If you are reading this article, chances are you already understand the importance of having a strong digital presence to drive the growth of your business. In today’s digital age, having an online presence is essential for businesses of all sizes. But simply having a website isn’t enough – you need to take steps to drive traffic and generate sales. This is where most business owners get stuck. With so many channels and solutions available today to drive sales and customer acquisition online, how do you select the right one for your business to ensure you achieve your sales goals for 2023?

In this article, we share 7 tips for boosting sales on your website in 2023. These are actionable tools that will help you meet your business sales goals for 2023 and beyond:

1. Improve your website’s speed and user experience
2. Optimise your product and service pages
3. Invest in Paid advertising
4. Invest in SEO
5. Use social media to connect with your customers
6. Utilise Email marketing
7. Data Flow Analysis: Measure and Optimise what works

Let’s dig into each of these to learn how you can use them to achieve your sales goals for 2023.

1 – Improve your website speed and user experience:

Website speed is the ultimate first impression. No matter how good your website looks or how attractive your offering might be. If users do not stay long enough to engage with your website, you will be losing potential customers by the day. Stats show that up to 90% of users leave a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load leading to a high bounce rate. I am sure you have had the same experience of leaving a website when it is slow to load.

In view of this, your first task when it comes to optimising the user experience on your website is to ensure that it loads very quickly. Work with your web agency to run a technical analysis on your website to check if it loads optimally. If there are issues identified, they could help you fix them to ensure that your website loads super fast.

Once the speed issue is fixed, the next step is to make sure your website is easy to navigate and provides a seamless experience for users. This can help increase the likelihood that visitors will stay on your site longer and ultimately inquire about your services or buy a product. Put yourself in the user’s frame and experience the complete user journey from when a customer lands on your website to when they take an action to get in touch or buy your product. Can a user quickly understand what you offer and how they can procure your service? Can they order your product seamlessly in a few seconds without filling out long forms? An ideal target is 5 seconds. Can a user understand your product or service and start an ordering process within 5 seconds?

2 – Optimise your product and service pages:

this follows on from the first point we discussed. Once you have optimised your landing page, the user should very quickly be able to navigate to a product or service page. Once they land on the product or service page. How is the experience?

For products:

• make sure your product pages include high-quality images,
• detailed descriptions, and
• clear call to action button to encourage visitors to make a purchase. E.g., “Order Now”, “Buy Now”

For services:

• include a short description of the services
• benefits or results from the service
• include social proof or reviews from customers who have used the service before.
• Clear call to action button for subscribing to the service. e.g., “Book Appointment”, “Subscribe Now”, “Book Now”

3 – Invest in paid advertising: 

There is no question about the clutter we have online today. The online space offers a borderless environment where your competition could be anywhere on the globe. Whether you are offering a product or a service, chances are there are several options that pop up when potential customers look for your offering. To increase your online visibility, you need to precisely target paid campaigns. These could be paid Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Paid Social Media Marketing( SEM).

• SEM: helps you target customers based on their search activity in search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. We’d recommend focusing on Google as a huge proportion of all searches happen on google still, up to 96% by some estimates.Google Ad Networks offers tools to help you target users by their behaviour online. These include Affinity audiences, In-market audiences, custom audiences, etc. You can also target customers by geographic and demographic indicators like country, city, a district with a city, age, gender, income, etc. the benefit of search engine marketing is that it is an active marketing tool. This means that it enables you to target customers who are already searching for your offering. Work with a digital marketing agency that has demonstrated expertise in running search campaigns to help you set up targeted campaigns that will help you achieve your sales goals for 2023.
• SMM: Social media marketing involves running paid marketing campaigns across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, SnapChat, Twitter, etc. Each of these platforms have campaign tools that you can use to create campaigns and target different audience categories across each platform. Depending on the time of product or service you offer, one social media platform might be better suited for your business than the other. A competent social media agency should be able to guide you on making the right decision on which platforms to focus on and would be able to help you set up and optimise campaigns across the different social media platforms to drive sales and customer acquisition for your business in 2023.

4 – Invest in SEO:

Search engine optimization are activities you carry out on your website to optimise it for ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Most business owners shy away from investing in SEO because they perceive it to be expensive and do not see results immediately. This is often a bad decision for most businesses. If you do not invest in SEO, you are leaving a huge chunk of business to your competitors who invest in SEO. SEO helps you get leads and generates sales from your website for free! Once your website starts ranking on top search results for keywords related to your product or services, customers will visit your website and buy or order your services without you paying each time they click to visit your website which is the case with paid search campaigns.

The Google algorithm is always changing and evolving, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest SEO trends to get your site ranked for the right keywords. In addition to looking at SEO tools like Moz and SEMrush, you can also ask yourself these questions: “What are people searching for?” and “Is my website optimised for those search terms?”

Back in the day, having a website was okay to have your website appear on top search results. Today with billions of websites out there, search engines crawl the web and serve the sites with the most relevant page content and crawlability to users based on their search. This is where investing in SEO comes in. there are broadly three types of SEO;

• On-page SEO: these are activities carried out on web pages to optimise them for ranking on search engine results. The optimization actions carried out ensure search engines are able to crawl the webpages, understand the content and serve them up for relevant searches. Some of the actions include;
  • using relevant keywords in the title tag, header tags, and throughout the content of the page.
  • adding meta descriptions that summarise the content of the page
  • Optimising page speed to ensure the web pages load quickly.
  • Using alt text to describe images and other media on the page
  • Creating a sitemap to help search engines understand the structure of the website
• Off-page SEO: are activities we carry out to generate backlinks to the website which helps to improve the domain authority (DA) of the website which is a key factor for ranking high on search results. This focus here is mainly on adding good quality content to the website which would be referenced on other websites to generate backlinks to the website. Some of the activities carried out here include;
  • Submitting the website to online directories and local business listings.
  • Building high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites.
  • Participating in social media marketing and building a social media presence.
  • Getting mentioned in online news articles and industry publications.
  • Participating in online communities and forums related to the website’s content.
• Local SEO: these are activities carried out to improve search ranking in local geographical areas. This is very important for businesses that serve a specific geographical area as it improves visibility to customers searching for services near them. Adding map citations and publishing content on Google business profiles are key factors for improving local SEO. Some of the other activities that improve local ranking include;
  • Including the presence of accurate and consistent business information such the business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on the website and on other online platforms,
  • Using local keywords in website content and metadata,
  • Acquisition of online reviews from satisfied customers.
  • Posting relevant content regularly on your Google business profile.

5 – Use social media to connect with customers:

Social media platforms can be a great way to connect with customers and promote your products. Consider creating a social media strategy to engage with customers and drive traffic to your website. In addition to engaging with your audience, social media is being used as a means of validation for customers looking to decide on buying a product or subscribing to a service. When customers are comparing websites, they often check their social media pages to gauge how active the business is to reconfirm that the business is operational and actively serving customers. Publishing content on social media is also an important factor for improving off-page ranking of your website for keywords related to your offering.

To make the best out of your social media presence, invest some time in researching content relevant to your offering and to your audience. Think of content that actually creates value for your audience, it could be educational, informational or entertaining. Organise these in a content calendar and create content off them in different formats to engage your audience. If you do not have the time to expertise for these activities, you can work with a local social media agency that understands your market and industry to help you optimise your presence on social media.

6 – Utilise email marketing: 

People often assume that email marketing is no longer relevant and does not create any value for a business. This is often a wrong perception. When used right, email marketing can generate some of the best ROI of all digital marketing channels. It is a very low-cost way to build brand recall and stay on top of mind with your audience when they need the products or services you offer.

As with social media, the focus here should not just be on sending promotional offers, send good quality content that adds value to your audience. You want your content to be so good that your audience looks forward to receiving your email. Do not send marketing emails too often otherwise, it might be perceived as spam and audience members might start unsubscribing or blocking your email which is not good for your domain.

Depending on your type of business, and the quality of content you have, a frequency of once to twice weekly at most should be sufficient. You can use email marketing platforms, like Mailchimp, HubSpot and Sendinblue to schedule and send email campaigns to your audience. These tools can also be integrated on your website for your website visitors to sign up for receiving email campaigns from your business.

7 – Data Flow Analysis: 

Measure and Optimise what works. With so many activities carried out across different online channels, it is very important to have a system in place to gather data on performance and use this as a feedback mechanism to enhance what works and discontinue or improve activities that are not working.  By tracking and analysing data from these channels, businesses can gain insights into their online presence and the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

For example, tracking data from a website can provide information about website traffic, user behaviour, and conversions. This data can help businesses understand how their website is performing, identify areas for improvement, and optimise their marketing efforts to better reach their target audience. You can integrate Google analytics on your website to get this type of insight.

You can use analytics tools across each social media platform to also get insights on how your audience is engaging with your content. This will guide you on the best format or type of content to publish across your social media platforms.

For email campaigns, all email marketing platforms have dashboards which will show you how many recipients read your email, clicked links in the email and information on how many people unsubscribed from your mailing list. This is useful feedback for optimising your content for more engagement. 

Conclusion

By implementing these strategies, you can increase traffic and sales on your website in 2023 and beyond.

The web is a busy place.  It’s hard to get your brand or product noticed in the sea of content that people are swimming in.  By implementing these seven tips, you will enhance the visibility for your brand, engage your audience better and generate more sales and leads for your business in 2023 and beyond.