Your ecommerce site needs a great blog to promote your products and boost your search engine rankings. Your blog can be useful in converting customers and attracting new ones, but the competition for such services is tough. If a customer doesn’t like what they’ve found on your blog, they’ll simply abandon your site.
For that reason, it’s essential to get the blog perfect. However, all too many ecommerce blogs make serious design mistakes that kill their sales. These mistakes can drive your visitors crazy and minimize your conversions. If you’re making the following nine mistakes on your blog, you need to fix them immediately.
- Great Content
Before we get into the design elements, we need to highlight the importance of great content. Your content must also be solid and highly valuable to your readers. According to the digital marketers at Single Grain, “Content is the fire” of a business. Without a healthy blaze going, you’ll have a hard time getting anywhere, no matter how good your blog looks.
- Sparse and Low-Quality Images
In an ecommerce setting, people purchase items almost entirely based on appearance. If you don’t have images to promote your products, how will they know what they want?
Furthermore, visuals grab attention and increase engagement. According to research from Hubspot, not only do images create 2.5 times more engagement than text, but they also increase reader retention by 65 percent.
- No Calls to Action or Registration Buttons
Never underestimate the power of a call to action or registration button at the bottom of your blog. When there’s a clear value proposition in your blog post, consumers will want to click your CTA button and get more information. If the button is missing, they’re more likely to move on without pursuing further information.
- Complicated Navigation
Complex navigation frustrates readers and inhibits understanding. They want to see what steps they’ve completed and want to have the option to go back if necessary. Breadcrumb navigation provides this capability and reduces the likelihood of consumers abandoning a page before they’ve reached the CTA.
- No Social Sharing Buttons
Don’t bank on people finding a way to share your content just because they like it. There’s so much content out there, and social sharing isn’t a huge priority for most people. They’re more likely to forget about it than they are to go out of their way to share it.
If you make sharing easy with buttons on your page, they’ll share content they enjoyed because it didn’t take any effort to do so.
- Too Many Widgets
Widgets are great for optimizing your content, connecting with social media, and providing internal links. However, it’s easy for this to go overboard. They can distract from your content and slow down your page, two things that can have negative consequences for both SEO and conversions.
- Untargeted Design
If you’re creating a marketing website for entrepreneurs, but your site uses flashy colors and spirally fonts, you’ll completely miss your target. What’s more, your first-time visitors might not know what page they’re visiting at first glance.
- Missing Search Box
Readers need search bars to navigate your content. If they like what they read, they’ll likely want to search for more. This engagement is key to fulfilling your blogging and ecommerce goals, but it won’t be possible without the search box.
- A Cluttered Homepage
Simplicity and minimalism are the industry standard while clutter strays from that. Attention spans are continually shortening, and readers should get the point of your blog from the homepage without complex jargon, confusing navigation, and overloaded colors.
Correcting these design mistakes will be crucial to delivering an ecommerce blog your customers actually want to read.