be clickable links. This is true even with drop-down menus where clicking a sub-category link may be the natural inclination of the visitor.
In order to add a navigation menu on your EDD website, an excellent and flexible plugin we have been using is the Nav Menu Roles. This plugin lets you hide custom menu items based on user roles.
4)Product Categories and Subcategories
Product categories are often arranged in a hierarchy that moves from the general to the specific. It is possible, however, that some products might naturally appear in more than one hierarchy.
5) Keep it consistent
Consistent navigation promotes ease of use and increases your visitors’ ability to find relevant information more quickly, and also so that people can find their way around the site from wherever they happen to be. If your navigation is constantly changing from page to page (except where absolutely necessary), visitors lose their on-site bearings and must reorient themselves constantly.
6) Follow Design Conventions
Although it might be fun to generate a unique and unusual form of website navigation, for eCommerce it is often best to follow common design and navigation conventions. With this in mind, navigation should either be at the top of the page or, for sites featuring left-to-right reading languages, on the left side of the page.
7)Filtered Navigation.
If you have tons of products on your webstore, Filtered navigation is essential. It makes for effective browsing by allowing the customer to narrow their product selection by eliminating results that are irrelevant to them.
8) Product Displays and Carousel Sliders
Carousels, or image sliders, and even simple product displays are commonplace on eCommerce sites which can be achieved by using shortcode for WordPress. Essentially, they allow your customers to promote several different products without using all of the space on the page, thus making it more user-friendly, creating an eye-candy, animated display. Fortunately, there is WordPress shortcode plugin out there that you can use.
If you want a WordPress shortcode plugin to enable product/vendors displays on your webstore, either a simple grid display or a carousel slider, you can try checking out the EDD Advanced Shortcodes plugin. This truly enhances website navigation and browsing capabilities of your products and vendor profiles in a more powerful manner using the advanced shortcode for WordPress provided.
9) Fix Broken Links
Always keep in mind to frequently check and fix broken links. Whether the page is yours or another website’s that you hyperlinked somewhere, 404 error pages aren’t helpful for visitors. Actually, they make them want to leave. WordPress has multiple plugins to check for broken links within your pages, posts, comments, directories, etc. but I suggest using Broken Link Checker since it’s one of the top plugins for this purpose.
10) Optimize for Mobile
As of 2017 Q1, mobile devices were found to be used for 49.7% of overall web page views globally. Make sure that everything you have on your desktop website version fits well with the mobile version. Choose either to create a responsive or adaptive mobile version depending on budget and what works best for your overall needs.
Keeping it simple and obvious will keep your clients and visitors happy and coming back for more. Be sure that your visitors are able to locate the necessary information as soon as possible, without searching through heaps of extra information. Navigation should assist the user in finding all the information they are after before a call to action can be made.
Conclusion: Make it easy for customers to find what they want!
Continuously thinking of new ways to attract more visitors to your EDD webstores can be very challenging. But what’s even more difficult is to keep and make your customers stay browsing on your website, how? That’s where good website navigation takes place. This should make it easy for your visitors to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Improving your website navigation also comes with improving your website speed. When it comes to page speed and load time, an improvement of just a single second can have huge implications for your bottom line. The result of this is faster loading times and happier visitors. You can read through this article “A Guide to WordPress Caching and the Best Caching Plugins” to learn more about WordPress Caching.
No one wants to go through leaps and hurdles to get to the endpoint, so make it easy and optimize your navigation for better user experience. Use any or all of these techniques above for your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress website, and you’ll be helping yourself and your visitors to move them toward your ultimate goal – conversions.
As your WordPress website grows, with the publication of new content and the installation of additional wordpress plugins, it will, unfortunately, start to slow down. Even a fresh installation of WordPress platforms can suffer from poor performance during spikes of high traffic or if you’re using a low-quality web host.
Statistically speaking, Neil Patel says that 40% of people abandon a website if the load time takes more than 3 seconds. So it comes as no surprise that Google continues to emphasize site speed in its search algorithm. The fewer the load time, the better your search rankings, and the more organic traffic you can attract.
Caching WordPress is a fundamental factor in determining a site’s overall performance since it generates HTML pages dynamically – by applying PHP code alongside MySQL database queries. If properly, your WordPress site can be orders of magnitude faster. It helps prevent redundancy and speeds up the load time of your site. Speeding up your WordPress site can be employed in 3 primary ways:
Use high end, insanely powerful, clustered servers
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Configure WordPress Caching
The first two points can be very expensive and usually depend on
the number of visitors a site has. However, WordPress caching can be used even in the smallest of
websites.
Do you want to increase the speed of your WordPress website? Using
a caching plugin on your website is one of the best ways to ensure your website
loads faster.
What is Caching?
A cache is an area in the
computer’s memory that stores recently used information. When a site is cached,
it means the site’s pages, images, files and Web objects are stored on the
user’s local hard drive – this is called the cache file. In turn, this means that when a user
opens a frequently accessed file, the browser will have most (if not all) of
its files cached.
To put it simply, when a user visits a page of your website, he loads all the elements. So there are a number of requests that are sent to the server. Each of them increases the loading time of the page. This is the principle of a dynamic website, every time the page is displayed by a new visitor, all elements are requested from the webserver through queries.
The caching plugin instructs the
server to store some files to disk or RAM, depending on the configuration.
Therefore, it can remember and duplicate the same content it’s been serving in
the past. As a result, your web pages load much faster, directly from cache.
Basically, caching reduces the amount of work required to generate a page view.
Types of Caching
Broadly speaking, there are two types of caches — server and
browser. Browser caching is done on the client (user) side, while server caching is
(unsurprisingly) done on the server. Let’s look at the differences between the
two.
Browser Caching
When you visit a website, you don’t just need to retrieve the
content of the page you’re seeing — you also need a bunch of resources such as
Javascript files, stylesheets, and fonts and so on, which your browser
downloads in addition to the content of the page.
Browser caching allows your browser to store these files for a
while, so it doesn’t need to retrieve them every time you visit the site.
Server Caching
This is a dedicated server acting as a storage for web
content, usually to have it available in a local area network. This serves to
make web browsing and other services that need to go out over the internet,
like software updates, faster because all of the usual data that used to be
fetched from the outside is made available within the local vicinity.
Instead of processing every request, the server takes the results
of these requests and stores them. It then serves these saved results instead —
making everything much faster.
WordPress
Caching:
Why important?
Caching plugins help
WordPress work more efficiently. By default, each time a page on your WordPress
website is accessed by a visitor, the content is generated dynamically with
lots going on in the background, including multiple database queries and code
executions. A caching plugin will create a static version of your content,
removing many of the steps that take place when a page is generated
dynamically. You need proper caching set up to improve your WordPress speed and
performance.
When it comes to page speed and load time, an
improvement of just a single second can have huge implications for your bottom
line. The result of this is faster loading times and happier visitors.
According to Kissmetrics, 40% of your visitors
will lose patience and leave your site if your pages take more than three
seconds to load. A single second of delay can reduce your conversions by 7%.
Faster websites are known for decreasing bounce rates since people are not
interested in waiting around for a page to load for 10 seconds.
It also puts less of a strain on your server.
This is very important when it comes to highly dynamic sites. It reduces the
load on your WordPress hosting servers and makes your website run faster.
Google uses page speed as a factor when
determining where to rank your content in its search engine results pages. So,
if you want greater search engine visibility and more traffic from sites like
Google, you need to speed up your website.
Caching is one of the easiest ways to lower your TTFB (Time To First Byte). In fact, caching typically reduces TTFB by up to 90%. TTFB is the amount of time it takes from when a client makes an HTTP request to it receiving its first byte of data from the webserver. This is an important aspect of website optimization since the faster the TTFB, the faster the requested resource can start being delivered to the browser.
Caching can also help reduce the load on your hosting server. This can save server memory and I/O operations. As a result, caching is fast becoming a vital feature, especially for folks with limited hosting plans. Save a substantial amount of the server’s resource consumption – very helpful for people who host their sites in shared hosting servers.
There are many ways to improve the speed of WordPress, one of the easiest options is to use a caching plugin.
Why should you care about your page speed?
When it comes to page speed, if your website takes more than 2 seconds to fully load, it can be a serious concern. A slow-loading website can cause significant loss – most website owners lose their loyal audience just because their website loading speed is not acceptable. Not only it will dramatically increase your bounce rate but also it affects your SERPs standing.
This correlation was recently backed up and supported by Google’s new PageSpeed industry benchmarks. They found that as page load times go up, the chance of someone bouncing from your site increases dramatically:
So in conclusion, a few extra seconds could have a huge impact on your ability to engage visitors and make sales. So focusing on page speed is paramount to having a successful company and a website that best converts.
The Best WordPress Caching Plugins
Before anything else, we need to stress out a very important rule: Never ever use more than one caching plugin. This will not make your site faster instead it’ll likely make your site a lot slower, and break it in the process.
Always use a single caching plugin. When configured
correctly, it’ll help speed up your site quite a lot.
Here’s a short list of the top WordPress caching plugins for you.
W3 Total Cache (Free)
Version: 0.9.7.5 | Active Installations: 1+ million | WordPress Version: 3.2 or higher
As one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress plugin library, W3 Total Cache is a common WordPress caching plugin.
The backend settings are often quite plentiful and difficult to understand. Although it includes all the features you will need, beginners will still find it confusing.
Features include page cache, object cache, gzip compression, limited minification support, CDN support, and more.
With over a million active installs, W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress. It improves your server performance by caching every aspect of your site and also offers content delivery network integrations.
WP Super Cache (Free)
Version: 1.6.8 | Active Installations: 2+ million | WordPress Version: 3.1 or higher
Anyway, WP Super Cache is free and open-source, with no upgrades needed after the installation.
It works efficiently by creating static HTML files and serving those files instead of the heavy WordPress PHP scripts. A benefit of going with WP Super Cache is that it offers three caching modes.
(a) Simple: This is the most recommended method of file caching because you don’t have to edit PHP files, plus the .htaccess file does not need to be configured. (b) Expert: This is the fastest caching method to serve super cached HTML files to users, but requires a modification of your .htaccess files. (c) WP Super Caching: This method is used to cache pages for known users (the ones who log into your site, leave comments, etc.). Though it’s the most flexible caching method, it’s slightly slower compared to other methods.
WP Rocket (Premium)
WP Rocket is the most popular premium caching plugin for WordPress.
The ease of configuration is what sets WP Rocket apart from its competition. Once you activate the plugin, page caching will immediately be activated in one-click.
It is the easiest and most beginner-friendly caching plugin, which is a big help if you don’t know the technical terms used for different caching options.
Its crawler automatically fetches your WordPress pages to build up the cache. The plugin then automatically turns on recommended WordPress caching settings like gzip compression, page cache, and cache pre-loading.
WP Fastest Cache (Free + Premium)
Version: 0.8.9.5 | Active Installations: 1+ million | WordPress Version: 3.3 or higher
WP Fastest Cache is similar to many other caching plugins, but with fewer customization options it’s easier for the average user to get to grips with. It’s updated often and has over 100,000 active installations.
The premium version of the plugin comes with a lot of unique features to increase your page speed, like image optimization, database cleanup, mobile caching, and a lot more.
Similar to WP Super Cache, WP Fastest Cache generates static HTML files based on your dynamic WordPress blog and saves it in the cache.
Provides an easy-to-install plugin. You don’t even have to modify the .htaccess configuration file.
Hyper Cache (Free)
Version: 3.3.9 | Active Installations: 30,000+ | WordPress Version: 3.9 or higher
The Hyper Cache plugin runs solely on PHP, so no complex configurations are required and you can run the plugin on any type of WordPress blog.
It’s also aware of mobile environments, so the caching still occurs when someone is looking at your site on a phone or tablet.
Comet Cache (Free + Premium)
Version: 170220 | Active Installations: 70,000+ | WordPress Version: 4.2 or higher
This plugin is fully “plug and play” – just install and activate, and you’re set.
Comet Cache is fairly easy to install and simple to move around the dashboard. However, it beats out the majority of the competition in the documentation department.
Comet Cache features a fast configuration and a reasonable backend for setting up your caching within minutes.
Cache Enabler (Free)
Version: 1.3.4 | Active Installations: 70,000+ | WordPress Version: 4.6 or higher
The disk caching engine is quite fast and reliable, while the WordPress multisite support is an advantage for those with networks of websites. This is a top-notch caching plugin without the price tag.
Cache Enabler is a lightweight caching plugin that creates a static HTML file of your site and serves them to the vast majority of your website visitors upon request. It needs minimal configuration and comes with all the important features you’ll ever need from a caching plugin.
Extensive documentation that helps you explore the different plugin features.
How to check the Cache Plugin’s effectiveness?
When assessing the effectiveness of any WordPress caching
plugin of your choice, it’s important that you are able to correctly measure and
check the page loading time of your website.
There are several tools available for this. These types of
tools work by just entering your websites URL into the tool and running the
test. Here are our best picks in testing your page speed:
Since page speed is an important ranking factor for SEO said by Google – to
help you improve your site’s speed, they have their very own speed testing
tool, Google Page Speed Insights, which measures the performance of a page for
mobile devices and desktop devices. The Page Speed Score ranges from 0 to 100
points. A higher score is better which indicates that the page is performing
well. The report page also gives you a useful breakdown of the steps you can
take to improve performance.
Another popular and the best-known speed analysis tool of all the Pingdom
alternatives. It is easy to use and beginners can pick it up quite fast. This
tool provides a comprehensive analysis by combining the performance and
recommendations provided by Google Page Speed Insights and YSlow. This is an
effective tool for all of your speed optimization needs.
This tool is best known for its free website speed testing tool. It has gained popularity over the years due to the fact that it is super easy to use, especially when compared to similar speed test tools. For beginners, Pingdom can be a great way to start. Also, what’s great about this tool is that you can test your website’s speed from different parts of the world by checking the content delivery network (CDN) for a better and effective web testing.
Run a free website speed test from multiple locations around the globe using real browsers (IE and Chrome) and at real consumer connection speeds. You can run simple tests or perform advanced testing including multi-step transactions, video capture, content blocking and much more. Your results will provide rich diagnostic information including resource loading waterfall charts, Page Speed optimization checks and suggestions for improvements.
Conclusion: Caching is essential for
Website Speed
It’s easy to test how different caching plugins affect the speed of your site using
a combination of GTmetrix, Pingdom, and Google PageSpeed Insights. Simply
install the plugins you are considering, then activate them one at a time,
configure them if needed, and run your website through the various testing
tools, taking note of the results.
When it comes to choosing a WordPress caching plugin for your site, there is no
“one size fits all” solution. If you’d like to choose the best free WordPress caching plugin that
does the job, then choose either W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. Both of them
are constantly being updated and are used by over a million websites. If you
need a premium WordPress caching
solution that offers tremendous support and requires minimal configuration on
your end, choose WP Rocket.
Just remember that when caching wordpress is implemented properly, it can
reduce the load time
of your WordPress site which can further contribute to SEO rankings and deliver
a better user experience.
Please tell us which WordPress Caching
Plugin you are currently using and why you think it’s the best choice in
the comments below.
WordPress today powers 30% of the world’s websites and leading eCommerce software such as WooCommerce are actually WordPress plugins which have proven that WordPress is much more than just a blogging solution.
When you are considering setting up a multi-vendor digital product marketplace you might want to consider using Easy Digital Downloads (EDD). EDD is the leading WordPress solution which is specialized in selling digital products and offers a marketplace extension as well. Unlike WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads does not come with any in-built legacy made for shipping physical products, instead, it is truly optimized in selling digital products. In this article, we will outline how to set up a multi-vendor marketplace platform in WordPress with Easy Digital Downloads.
If you are interested in more information, please download our Free eBook on How to Build a digital product marketplace on WordPress which contains even more comprehensive and detailed information on how to set up a multi-vendor marketplace for digital products.
Why create a Digital Product Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform?
Sales for online marketplaces are expected to greatly double from $18.7 billion in 2017 to $40.1 billion in 2022 (MCFADYEN based on eMarketers). During the May 2018 survey made by Statista, 50 percent of global shoppers stated that they preferred to make first-time purchases at a retailer, whereas 47 percent of repeat buyers preferred online marketplaces. As per Statista, two of the top three reasons for purchasing at a marketplace instead of a retailer were more competitive prices and a broader selection of products available. Also 38% of all online shoppers in 2017 ordered from abroad.
Number of
Digital Buyers Worldwide, Source: Smartinsights 2017 based on eMarketer
First of all, why should your first choice be is to sell a digital product and not a physical product in your marketplace? The three main reasons are:
(1) No inventory required
(2) No shipping and handling problems
(3) Easier to sell worldwide
When selling digital products, a creator will
have the choice to either sell his digital products on his own website or using
a digital product marketplace. Below are the arguments why it can be a good
idea to start a multi-vendor
marketplace platform
rather than a single vendor store:
Selling a digital product is easier than selling a physical product
Buyers prefer choice and larger product inventories
Same launch costs as single-vendor websites
Low fixed costs enhancing chances of achieving break-even early on
Scalable business models with benefits in obtaining traffic (e.g. SEO and Social Media)
Types of digital eCommerce, Source: Pluginsandsnippets.com
Best is to start a digital product marketplace
only in a niche you are very familiar with as this will save you time and it
allows you to find solutions to problems quicker than when you know nothing
about an industry. Some people also say you need a large amount of passion. We
think it cannot hurt and will only help you if you actually care about the
products you will sell in your digital product marketplace.
Before starting a WordPress Marketplace – Market Research
Conducting market research is the very first
step we must work on and do before even building and starting our Digital
Product WordPress
marketplace. It is important to first conduct thorough market research
and study the essential factors which can affect and contribute to the success
of the business plan when starting a digital product marketplace.
Illustrative example competitor analysis, Source: www.pluginsandsnippets.com
An effective way
to conduct a market study is by starting with the closest competitors of your digital product
marketplace idea. Try to especially focus on the top 5 or 10 competitors
and thoroughly research their profiles to understand what and how they are
doing and where the market gap for a new digital product WordPress
marketplace might be. When analyzing competitors, try to analyze the
following:
What do they sell?
Number of Vendors / Products
Price ranges of their products
Alexa Rankings
Followers on social media
Sources of traffic
Strengths and weaknesses
Reviewing the strengths and weaknesses of
competitors should not only be in terms of how good their website appears but
more in terms of how good their business model is. Is this a marketplace
platform you believe can attract the interest of customers and vendors? If yes,
why? What do they do well? Which points they seem to neglect or where do they
show weaknesses? There might be an untapped opportunity where the market is not
served?
Doing this analysis properly will give you
more information about the marketing strategies and tactics of each of the
competitors and you will quickly figure out where there might be an untapped
opportunity in the market that deserves to be serviced by your new digital
product WordPress
marketplace.
SEO can offer a cost-effective long-term
marketing strategy for marketplaces since there is a lot of content placed
there. Therefore you will need to do keyword research which is the process of
finding and analyzing actual keywords entered in search engines. The objective
of the keyword research will be to figure out which keywords would be easy to
rank within our market niche, have decent traffic search volumes and show only
a low level of competition.
Another topic to research and check are
commission rates charged to vendors by similar digital product marketplaces. Standard commission fees for digital product marketplaces are somewhere between 10% and 30%. So
before deciding what it will be, please check first how many potential
competitors are charging to their vendors and see that your fees are in line
with the market terms for your market segment.
Setting up a Digital Product Marketplace
Just like in starting a simple Digital
Downloads eCommerce WordPress Website, the very first thing to do is to choose
your Domain Name URL and a Web Hosting Provider.
The Domain Name URL is the internet address
where Internet users can access your website. Registering domains will cost
from $10 per year upward, depending on the registrar and top-level domain
(TLD).
The next task will then be to select a
suitable web hosting provider that will host your website. You can choose
between a shared and a private server. If you have plans to make your website
large, you might be better off starting with a private server as otherwise, you
will have to move your website away from a shared account as soon as you get
more traffic.
As mentioned initially, you will need to install Easy Digital Downloads which is the leading solution in WordPress and fully specialized to sell digital products online.
Installing a Multi-Vendor Marketplace WordPress Theme
The next step will be to install a WordPress Theme for your new marketplace platform. There are numerous free and paid themes available which are covered in a previous article and summarized here:
What you need to watch out for is to install a theme that supports the Frontend Submissions (FES) plugin in EDD. In case your chosen theme would not support FES, you can still install the theme but then you will have to manually develop designs for frontend vendor pages which is costly and time-consuming to do. Therefore, better use a standard theme which already supports FES, to begin with.
Please note, the theme just needs to serve the
purpose to get you off the ground. You will have to rework your website many
times during the operations of your digital product WordPress marketplace.
We just need a theme to start with, makes your marketplace presentable and
helps us to attract first customers and vendors.
Frontend Submissions provides a full-featured front-end package to turn your Easy Digital Downloads powered website into a complete multi-vendor marketplace. It allows you to accept download submissions from third-party authors or vendors and allows them to list their products in your Easy Digital Downloads marketplace website.
By using the FES plugin on top of your EDD
plugin, you can build a store where vendors and creators can sign up, list
their products for sale, and manage their own accounts, all from within your WordPress marketplace platform.
For a multi-vendor digital product store, FES is the key marketplace
plugin for WordPress to use.
Commissions– An Essential Marketplace Plugin for WordPress
Commissions Plugin
The Commissions extension is what you need to administer the revenue split between your platform and third-party vendors automatically. The way it works is that you need to define the percentage of sales (the commission) your third-party vendors get on every product sale. For digital product marketplaces, commission rates should lie between 10% – 30% which will form your fee income.
The Commissions add-on is often paired with Frontend
Submissions, but it can also work perfectly on its own. Commissions can be paid
to any WordPress user at either a flat rate or a percentage of sales. It’s a
key component for any Marketplace plugin in WordPress and Easy
Digital Downloads.
Our PayPal Adaptive Payments, same as FES, the main marketplace plugin for WordPress, is a key WordPress plugin to use, as it automatically splits payments received between you and third-party vendors. This way, it avoids a lot of administrative work as the payment of third-party revenue can be done instantly and it saves significant time. This marketplace plugin for WordPress is a tested and true time-saver for all multi-vendor Easy Digital Downloads stores.
The plugin connects Easy Digital Downloads to the versatile Adaptive Payments gateway. With this gateway integration, you can easily split payments with up to 6 different receivers at the same time. You can set each receiver up with a specific percentage of the payment within the settings for this gateway. Also, you can determine whether you would like to use chained or parallel payments.
We do really like to recommend you to use this plugin and benefit from its very helpful and straightforward features. We have customers who spent a lot of time executing payments to vendors manually every month and is simply a lot of work which you do not need to do if you have an automated solution. PayPal Adaptive Payment Gateway is not actively promoted anymore by PayPal and you will need approval from PayPal before you can implement it. Nevertheless, we recommend using it as it saves a lot of time and as far as we are aware PayPal still accepts new users into its program.
The Reviews plugin from Easy Digital Downloads makes it quick and easy for your visitors and customers to review the products offered on your website and for leaving a rating. Reviews are a sign of engagement and trust, therefore installing such a marketplace plugin WordPress extension is a must.
After you have successfully set up your digital product
marketplace and installed the specific EDD WordPress plugins, the next
essential step to take is to be able to fill up your catalog with products, but
how? The answer is, we first need vendors to get on board with us. It wouldn’t
be a marketplace if there were no vendors. This means we will have to source our
first vendors who will contribute the digital products for sale on our
marketplace.
From where can you obtain first vendors
willing to sell their products with you? Based on our experience, vendors are
normally sourced from the following sources when starting a new digital product marketplace:
Creating your own products
Partner with vendors you know personally
Reaching out to potential new interested vendors.
Read our eBook for more insights on each source
of vendors.
Marketing Strategies for Digital Product Marketplaces
Once your WordPress marketplace has been
launched, promoting your digital product marketplace is important for
gaining the attention of future customers and prospective vendors. The process
of selling and promoting digital products is quite similar compared to how you
would sell and promote physical products on any eCommerce website.
Now, if you are looking for ways to effectively
market your digital
product marketplace, here are the strategies that should be tested.
Social Media Marketing
Social media refers to websites and
applications that allow users to create and share content as well as
participate in social networking with other users. Different Social Media
Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and many other remains
a very great way to establish your brand and build an audience.
Keep in mind, depending on your target market,
there will be different social networks of relevance. E.g. management
professionals you most likely find on LinkedIn, developers there are many on
Twitter and Youtube, etc. Try to figure out which social media networks your
target audience is most active and these should be the social media channels to
focus on.
Social media marketing is an art by itself and
there are many techniques and tricks to be mastered. Most important we find is
to post regularly. For this, you can use a service such as Buffer which allows
you to put your posts in a queue so that you won’t forget to post at least once
per day.
Normally, the tasks are to review your posts,
compared to your competitors, research and learn what can be improved and
implement it. The key performance indicators (KPIs) normally are engagement
received, number of followers, retweets/reposts, shares, clicks which drive traffic
to your website. This all needs to be monitored on a regular basis. So be
prepared for a steep learning curve and lots of trial and error until you know
how to master social media marketing for your digital product WordPress
marketplace.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the
process of optimizing your website to be found by search engines. The objective
is to rank on the first page such as Google, Bing or Yahoo when somebody enters
a keyword in the search bar. The result will be that you will be getting free
traffic from organic search results via the search engines as you will improve
your website position in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
There are two sides to any successful SEO
approach SEO has two techniques to improve website position, On-Page SEO and
Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO
This refers to all the optimization tasks that
we do on our websites such as optimization of text titles, meta descriptions,
page titles, contents, image optimization by adding alt tags and descriptions,
checking keyword density in text, internal linking, creating sitemaps, ease
navigation, reducing page load times and many more tasks.
Overall, the on-page technique aims to
structure and present your website in a search engine friendly manner. This is
a very important task and to be done before even thinking about working on
Off-page SEO link building.
Off-Page SEO (Backlink Building)
This refers to all the activity that happens away from your website to raise your site’s rankings by building quality back-links. Building quality backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO. Search engines use backlinks as an indication of the linked-to content quality, so a site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank better than an otherwise equal site with fewer backlinks. Below find some strategies you can use to obtain backlinks for your digital product WordPress marketplace:
Participating in Forum Discussions
Blogger Outreach
Guest Blogging
Press Releases
These are just some of the techniques which
can be used to build backlinks. Feel free to talk with an SEO agency, they
normally can provide you with additional options where to place backlinks and
can also help you work on that.
Email Marketing
An email marketing list can become a very
effective tool for communicating with your audience on a regular basis.
The first step in setting up your email marketing program is to install an onboarding process. Mostly this can be done by adding a subscription form at the checkout page to stay updated on news and product updates (e.g. install the Mailchimp extension). Another way is to add a widget or a popup window with subscription suggestions on your website.
Email newsletters should be sent on a regular
basis (e.g. monthly) but also not overdoing it as otherwise unsubscribe rates
will become high. For digital product marketplaces here, some ideas what
to put in your newsletters:
Present new products
Summarize new blog posts or research articles you have written
Present select vendor achievements or story
Present customer showcases and how your marketplace could help them
Introduce new features of your marketplace
Ask for user opinions on topics of interest
Only by tracking and comparing your newsletter
results you can figure out how to make your email marketing campaign more
effective and which changes lead to best results among your audience.
Now that we have successfully set up our multi-vendor marketplace platform and, have started
with marketing and vendor onboarding, we need to focus now our attention on the
operations of our digital product marketplace.
There are actually a lot of different elements
that we need to keep on our radar, constantly observe and work on in order to
enhance and improve our WordPress marketplace.
Sales Optimization
Normally the main goal of your digital
product’s marketplace will be to maximize sales and profits over the long-run.
In eCommerce we have 4 factors which determine your revenues as shown in the
following graphic:
This means you can maximize revenues of your digital product
marketplace when you seek to maximize each of the 4 revenue drivers:
Number of Visitors – See previously mentioned marketing strategies which will be needed to attract and grow the number of visitors
Conversion Rates – You will need to work on your website to best convert visitors into paying customers
Number of Orders per Customers – The more times your customers return and purchase from you, the higher your sales will be
Average Order Value(AOV) – Mostly depends on the price point of your products, how your products are packaged and how easy/difficult it is to sell them.
As for any eCommerce website you will need to
work on improving each of these four factors in order to max out your full sales
potential.
Vendor Management
Running a successful digital product multi-vendor marketplace platform means
keeping an eye on multiple vendors. Vendors come to your store with their own
ideas, expectations, and ways of doing things. You have to gather these
different vendors under one umbrella.
Your job as a store manager is to help vendors
sell as much as possible as easily as possible, while still retaining the
ability to make important decisions about your store. This means making vendors
happy while making yourself happy as the store manager.
Most digital product marketplaces will opt for curating all products they
receive from vendors for the following reasons:
Avoiding harm: Digital products are subject to
harmful code additions that might not be detectable by normal users. The worst
that could happen is that any form of digital code or program harms customer’s
computers. Therefore, it is important to review each product and know the
vendors you work with as otherwise, the risk may get too high.
Avoiding chargebacks: In the case of product
descriptions that would not be accurate, they will have a good chance of
requesting chargebacks as payment gateway providers will have the last say in
such cases. It is therefore in the best interest of the marketplace operator to
ensure product descriptions are accurate to avoid problems later on. Especially
products listed from new vendors will require a careful review.
Establishing a personal relationship with your Vendors: A product curation process will also establish a more personal relationship with your vendors. As the operator of a multi-vendor marketplace platform, your vendors are not simply your sellers but rather they are your business partners. It is very important to establish a good personal relationship with them. Why not use product curation as one way to do this? Especially smaller niche marketplaces have an advantage here as they can afford to deal with their vendors on a 1:1 basis.
It is very rare to see a digital product
marketplace that would not use a curation process to ensure a
high-quality of products are listed in its marketplace. However, we are still
checking for best practices on how to do this. Let us know if you know any good
example which should be listed here.
Monitoring How Vendors are Doing
As the operator of your marketplace, you don’t
simply source vendors and let them be on their own selling digital products on
your website. It is very important to also monitor how your vendors are doing.
You should, therefore, run different reports from time to time to benchmark and
compare your vendors to find out what works, what doesn’t and what are the best
practices that might help all the vendors to sell more.
If you find vendors who are
underperforming, first, check vendor profiles if all necessary information is
present in so that they will have a well-established identity that your
customers may see and observe.
The next step is to check their
product listings. Are the product descriptions accurate and are the products
well presented? In case of problems, does the problem lie with the seller or
with your processes? Is it easy to list products? Are there enough information
fields to completely present the products?
You might as well enhance and
optimize your website’s navigation and experience which would definitely help
your vendors get a sale.
Promote your Vendors on Social Media and your Blog
Advertising and promoting your vendors, along
with their products, in different Social Media Channels such as Facebook and
Twitter can be a good way to get visitors and help your vendors with marketing
their products. Remember, if your vendors earn, you earn, so it’s in your best
interest to help them market their products.
As part of your digital marketplace marketing
campaign, writing blog posts about vendor products can help you to create
additional content for your web page and offer your vendors another platform to
market their products. However, make sure the articles to be published comply
with the required quality standards you need to maintain for your blog.
Providing Vendor Resources
Working with vendors and helping them to
market their products will become an ongoing task. As such you will need a
process to help your vendors. In the beginning, vendors will have a lot of
questions as they will need to understand how to work with your digital product
WordPress
market place and what they will have to do to earn money.
Therefore, in order to anticipate their
questions, it is advisable to follow a pro-active approach. One way to do this
is to send out a series of education emails to new vendors upon sign-up. The
objective is to help vendors to complete their product listings and then in a
second step motivate them to list more quality products on your digital product
marketplace.
Building a Team
We all know that running a digital product WordPress
Marketplace is tough. When you’re starting out with your business, you
will have to do all the tasks required. From running and managing your
marketplace like updating and creating products, managing vendors, paying
commissions, sourcing more vendors, managing promotions, customer support,
handling social media accounts, SEO Management – the list of To-Dos is endless.
However, as a business owner, it’s better to spend your time doing what you do best – running and growing your company. But that’s not to say the routine tasks and administrative duties aren’t important because they absolutely are. Depending on your budget, you will have to consider hiring people. Normally you want to hire employees in a lean manner. So apart from hiring employees, you have the following alternatives to hire:
When your marketplace is very new you don’t
want to incur big costs at the beginning and first test out if there are demand
and interest in the products. Therefore, you should consider outsourcing tasks
first to freelancers then to virtual assistants until your marketplace produces
stable revenues and profits so that you can afford to hire employees.
Tasks you can Outsource
It is important to know what tasks you should
outsource before you start building your team – including freelancers and
virtual assistants who you can work with on a more permanent basis. When
considering to outsource tasks, look for manual, time-consuming work or tasks
that are repetitive, can be thought to others and where you are better off
using help rather than when having to spend the time yourself.
Here are some daily tasks you should consider
delegating:
Customer service: Answering emails
and phone calls from customers.
Social Media Management: Creating
content, responding to comments, and other community management tasks.
Store management: Reviewing product
descriptions, managing vendors, tracking KPIs
SEO: Off-page link-building
Technical operations: Website
maintenance, SEO management, and other administrative tasks.
Data-entry: Bookkeeping or
inputting data from different sources into a spreadsheet.
Etc.
Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
If you want to know how your digital product
marketplace is doing, you need to keep track of your Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs). This is an important step to take to ensure that you are not
going off track.
Example dashboard of tracking KPIs
A key performance indicator – also known as
“KPI” is a performance measurement that impacts the result of your online
store. KPIs need to improve and achieving your objectives will provide
important milestones on your road to online success. Monitoring important KPIs
for your online store tells you whether your business is moving towards meeting
your objectives or not.
Essential KPIs you should track
KPIs for digital product marketplaces are numerous to track but important is to
focus on those where any change will impact the financial result of your
business. Tracking should be done at least on a monthly basis or even on a
weekly basis. The advantage of doing a weekly tracking is that you will find
out sooner in case of any problems and have more time to take action. If you
wait until the month-end, you might find out that too late that were problems
and it leaves money on the table.
We present a selection of KPIs which will be
useful to consider tracking on a regular basis for a digital product marketplace.
They are:
Website
Traffic (Number of Visitors)
Website Traffic
Average Time on Site
Domain and Page Authority
Alexa Ranking
Social Media Followers
Conversion
Rates
Conversion from Visitor to User
Conversion from User to Paying Customer (Free to Paid product)
Cart Abandonment Rate
New Customer Signups
Email list subscribers
Number of orders
Average
Order Values
Number of products
Average Order Value
Measuring KPIs on a regular basis is an
important step towards professionally managing your digital products marketplace
and finding the areas where you can still improve in order to achieve your
business goals. To really grow your multi-vendor marketplace, you need to monitor
your webstore’s performance on an ongoing basis and take actions every time
KPIs, move in the wrong direction. Once you’ve decided which KPIs you want to
track, make it a part of your weekly and/or monthly routine to follow them
closely.
Automating and Improving Processes
At the beginning of your website, tasks are
fine to deal with as they come up. But as you grow, these tasks get more and
more frequent, and the demand on your time and your team’s time becomes even
greater. After a while, these small tasks can significantly eat into
productivity; reducing output, creativity, and even profit margins.
You will be confronted with seeking new ways
to automate and improve your processes as your digital product marketplaces scale up and become larger. The objective
is to save time, money, and sell more. Ultimately, it provides gets your
business ready to scale-up exponentially. Automations include mostly:
Automating tasks and improving processes is an
ongoing task and there will be many more ways to save time and benefit from
automated solutions and improved processing. Obtaining a sufficient level of
automation is key to fully scale-up your digital product marketplace to
reach its full potential.
Website Security
Another important element that most eCommerce
companies need to consider from the very beginning is the eCommerce website
security. If you run an eCommerce website, you’ll know that they are a major
target for hackers, fraudsters and yes, even for your own competitors. Just
think about the thousands of user IDs, personal information, product catalog
and prices, financial information including credit card details a typical
eCommerce webstore has. That’s what makes eCommerce sites, big and small, so
attractive to cybercriminals to exploit and competitors to leverage on.
As your multi-vendor
marketplace platform becomes larger you will also find that you
will have to spend more time in making your infrastructure more solid and
enhance the security of your marketplace. Here are some basic measures you will
have to implement to keep your digital product marketplace save (among many
others):
HTTPS / SSL – today Google views it as an
outdated practice to use HTTP and punishes websites still using the old HTTP
protocol. Therefore, implementing a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate from
the start is a must. You can purchase one from your hosting company or a
reputable SSL vendor at affordable costs.
Complex Passwords – Insist that every user
have to use passwords that comply with a minimum standard.
Payment Gateway Security – While it may make
processing payments more convenient, having credit card numbers stored on your
database is a liability. In order to save your business from this terrible
fate, you should never store credit card information on your servers and ensure
your payment gateways security is not at risk. Today you can easily use
third-party payment processing providers such as PayPal or Stripe who will
manage all sensitive Credit Card information in a professional manner.
Firewalls – using firewall plugins and also
configuring your server firewall is a must to protect again malicious attacks.
Backup your data – Data loss due to hardware malfunction or cyber-attacks are not uncommon. And if you don’t back up your data regularly, you are at the risk of losing it for good. Employ automatic daily backup service so that even if you forget to do it manually, all your data will be backed up automatically minimum once a day.
These are just a few elements to mention and
to work on. As your digital product
marketplace becomes bigger, paying close attention to security becomes
even more important.
Conclusion: Building a Digital Product Multi-Vendor Marketplace Platform is a
Journey, not a Destination
Building a digital marketplace is a good idea
as today the trend goes towards creating specialized niche marketplaces that
can offer better know-how and a much more focused approach than a generalist
marketplace. Many buyers prefer to buy from a marketplace rather than a single
vendor store.
Easy Digital Downloads offers an open-source solution to run a digital product marketplace on WordPress by installing select marketplace plugins for WordPress. These are either freely available or are very reasonably priced. Also, many useful plugins are available on the WordPress plugin directory.
The marketing tactics require a bit a
different focus for a multi-vendor
marketplace platform
compared to a single vendor store. SEO and Social Media Marketing are two
important strategies to focus on, especially as traffic there is cheap in the
long-run compared to other sources of traffic.
Vendor management and tracking your Key
Performance Indicators are a must in establishing a successful digital product marketplace.
Activities and tracking of KPIs should focus on factors which will influence
users and revenues later on.
Ongoing work will be required and normally
only by keep testing and optimizing your WordPress marketplace you can exactly understand
how your marketplace business works and how to make it a success. Creating a digital product marketplace is not a
destination but one of the most interesting journeys in eCommerce. Feel free to
take it.
This article provides an overview of how to build, set up and operate your digital product marketplace in WordPress. If you are interested in more details, please download our Free eBook on How to Build a Digital Product Marketplace on WordPress which contains even more comprehensive and detailed information on how to set up a multi-vendor marketplace platform for digital products.
For any feedback or comments feel free to reach out to us as we are also interested in your input digital product marketplaces can be made even better.
Let’s say that your eCommerce webstore is all set and running. Your webstore’s design and the theme are perfect, you are offering a variety of good products, your content is also very informative and compelling, and it really looks like you’re doing well. But, do you? Are you confident that your webstore is doing well? Any guarantee that a handful of audiences are visiting your page? Is it enough to optimize sales conversions?
You may want to ask these kinds of things to yourself before settling with your current situation. You have to make sure that the efforts you exerted upon building that perfect eCommerce store of yours won’t just go into waste.
In this article, we’ll teach you how to build the most SEO
friendly landing page for your webstore.
Search engine
optimization refers to the process of editing a web page’s elements to make
it more likely that your page shows up in search engine results when someone
types in a relevant query. It is also the process of getting traffic from the free
and organic search results on search engines.
Major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other web contents are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.
You may want to avail of the paid search ads, which enables your webpage to display at the very top of the Search Engine Results Pages or most commonly known as SERP. These are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a searcher.
But, if you think that paying for search ads isn’t yet the perfect
time for you, there are some best practices you can follow to make it more
likely that your landing page will pop up there – by driving organic traffics
to your page.
What is Landing Page Optimization?
Landing page
optimization refers to the process of enhancing or improving each element
on your landing page to attract traffic from search engines.
Your webstore’s landing page is the first page that site
visitors arrive on. It might be a home page, marketing page, blog post or any
other type of webpage. One essential part of a successful landing page that
many people forget about: targeted
traffic.
When you optimize your webstore’s landing page according to SEO best practices, depending on how well you optimize your page, it can drive more traffic of people to your page who are specifically in need of reading your content and your services. Without anyone to land on your landing page, it serves absolutely no use on even starting your eCommerce store. We need the right traffic to direct people in visiting your webstore. That is now where the magic of SEO happens.
How to create an SEO-friendly Landing Page
If you want to improve your website conversion rates,
approach landing page optimization using best practices and strong data are
your best options. Making a few tweaks can have a big impact on your results.
When building your next landing page, consider the following tips and best
practices as an SEO landing page template.
Determine your keywords
The first step of SEO is by conducting a Keyword Analysis. A keyword analysis is the process of analyzing the keywords or search phrases that bring visitors to your website through organic and paid search. As such, keyword analysis is the starting point and cornerstone of search marketing campaigns. The purpose is to understand the volume, competition and expected results of the keywords that you plan to use for SEO.
Best Keyword Research Tools
Fortunately, there are many tools available that can help you figure out which keywords work best for your overall web strategy. With these, you’ll be able to:
Determine the best keywords based on your industry type and potential customers.
Create a content compilation that’s based on related long-tail keywords.
Know more about your competitors and their keywords standing.
Know which keywords on your targeted list have the highest search volume.
Ubersuggest (Free to Use) – a Google Suggest scraper which is useful as a way to find a ton of Keywords at once and then sees if they’re worth targeting or not.
SEOlium – is a Professional Google Keyword Rank Tracker and they offer a generous free plan. They have a feature to easily import keywords from Google Search Console which makes it easy to start with Keyword Tracking.
Rankactive – is also a professional keyword rank tracker, their specialty is to track large volumes of keywords across different search engines.
SEMrush (14-Day Free Trial, worth $199) – best tool in checking your competitor’s SEO ranking but it’s just very expensive. This shows you keywords that your competition already ranks for, which you can later on use.
Serpstat – is an SEO software suite with tools for content, link building, and more. It has a Competitors Graph that lets you visualize the sites that are competing for a given keyword.
Ahrefs – is one of the most popular keyword tools out there. It gives you super in-depth information on each keyword.
Moz – find those keywords that will generate the most traffic. This tool also works very smartly as it gives you suggestions that you cannot usually find elsewhere.
Soovle – gives you suggested keyword ideas from Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon and more – all in one place.
Google Keyword Planner – one of the most used and popular keyword research tools out there. The only reason for it being so popular is it’s free and is directly integrated with Google AdWords.
Keyword Tool.io – you’ll get tons of targeted keyword ideas and suggestions from here.
KWFinder – is completely dedicated to Keyword research only. Also one of the fastest-growing SEO tool company.
Long Tail Pro – is a paid keyword research tool that will help you find amazing keywords for your niche/micro-niche sites.
If you have been using the Google Keyword Planner tool for a
while, you have a good basis for getting started with any of the paid and
professional tools listed here. Take a
look at some of these tools and decide which works best for your business
strategy.
Conducting Keyword Analysis
Before you even start to optimize your landing page, you
should first know which keywords you are going to target. By keywords, we
understand that you might think of single words such as “eCommerce” as well as
short phrases like “digital products”, but you might also want to make use of
long-tailed keywords instead.
A long-tail keyword is a keyword phrase that contains at least three words. It is used to target niche demographics rather than mass audiences. In other words, they’re more specific and often less competitive than generic keyword terms. Some examples are “eCommerce store selling digital products” or “optimize landing page effectively.”
We may ask ourselves the following questions when analyzing
keywords:
How are potential visitors searching for your content, product or service?
What do people search for when they want a product or service like mine?
How do you rank against your competition for different keywords?
After finding out the answers to those questions above, we can now proceed with creating a list of keywords based on how people search for your product or service. Once you have your keyword list, analyze how your competitors are ranking for each keyword versus how your landing pages perform. We can use the suggested keywords research tools provided above to get all necessary and relevant data in optimizing your landing page such as suggested keywords, search volumes or monthly traffic, Cost-Per-Clicks (CPC), rank among competitors, keyword difficulty and many others. These data are very useful in deciding the best keywords to add to your landing page.
This can be a very long and drawn-out process. But as with anything, the more research you do, the better prepared you’ll be.
SEO Landing Page Optimization
Once you’ve determined your target keywords, you’re going to
want to place them strategically on your landing page. The next step is to
incorporate those keywords throughout your landing page. This is called page optimization.
The main keywords should be included in your:
Site URL – If you wanted your website to have SEO friendly URLs, simply make sure you
have proper keywords in it and separate each word by dashes.
Headers –
The title and subtitle of your page, as well as any other headers within your
landing page, should include the important and exact keyword phrase that you
are aiming for. In HTML, title tags are arranged in a hierarchy from H1 to H6.
Your page should have only one H1 tag and it should be your main headline. If
you’re going to have subheadings under that H1, use H2s and so on and so forth.
Body text – This should contain as many as possible from your targeted keywords list. But remember, instead of mindlessly adding the keyword multiple times, it is important that the text still has to look natural, easy to understand, and provides value to the reader. Don’t try to stuff as many keywords as possible just for the sake of it.
Images (Alt text) – It is very important to add a text description (alt-text) to images, which makes them readable for search engines. Think of a unique name for each image that would contain keywords from your analysis and description of the image. An image title containing your keywords will help improve ranking (separate words by dashes, not underscores, too).
Meta
Description – This is the text that appears firsthand on the SERP. It is also
a more detailed explanation of your landing page. This is an opportunity to attract
people on visiting your page by describing the value you provide, why you are
better than your competitors, and why they should go to your page. Meta
description length should be up to 160 symbols and must include your exact
keyword phrase just like you would in any other sections of your page.
Using the right keywords will help search engines see what
your landing page is all about, and will draw targeted traffic which most
especially those with intentions to make a purchase right to your landing page.
Create best contents
An important thing to observe in creating your page contents is that it must be well researched and full of valuable information — which attracts more readers, more shares, and more clicks. All of these lets Google know that your page deserves a rankings bump.
Also, having a content page focused on a more defined
subject niche, you can better develop the content towards customers interested
in specific and related niche topics. We also need to focus on a specific topic
area, therefore we can throw in more keyworded headings, keyworded text, and
keyworded links within that keyword category.
Traditionally, we’ve heard that search engines favor long content over short, but there’s no conclusive evidence that only increasing word count will boost your SERP position. So with your landing pages, don’t obsess over length. An important thing to remember here is to stress quality over quantity and Google will surely recognize your page.
Secure Off-Page Backlinks
Backlinks (links to your landing page from other websites) is one of the most important off-site ranking factors search engines use. If we attain to rank high in major search engines, at some point we need to apply a link development campaign. Getting people to link your page on their own websites is still the number one way to boost search engine rankings organically – it’s like they are vouching for you.
A combination of great content and targeted outreach is a proven and true method of building links. Important thing is to create your own content – the more original, well-researched, and valuable your content is, the better it’ll be vulnerable to getting some backlinks.
Conduct research on some influencers in your industry.
We can also start small by researching for some bloggers in the same field that
would be interested to promote your page. Getting in contact with the right
people and offering some sort of exchange is a great way to generate new
backlinks to your landing page. Also, we can make use of referrals from friends
to let people, who would find your content relevant, visit your website.
Add some fun social share buttons and get people to share your landing page online, which is also a good method of getting direct backlinks. Adding social sharing buttons to your landing page will make it more SEO friendly. By encouraging people to share your page on their social media channels, you will improve the number of quality links you receive.
Other niche websites that may find your content
useful or even share your content in forums or blog posts in relevant
discussions.
There so many different tactics you can utilize depending on your content and business. Like getting new backlinks will help your landing page rank better and is a great way to spread the word!
Tracking Actual Results
Don’t forget to track your results for further improvements.
The last and an important step we should always do in landing page optimization for search engines is to track your results. If you don’t measure performance, you’ll never know if it is properly optimized or not. The most important things to track are your organic traffic and click-through rates. You can track these metrics using free tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Remember, there is no exact formula for success. A lot
depends on your messaging and the behavior of your potential visitors. As you
always track results and optimize, you will learn more about your audience and
improve results over time.
Conclusion: The perfectly optimized landing page
The above methods may actually take some time and effort, but we guarantee that they are absolutely worthwhile to do. Give it a shot and you will see how simply you can optimize your page onto different search engines. Making sure that your landing pages convert as well as rank for SEO is a recipe for true success. Now, you already know some very important steps to make your landing page SEO-friendly. Don’t wait for any second and get started!
