It often happens that the heads of online stores are stuck in a dead-end. Revenues are falling. Increasing advertising budgets do not lead to an equivalent increase in profits. It is not clear how to scale up the business correctly. Here you will help check-list on resuscitation online store.
The main reasons for which the online store brings less income:
- relied on the financial flow: you have 50-80 orders per month, mastered the basic SEO traffic. For example, the site relies on 1300-1500 unique visitors per day and further it is unprofitable to promote.
- The cost of investment is not correlated with profit growth;
- increased competition and the entry of new players into the market;
- your offer has lost its uniqueness and attractiveness.
- There are more interesting ones in the market;
- there have been changes in the industry to which you have not been able to adapt;
The most common problem is that orders are slowly falling and you don’t know why.
Crisis Management Plan
1. Technical audit of an online store
- Checking the indexing of categories and product cards. Checking the site performance.
- Checking the correctness of micro markup.
- Checking the structure of the site.
- The correctness of title and informative Description. Validation errors W3C and Shema.org.
- Duplicates and sleepovers on pages.
- CNC in URL (or still productID?).
- Canonical pages and Robots.txt.
- Internal relinking.
- Audit of an external reference mass.
- Overspam in anchors.
At the end of the audit, we make the task for programmers and eliminate critical errors.
2. Analysis of advertising campaigns.
- Verification of configured targets and conversions in analytic systems. They should be.
- Check the ROI for each campaign. Cut across each channel in at least one month, better in 2-3.
- We leave only profitable campaigns.
- If it’s bad, we’ll re-assemble the semantics.
- Setting up ads for the TOP 100 products sold. It is important to emphasize advertising on what is already sold, or on what is potential stable demand.
- Adjustment of advertising to search. Adjustment of dynamic remarketing.
If you do not have contextual advertising, and this also happens, we leave remarketing (including dynamic). We try CPA networks and crowd marketing. We analyze the results for 2-3 months. Disconnect channels with low ROI and increase budgets on revenue channels.
3. In-depth analysis of competitors
It includes such aspects:
- regional competition, how similar stores are promoted;
- national competition. Identification of the strongest players, weaknesses, and strengths;
- analyzing search results by subject matter in your region;
- analyze the most visited competitor catalogs;
- exploring ways to attract customers by competitors. Multi-channel analysis, from where competitors take traffic, and therefore orders;
- semantic analysis of search queries by competition and frequency. Selection of directions in which there are more traffic and money, but weak competition;
- analysis of competitors’ trading offers. What benefits do competitors use?
As a result, we get a list of competitors. We rank them by attendance. You can see the data, for example, on Similarweb. It is impossible to know the exact attendance without analytics counters, but for comparison of the data is enough. Our task is to focus on those who have reached the maximum traffic for the minimum period. To understand the means by which they have achieved this, and to repeat their success. We are conducting an extended analysis of them. We make test orders. We study the operators’ response speed, their scripts. Doing or not doing an upselling
On the basis of the received data, we update the positioning and the benefits to us.
4. Moving to a new CMS
Let’s determine if we need to move to a new CMS. We recommend to leave the old “sad” site as is and integrate it into CRM. Modern CRM allows you to successfully collect data even from independent engines. It is easier to create a new website on the right engine and integrate it into the CRM with the help of Mageworx extensions as well.
As a result, you will get 2 websites and more traffic.
But it often happens that a move is necessary. For example, your store has a well-known brand and you need a new site on a full-featured platform. It is important to remember that any move to a new CMS is a risk of losing positions in the issue.
How to optimize these risks:
- URL comparison. We need the URL on the new project to match the URL of the old project. Ideally, we should repeat the structure of the URL completely so as not to redirect it. If this is not possible, prescribe a page 301 redirect for all traffic pages on the site (upload from the analytics) to new similar pages. It is important that traffic pages do not fall out of the search.
- Prescribe meta tags, transfer texts. See how meta tags are generated – by mask or manually. Ideally, repeat it completely and do not change it to understand the reasons for possible traffic subsidence.
- Check the links on the site. Required pages and sections should be available in 2-3 clicks from the main page.
- Check for pages to which external links lead;
- Configure the 404 page. Make it possible to go to the main sections of the site. Make sure it gives away the 404th server error;
- Transfer and configure the analytics systems and services. Correctly set goals, set up Google Analytics e-commerce to see the effectiveness of advertising channels in the money. Or install an alternative end-to-end analytics system.
- Configure robots.txt and sitemap.xml for the new site.
- Open the site for indexing. Very important: conduct technical and SEO-audits of the site before launching the site. Pay special attention to the item “URL Comparison” and repeat it again on the already launched site.
- Control after moving. Track positions by request groups and check messages in the site error section. Respond quickly to errors and drops.
We advise you not to make unnecessary movements during the move, not to change the main mirror of the site (www, without www), not to set https on the new site. The first move, wait for the URLs to be connected, and then adjust to understand the reason for possible subsidence.
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