THEincrease in online shopping could accelerate in 2021, with a performance that exceeds the record of 2020, according to the surveys on the e-commerce sector in Italy by Salesforce Index.
In particular, analyzing the first quarter 2021 and comparing it with the same period last year, the report highlighted for Italian e-commerce a increase of 78% compared to +26% in the first quarter of 2020, well above the global average of +58%.
In detail, Salesforce recorded a strong growth in mobile shopping, or purchases on e-commerce portals made via smartphones and tablets. Mobile traffic would be increased by 24% in the first quarter of 2021, with a significant reduction in users who bought online from their PC (from 40 to 20%). At the same time, the report indicates that there is in Italy one of the lowest conversion rates, showing how despite the boom in online shopping there are still several problems that need to be resolved.
According to Salesforce, the growth trend of e-commerce is set to consolidate in the post-covid era, so it is not a spike due exclusively to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but a real transformation in the way people manage their purchases.
However, investments in digitalisation are essential, improve online sales processes and strengthen its position on the market, aiming to ensure greater awareness among users of the virtual world and high competition among operators in every sector.
How to improve your e-commerce and increase online sales
As explained in detail on the specialized portal www.roberto-serra.com, to take advantage of the e-commerce boom it is first of all necessary optimize your website, so that it can rank well on search engines and increase the conversion rate.
Experts recommend first making a Complete SEO Audit, an in-depth investigation of the portal, the reference market and the target users, with which to obtain essential information to identify the critical points of the digital project and identify the most effective solutions for intervention.
In this way, it is possible to know the competition, the needs of potential customers and the dynamics of the competitors' business, furthermore with a professional keyword research you can discover the right keywords to use for content marketing strategies. At the same time, you can plan the actions to take for link building and digital PR, essential activities to increase the ranking of the online store and strengthen the brand, in order to obtain advantages in the positioning on search engines and users' perception of the company brand.
Of course, you also need to resolve any technical errors, such as incorrect tag and metadata insertion, as well as fixing on-site issues such as a suboptimal checkout system, an inefficient portal structure, and non-optimized product sheets.
The same goes for internal link management, image quality, and strategic presence of reviews and FAQ pages. In addition, you need to make sure that website performance, so that e-commerce is fast enough in loading pages so as not to compromise turnover and profits.
How important is user experience for successful e-commerce?
Even today, few people know that User experience is one of the most important ranking factors, in fact it is not uncommon for a web shop to not perform well enough due to poor UX. Modern SEO has adapted to today's digital context, as many aspects that determine the success of an e-commerce are closely linked to the experience offered to users.
Google, on the other hand, wants to provide efficient solutions to users, for this reason the first websites in the SERPs are almost always portals that guarantee a high level UX.
A tool not to be underestimated to understand how to improve the user experience is Google Analytics, the American company's tool for webmasters and owners of websites and e-commerce.
The new version of the Mountain View platform allows you to obtain a lot of essential information for monitor user behavior, for example by analyzing events in detail, that is, every type of action that people perform on the portal such as clicks, file downloads and time spent.
One of the main metrics today is in fact the user engagement rate, to understand how much people appreciate the website and how to optimize it, a clear signal of the importance for Google of the user experience and the key role of personalized advertising.
SEO professionals therefore recommend: focus on communication, always trying to respond to people's questions and needs, guarantee the greatest possible accessibility and contextualize the business based on the location, to the sector and to the reference market, according to a continuous optimization process that is fundamental for competing on today's web.
