Emerging eCommerce Trends in the Middle East region
Projected to grow at a CAGR of 28%+, the Middle East region is the level-playing field for the emerging eCommerce players with no signs of monopoly from Amazon, AliBaba, Walmart, etc.
Let’s talk about some of the most interesting trends emerging in this market in 2020-21.
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How to Bring Organic Traffic to Your eCommerce Store
Are you wondering how long does it take for SEO efforts to show results when you are putting all the time and effort into making your eCommerce store get to the top?
You are anxious about seeing the results right away, aren’t you?
In this article, I will dive into the subject on the duration that SEO takes to work for a new eCommerce website.
You could have got on a top page in a few months maybe even six months at the latest, as it was the case with Google years ago. However nowadays SEO is super competitive. There are over a billion blogs on that and that’s roughly one blog for every seven people and there are even more websites out on the web. So when you combine all of that it makes sense on why SEO is so hard because now Google has its prime pickings to figure out which website they want to place that top. In other words, they can be super picky while five ten years ago they couldn’t be as picky.
So first let’s start by seeing how SEO has changed over the years into keyword research.
Number of keywords
This is one of the biggest areas. Millions of websites are created every single day and that brings a lot of competition. It used to be that you can focus on five or six keywords or maybe even 10 and those keywords would bring in most your site traffic. Companies used to be able to focus on small groups of generic keywords and see great results. The reality now is there are a lot different websites now. Each must have a list of fifty to a hundred keywords or more depending on the site. And at bare minimum each page on your site is going to need to be targeted at least at one keyword. However, in most cases actually three or four keywords are linked per page now.
Content remains the indisputable King
The next thing that’s changed is content. It used to be that you can simply write an article and implement the keyword a fair number of times and Google algorithm will rank you. This is what we call as keyword density. The more you put a keyword in your page in an article the more they know about that pages is around that topic and that doesn’t necessarily flow naturally and it didn’t really work well for users.
Hence, Google doesn’t look at density the same way anymore. Google has gotten smarter and they change your expectations a bit. They are not just looking at a site shoving in the same keyword and stuffing it and ruining the researcher’s experience. They made some big changes to improve their rankings by not showing low quality content as high. So now when you are writing content, it’s not about putting that keyword in there. Naturally, it’ll be in there.
Other synonyms will be which Google can tell because think of them as a big dictionary and thesaurus so they will know what the article is about. Even if you don’t have that keyword in there their main priority is to deliver high-quality content and keeping the search intent in mind. Remember when someone types in a search query it usually is a question. Or it’s not necessarily specifically a question with a question mark. But when someone does a Google search looking for an answer to whatever they typed in and if your page does that provides an answer with that intent you are in the good graces.
If you don’t you are not going to do well, so don’t just shove in keywords within your content and right long pieces article because Google wants a 2,000 word article ranked at the top. It’s not about word count. It’s about providing what the users are looking for.
It is as quick as possible to do than 500 Words 2,000 worth 5,000 words, whatever it may be whoever does it in the easiest form for the user without shoving in keywords and creating the best experience is who’s going to do well and the best in the long run.
So how long does it take to rank on Google?
Well, are you ready for this? Answer to this is: it depends.
According to Forbes the average it takes for a new site is four to six months to start seeing some traction and serfs. However, because there are so many factors in SEO there is no definitive answer, every industry is different as well.
It’s easier to ring for a plumber in a localized city than it is to ring for auto insurance naturally. Even if you are starting a new website and you are actively working on your content on-page-SEO and link-building it can take roughly six months before you start seeing results. It doesn’t mean in six months you are going to rank at the top and get what you want. But usually take 6 months to start seeing traction and the best way to start seeing the traction faster is going after a long-tail phrases which convert better than head terms.
So if you want to rank faster, there are some important SEO factors that you need to consider.
What you need that your website is secure and is accessible to Google. Crawler are using HTTP is a robot.txt blocking the right Pages allowing access to the right ones using a site map and submitting it to Google webmaster tools.
So Google can crawl your pages as your website fast and low time. If it’s fast not only it is going to boost your rankings because that’s a part of their algorithm and you can use Google page speed to see how fast your website loads both on mobile and desktop device.
The other thing that you need to look at is your site mobile friendly. Did you know that over half of searches on Google are done by mobile devices? If your website doesn’t look nice on a mobile device like an iPhone or Android device don’t expect them to rank it higher up.
The other thing you have to look at is do you have authoritative content? If you have just ‘me too content’, the same regurgitated content over and over again. They want you to provide something that’s unique that people haven’t read before.
Every time I blog something new we see on an average 47.6% more traffic than when we blog on something that’s been regurgitated and is old. So in other words try to blog on something that’s new that people haven’t seen before.
It can be overwhelming sometimes but the world is changing every time and yes, there is still new stuff that people are learning about. Not everything has been written even though there are over a billion blogs on the web.
Another thing you need to look at is quality backlinks. Getting links from authoritative sites is one thing, but if those sites aren’t related you are not going to do as well. There is a correlation between pages that rank high and have a decent number of social signals.
Remember Google wants to rank pages at the top that people love, so if people love a page, they are more likely to get links to it. They are more likely to share it on the Social Web.
The other thing that you need to look at is do you have your business information listed especially if you are a local business. You need to claim your Google my business profile. You need Yelp reviews, Google reviews, have a good better Business Bureau page.
The more reviews you can attract the better off you are at. The big takeaway is when you do the right things and you go above and beyond and put the user first you are going to rank faster than if you just try to optimize your page for Google and not put the user first.
12 Killer eCommerce Marketing Tips To Skyrocket Your Brand Credibility & Top-line Growth
E-Commerce marketing can be super complicated. There are just so many different things that you can do to make your online presence a real hit and then get successful.
In this article, I’d discuss all the tips and tricks that have resulted in tremendous results – breaking them down into 12 points in short. Let’s dive into those right away.
- Use a great shopping cart system
There are many shopping carts used around. Some of them that we prefer are Shopify, Magento, Woo Commerce and Big Commerce.
These carts are good from a perspective of SEO design and paid search. So if you are running paid ads even on social these carts have everything you need to scale your business. They also have a support team to back you up when you need the help. So check out one of those carts.
If you don’t already have them next thing is to spend a tremendous amount of time optimizing your product pages with regards to SEO and design. So SEO here means a good product title. Don’t just call it something that only you would call it something. Title here means something that people are actually searching online.
Additional read: Why Your Ecommerce Site Needs Customer Reviews?
So do some keyword research figure out what people are searching for your products and make that part of your product title. Also include that in the description of the product and write a good description. Remember, this is your 24/7 salesperson. Your product page never falls sick. It works through the weekends and the holidays every time somebody visits your product page and you want to have that perfect sales pitch. So put some time into that also.
Next is product photography. Make sure that photography is really clean, smooth and a nice design and professional and also if you can do a product video this is massively valuable. Make sure you invest in doing some product videos to explain your products and more details final tips here.
- Display third-party trust badges
Make sure you have trust badges on the page. Make sure it says things like you have fast shipping, free shipping, if you have that. Also get reviews of your products you want to have reviews on your product pages. Studies show, if you have reviews on your product pages, it can increase your conversion rate significantly. So make sure that you get proper reviews on your page
- Leverage schema mark-ups
Next thing is making sure you have schema markup on your product pages. What this means is when somebody searches on Google right there in the Google search page before they even go to your website they are going to see what Google calls product rich cards which is going to show your product image and some information right there on the search page. This is going to give you an advantage over your competitors make you a little more visible organically to people as they are searching on things like Google.
So here’s a quick tip, if you just Google search schema markup testing tool it will take you to a testing tool. You can just put your product page URL in there and it will tell you if you have the proper schema markup or not. But if you use one of those carts Bigcommerce Shopify our Woocommerce, they typically have good schema markup out the gate and so you can just kind of build upon that.
- Capitalize on Google merchant center
Optimize your product feed via Google merchant center. Google merchant center is what you are going to use to run Google shopping ads, but the product feed is hugely important. Make sure you have good information in there with regards to your product title, description, keywords so that you are showing up when people are searching on Google shopping when you are running your ads. You don’t want to be not in the game when somebody is looking for your product because your product feed is not very well optimized.
- Consider Google Shopping Ads
Next tip is running Google shopping ads. Google shopping is very popular. People go to Google they search something like white shoes. They will click the shopping tab those are all ads. So if you want to be in that shopping tab, which we highly recommend you are going to want to make sure that you are running Google shopping ads. So invest in running product ads and then here’s a tip, optimize your product ads based on results.
So if you have e-commerce tracking set up you can see the revenue generated from each product. You can really see your ROI per product on your product. That’s what you want to do is as time goes by turn off the ads that aren’t doing as well the products that aren’t doing as well. Increase the budget on the products that are doing well. This is going to really increase your return on investment over time.
- Don’t under-estimate the power of re-marketing
Run Dynamic retargeting campaigns off of your Google shopping ads and your website visitors so that people that go to your website and they browse maybe two three products as they are surfing the internet. After that on the Google Display Network, which is thousands of websites online, they are going to see banner ads for your brand actually showing the specific products that they looked at. So it’s very relevant. This stays top of mind and it kind of just wears them down until they are ready to buy those products. They click it and they purchase on your website.
Also, you can run retargeting on Facebook and Instagram as well. So if somebody comes to your site, they look around and they don’t do anything that night when they are on Facebook kind of looking through their feed all the sudden they will see an ad for your brand. This is bringing you back to the top of their mind. They are like, hey, I didn’t have time earlier to put my credit card in there because I was getting interrupted but hey, I do right now on this commercial that’s on TV. So I’m going to buy right now. So by doing retargeting in a dynamic way, you are going to bring a lot more sales back to your business.
- Social Media Ads are not dead (yet)
Make sure that you are running Facebook and Instagram ads. These are huge channels today. People are on Facebook all the time. So you are going to want to target people on Facebook.
So one example, like that is let’s say that you sell gymnastics equipment to kids particular maybe to girls in particular. You could actually target mothers that make over fifty thousand dollars a year that have daughters that are in gymnastics. How targeted is that? If these mothers see these ads they can afford it right there making enough money to afford it. They have daughters in gymnastics. It just only makes sense. They are going to like your product.
They are going to understand your brand and they are going to eventually buy from you. So make sure you take advantage of Facebook and Instagram ads those two channels are big Bread winners for e-commerce stores today.
Additional read: How To Choose Long-tail Keywords For Exponential Growth?
- Organic social media is the key
Invest in your social media organically whether you need to do yourself or hire somebody or hire another company. You need to make sure you have an organic presence on social media what that means is you are posting content you are engaging on social media. So not paid ads but just being involved being a part of social media today by doing this is going to be building your brand following organically. So eventually you have 10,000 followers a hundred thousand followers, the more followers you have as you are posting content you are building this awareness. You are only going to get more sales.
- eMail marketing may look cold, but converts really well
Automate your email marketing. Email marketing is hugely important. A lot of e-commerce stores fall short because they spend a lot of money to get that customer to make that first purchase, but they don’t remark it to those people via email marketing and other channels to get them to come back and make future purchases. If you could just get each of your customers to make one more purchase than they normally do think about what that does to your revenue. So with email marketing, it allows this in an automated way to make that happen.
So here’s an example you could set up an automated campaign for holidays. You just sent the up the beginning of the year for the whole year with promotions on all these different holidays that automatically gets sent to all of your past customers. So that’s one example, there’s tons of other examples like sending them automated emails to capture reviews for your products is another way to build product review content and automated way. If you are creative with your email marketing and you automate it, this is going to scale your business so that you can increase your sales overall and increase your return on investment on your marketing dollars.
- Do people read SMSs? Yes, they do!
Invest in SMS marketing. SMS marketing is text message marketing reason why that’s important is because only about 20% of people will typically open up your email sometimes even less and they also won’t open it up in real time. There’s a lag there right but with text messages, it’s almost a hundred percent of people open the text message and most of them are within a five-minute window so that can be really powerful on slow sales days on the end of the month times when you need to clear out old inventory stuff like that. So build a VIP text message marketing. And one way to do this is put a banner on your site that says hey for VIP VIP deals text something like hot deals 239 970 to opt in and get an immediate 20% coupon right now by doing that it gets people to opt-in to get that coupon. But now they are in that list for future VIP deals that you can tap into when you need to.
- CRM! Yes, isn’t that called ‘Customer Relationship Management’!
Use a CRM. After all, you have a relationship with your customers and you wish to cherish that. So many e-commerce stores don’t really have a CRM. They are actually using the back-end of their cart to look at customer data and kind of using that as a CRM, that’s not an active way you want to integrate your cart with an actual CRM so that you can populate all of your customer data and even add additional data in there as you get to know your customer.
And so if you hire a sales person or if you are the salesperson working through the CRM and actually making proactive calls to your customers can be life-changing for your business if you just reach out to hey, how was it? Did you get your package in time? Is everything going okay for you? What else are you interested in? Can I keep an eye out for other deals that come up and let you know you have for kids? Are their birthday is what are they interested in? If you get to know the customer you can save this information in your CRM your salesperson can just continually follow up these people and you will see four or five times more sales per customer than you would otherwise. So it’s a huge investment but a great return to look at a salesperson and a CRM and connecting those into your process within your e-commerce business.
- Care for the customer – they are real human beings
Create a customer care package that you send with all of your product purchases to the customer so don’t just send them a bag with a logo on it send them a nice package it has a handwritten note has a coupon in it for a future purchase that maybe has a referral card in there they can give to a friend.
This is going to be a nice experience for the customer and it’s really going to give them a good sense of feeling towards your brand and probably get them to come back and purchase with you again, but one really hot tip here is if you are selling on other channels such as Amazon or something like that when you send those products with the care package the coupon they come back to your branded website to make future purchases. This is going to increase your profitability right and get your brand going on your own website, which is what you want to do.
So take advantage of these care packages designed something real nice when they receive your product you stand out in the crowd from other businesses.
BookAuthority.Org features our Book in “99 Best LinkedIn eBooks of All Time”
It is quite amazing to find out US-based ‘BookAuthority.org‘ featuring the Book authored by Marcom18 Founder Vikram Jethwani in the ’99 Best LinkedIn eBooks of All Time’ globally.
“I’m grateful to everyone who find such initiatives useful. We aspire to help out more and more businesses with digital tools and technologies that can create value for them and the people they serve. Being a B2B digital marketing agency, it is our goal to maximize the value we add to the businesses we assist,” said Vikram Jethwani.
Check out the complete list here: https://bookauthority.org/books/best-linkedin-ebooks
As featured on CNN, Forbes and Inc – BookAuthority identifies and rates the best books in the world, based on public mentions, recommendations, ratings and sentiment.
Why Your Ecommerce Site Needs Customer Reviews?
This article explains why user reviews are important for ecommerce websites in Kuwait and the United States than ever before.
Why they are becoming so relevant in a digitalized world?
There are five main reasons why reviews are one of the most important things for online stores.
- Reviews create trust.
This happens because they are independent opinion from people like you and me — the consumers.
It is not a brand sponsoring itself. But actually real people talking about their own experiences in using the product. A study reveals that the product that has only positive reviews sells more than a product with no reviews at all – about 70% more! This happens because people like to buy products which others found useful.
So if other consumers have tried this product before and reported they had good experience, at least you won’t have any surprises on the other end.
If you buy a product with no reviews at all. You don’t know what to expect from it.
What and this is actually what generates insecurity and frustration.
60% of Consumers Trust Reviews
- Better customer insights
Reviews are voluntarily generated in free format. This means they represent truly what customers want to say without any possible filter. When purchasing a speaker, for example, all consumers might start by searching for reviews about the sound quality and what other users have to say about that.
- Point of interaction
Reviews are a sort of interaction between a brand and its clients. Brands can sell more to customers through reviews, starting a conversation with them.
Their feeling, their perception about the brand improves to a great extent.
- Reviews improve SEO
Reviews mention product name several times and some more important keywords that are used by clients to search for the product.
This text improves relevance of a web page and search engines like Google will see it positively when ranking this e-commerce page.
- Reviews drive sales
There are plenty of numbers that support these affirmations. In fact 95% of people read reviews before purchasing anything, and more than 80% of them make their decision based on what others say.
Customers trust reviews as much as they trust their family and friends. Reviews are beneficial not only for the product but for the e-commerce site itself.
Another study shows the result of adding reviews. 42% of users reported increase in average order value with the inclusion of reviews.
So it’s a win-win for a ecommerce site in Kuwait, the US and all over the world.
I hope this explanation gives you a clear understanding about the role of reviews in e-commerce.
If you wish to know how you can encourage users to publish more reviews about your products, write to us by filling up the contact form.
Magento Vs Shopify Vs BigCommerce: Which eCommerce Platform Is The Best?
In this blog, we’re going to talk about the three major e-commerce website platforms – Magento, Shopify & BigCommerce.
Probably if you’re an e-commerce business you probably fall into one of these two buckets: you’ve built your business on retail and you’re looking to now grow your business online or you are already an online business and sell all of your products or most of your products on the Internet.
Well, I’m going to talk about all the three of the main platforms that you’re probably going to want to think about using now.
This blog is intended to be a general overview of pros and cons and the major platforms that you can use. There are other ones that say that they are e-commerce. They have e-commerce capabilities, but they don’t really compare to these three, in terms of robustness, stability and scalability.
So let’s talk about the first one i.e. Shopify.
I’m going to go through the pros and cons of each of them and who probably like types of business each platform would be right for. Shopify probably is the most popular one and there’s a reason it’s the most popular.
It’s because it’s the easiest platform to start a small out of your garage side hustle business. It is super easy to start. It’s just a little bit harder than maybe opening a Gmail account another benefit or a pro is that has some of the most beautiful themes out there meaning you can make your website look, fantastic just by buying a theme off of a Shopify designer or developer and there’s thousands probably millions of them to choose from so you can really make your website your own individual website.
Let’s dive-in into some other benefits of Shopify. It comes with a built-in blog so you can get your blog right away. That’s great for SEO. That’s another benefit of Shopify.
It’s relatively low cost. Although they do take a percentage to assess any money coming in any time somebody buys your product, they’ll take a percentage of that. So merchant fees is there, but generally super easy to use.
It’s what I would recommend to anybody starting a new business from scratch without a lot
of funding; with zero technical knowledge – Shopify is the place to go and there’s even some big businesses built on Shopify. MGMT, for instance, is a watch company. They currently use Shopify.
Well, there are a few downsides too. The first one is that as you start to grow you start to have limitations with regards to the customization of the platform. So there’s limitations on the number of products that you can list.
There’s limitations on the customization between the apps or the plugins that you’re using to operate your business. Things like cart abandonment, retargeting, website pop-ups and rewards programs, you know website credit things like that that becomes major limitation as you start to grow your business into the $500-600K in revenue and beyond.
However, Shopify does have an enterprise-level version called Shopify Plus that comes in to help larger businesses customize their customers web experience their user experience because they have an API that you can tap into there’s just more customization that you can
use but it’s also more expensive starts at about $2,000 or 2,500 a month just to use Shopify plus.
One more downside of Shopify is that you have to buy several plugins to build your e-commerce engine. Some plug-ins come free of cost. But as you want to grow your machine and really start to integrate the full-scale ecommerce funnel, you have to buy plugins from their app Marketplace and that can get pretty expensive.
Plugins range anywhere from twenty bucks all the way up to a hundred plus and a lot of times these are monthly membership. So you can be paying you can be shelling out a lot of money just for plug-ins.
It’s now I want to talk about the next platform is BigCommerce!
BigCommerce is another relatively popular platform and it’s kind of the middle between Shopify and the third one.
I’m going to talk about Magento and the reason it’s sort of in the middle and I don’t mean middle and ranking. I mean middle in its features. It doesn’t have quite as beautiful themes as Shopify.
If you use a Bigcommerce theme, it’s like less likely to look like a lot of other websites out there. So you’re going to need somebody with coding and designing knowledge to create custom site in order to really set yourself apart.
But BigCommerce does come out of the box with more capabilities than Shopify without buying the plugins that you have to buy in Shopify. So BigCommerce just comes out of the box with a ton of capabilities that are ready to build your e-commerce engine.
So as you’re scaling up past five hundred thousand dollars, you really want a lot of customization and you would want to list more products — BigCommerce is probably going to be a little bit better for you.
Then the third one is super popular. I believe it is used by more companies than both of the first two combined. There’s a reason for that and that it’s highly flexible.
You can literally build whatever you want out of Magento. So, a lot of technical teams and developers love Magento because there’s not a lot of limitation but the limitations that the first two don’t have.
First off, the cost. The cost to use Magento is more expensive $500-700 a month is probably the average range. The other limitation to Magento is that it doesn’t have built-in hosting. So, you have to use a third party hosting provider to just build your website whereas Shopify, BigCommerce come with built-in hosting services. They have built-in hosting into the membership.
So if you’re just starting out Shopify is a no-brainer but if you have a budget and you have a development team, and you’re ready to grow fast BigCommerce is probably going to be your go to framework and it will also allow you to scale up pretty fast Magento!
It’s probably better if you have a technical team either on staff or an agency that is ready to do some crazy customizations right away. You want to grow fast or you already have a retail built business that you want to automatically integrate all of your functionalities and all of your products into Magento immediately with super custom features – Magento is probably the better fit for you.
Although BigCommerce really does compete with them, you know on a lot of these features
and things so that’s just a super general overview of the three most popular platforms.
Let me quickly mention a few other ones out there just so you know, they are out there. WordPress, for instance, has platform called WooCommerce. I didn’t really mention that one because it has a lot of glitches and it has a lot of shortcomings.
It doesn’t work quite as well and it’s harder to scale another. I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there that are going to argue and say it’s all it’s out of the box and all it’s easy to use. There’s just some small things in security, some small glitches that you just have to understand and know in order to make WooCommerce work for you.
Let me know your thoughts and if you require any assistance with your e-commerce business plans, do not hesitate to contact us via the below contact form.
Have a great day!