Posts filed under 'Traffic'
Posted by Aaron R Stewart on November 29th, 2007
There has been much speculation about how personal and local search, which I term “Specialized Search,” will affect search marketing strategies in the future. Although it feels recent, the discussion of more specialized search systems really started to heat up back in 2004, when Google’s Sergey Brin made comments concerning Google’s foray into Specialized Search technologies. Bill Slawski, our industry’s legal expert, has done a masterful job of following the patents issued to the search engines for various new personalized search techniques, and he asks insightful questions on how these patented technologies might affect search in the future. Bill helps me think, which isn’t easy. Bill’s SEO by the Sea blog has a has a full category on the personalization of search. It is worthy of your time if you want to better understand the great strides search engines are making to innovate to further customize the search experience for every individual client.
Additionally, Michael’s post of yesterday entitled: Local Search is Changed Forever - Now Google Knows Where You Are also discusses the amazing trends in local search. None of us should be surprised that the search engines are going to try to improve the search experience for their clients, it is basic economic principles at work here. We have to remember that Google and Yahoo! are competitors, I would say fierce competitors, and if these companies do not evolve, and implement new & better search strategies, then they run the risk of losing market share, and eventually becoming irrelevant over time. I don’t think either company will allow themselves to become the next Excite.com in the world of search.
There are many who believe Google and to a lessor extent Yahoo! are out to kidnap our personal preferences, and somehow use this “personal” data for some unsightly purpose in the future. Yes, even in search we have our own group of conspiracy theorists. I have read blogs recently of some who feel tricked that Google has been modifying their search results, based on their personal search histories and their locations, without their permission. While I am not one that wants to lose any personal freedoms, if while I’m using Google’s service, Google saves my search history to improve my search experience in the future, it seems like a pretty good business decision in my mind. Nothing overly Orwellian about it, just a vendor trying to better help a client, and fight off competition. If I am more satisfied with my search results, then the chances of me moving to another search engine is greatly reduced. That is pretty much what all of us business people are attempting to accomplish, develop a loyal customer base, and do all we can to prevent them from going elsewhere. If we aren’t moving forward in the marketplace, we are being left behind.
So as search results become more based on individuals, what effect will that have on SEO, and SEO strategies? It is an interesting question. If each of us are getting manipulated/personalized results based on our personal search history, then how can the SEOs “prove” their worth to their clients? I mean if we can’t see our sites rocketing up the SERPs, and show our friends, how will we know what we have paid out has been it? Or how will be know our personal SEO efforts are effective? While the benefits of SEO work may not be as obvious and homogeneous on the SERPs, we can be hopeful the resulting traffic driven to our sites will become more qualified, and our conversion rates will hopefully climb a bit. We have heard many times, we should rather have 10 people visit with 5 people purchasing, then 1000 visiting with only 1 purchase (assuming we aren’t a big Adsense site).
I believe specialized search will also increase the importance and necessity for more online competitive analysis strategies. Michael and I have been discussing other competitive analysis tools to add to SoloSEOs current tool set to further improve our clients abilities to understand what the competition is up to, especially when compared side-by-side to their own site’s performance. Then clients will be able to use the trends these metrics provide to accurately measure how effective their SEO strategies are within their competitive marketplace. Competitive analysis will provide more of the confirmation we need on our SEO strategies, especially as SERPs continue to morph to meet the personalized needs of search clients. It will be exciting. I will be interested to see if specialized search might possibly give those who didn’t get out online as quickly as they had wished, an increased ability capture new specialized clients by focusing on long-tail keyword phrases relevant to their specific market.
It is going to be fun to watch and be apart of all the fast approaching changes, and it will be fascinating to see which of us figures out how to capitalize on the new opportunities of Specialized Search.
We are looking forward to meeting many of you at PubCon in a few days, I did enjoy it last year. Please travel safe and enjoy. As an alum of UNLV, I know from personal experience, Vegas can be great, and Vegas can be absolute crap. I hope the former Vegas for all of you. If you to make is to PubCon, please come up and say “hi,” we are going to be handing out some SoloSEO SWAG, which is pretty cool. Quantities are limited. I may resemble one, but I am not a pack mule. 
)
Visited 1920 times
November 29th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on October 30th, 2007
On Aaron Wall’s site www.seobook.com, Aaron Wall makes a statement which makes me chuckle every time I read it, not because it isn’t somewhat true, but because I can imagine how it must drive others crazy. Aaron states,
“SEO is not hard, Anyone can be successful at it with the right information.”
While I agree that anyone can be successful through SEO, if they have the right information and the right tools, I don’t think SEO is “easy” for everyone, not even for most people. I personally have only met Aaron once, and have heard him present on a few occasions, and just based on those observations I can see why Aaron would see SEO as easy, I think for him SEO is easy. But for the rest of us, the average humans, SEO is tough work. It is especially difficult for those who are running more traditional/non-technical businesses. There is so much to do as a small business owner, and the entire organization relies on you and your efforts. Quite frankly you don’t have the time to sit down and work with site optimization all day, or dedicate enough time to learn how to make the required changes to web site pages in just a day or two. It is going to take more time than that. How much time really depends on not only your available time, but also on how good your information and tools are.
With accurate information, like from Aaron’s SEOBook, and excellent SEO tools, like we have developed here at SoloSEO, the SEO process can become more manageable, that much is true. But please never let anyone convince you SEO will be easy, unless you are a technological genius, and there are more than few using SEO as a profession. This hard work revelation probably isn’t what anyone with aspirations of quickly making it big online wants to hear, but I wouldn’t feel good about giving the impression SEO is some magic online wand, which when waved, instantly delivers more traffic and orders than a site can handle. It just doesn’t work that way. I am sure there are many out there who have heard and believed the claims of this “SEO ease,” then got in, got to work, and became quickly disenchanted with the SEO process, perhaps even felt frustrated at their inability to quickly grasp the “simpleness of SEO.” If you have felt this way, you are not alone, it is common, it is okay.
As perhaps some of you have done, I have spent my life as a very average person, not overly smart, not overly quick, not overly fun, not overly funny, not overly thin, just not overly impressive in almost everything. Fortunately I came to grips with my total averageness a few years ago, and I realized my only chance to get ahead in this world, was just to work harder than the naturally talented and smarter people were willing to. I can’t compete with the “blessed ones” one on one, hour to hour, but if I only sleep 4 hours, and they sleep 10, then I have picked up 6 hours a day on them, and my chances are better. I have no problem seeing myself as a tortoise, and I have always loved that story. I think most my fellow slower folks have too.
I think most entrepreneurs, who have created and succeeded in their own business, have either worked harder, or are “blessed.” For most of us it is simply a matter of out-working the competition, we may never be the biggest, or grow the fastest, but we can be successful, and live a comfortable life by out-working the others. And if we work harder, using the best tools and information, we can not only increase our chances of success, but shorten the time required. The same is true with SEO.
To me SEO is similar to the process of digging for gold. There are many technologies we can use to find gold now, and those technologies get better all the time. With today’s technology we simply don’t have to head out with a shovel and start digging hither and thither until we find something shiny, there are better ways. But even with all the modern tools and technology, when it comes right down to it, getting the gold out of the ground is going to take work. We can dig with a shovel, we can dynamite, we can use large equipment, and we can hire an army of miners, but it is all work and it is required to reap the eventual reward. No way around it.
There is no doubt SEO can be worth much to a company looking to increase sales, it can take a struggling company trying to make any sale at all, and turn that company into an online success story. Where they once wondered if they would convince anyone to buy at all, they now they struggle with cash flow, barely having enough cash on hand to pay vendors, so they can barely stay ahead of the orders onslaught. But to experience this kind of transformation in online sales, the SEO work must happen. We are going to need to focus on our site’s Keywords, Content, Links and effort must be spent to put it all in place. No way around it. We can use all kinds of great tools, and have the latest information to make our efforts as efficient and effective as possible. We can even hire others to do our SEO for us, but SEO is the price for long-term online rewards. SEO isn’t easy for most people, it isn’t a get rich quick scheme, there is nothing magic or extraordinary about it, but if the SEO work is done well, then success is more than likely, if not virtually assured. I like that about SEO, we can work harder at it than others do, and see success for our efforts. And as for all the other tortoises out there, I know you will like that about SEO too.
Visited 1045 times
October 30th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on September 7th, 2007
A good friend of mine, Thayne Peterson, called up yesterday and asked what he should do with his website to just help it perform a bit better. As you can imagine we get that question quite a bit around here, especially now that more people have kind of figured out what SoloSEO is about. This friend owns an auto dealership in Provo, UT (free link alert) and deals mostly in high-quality, used BMWs. He also has a repair shop as well, where they specialize in repairing most German made cars (this needs to be stated more clearly on the website). He, like many of us, just wants to be a bit more visible online.
In our conversation he mentioned he was considering signing up for a local online business directory, and perhaps purchasing some advertising on their site. He wondered if I thought it was a good idea, so I took a look. After some initial poking around, it was soon obvious that signing up was free, and the site existed solely on ad space it sold on the site. So I had no problem with him signing up, at least it is a new link to him, and this directory is well put together and has quite a comprehensive overview of local business, organized by category. I didn’t tell him if I thought purchasing an ad on this site was a good move or not, I don’t know enough about this directory’s traffic mix, or his business to understand if online advertising will provide a high enough ROI to make the ad price worth the investment. I will leave that decision to him.
But after a quick review of his site, I just gave him a few ideas that I think will help its performance in the search engines. First off, he does an excellent job of keeping the inventory of current cars up to date. As soon as they receive a new car, they clean it up and takes some nice pictures of the car, and then put those up with a simple description of each car on the site. I suggested that they should spend a bit more time on creating content for each car, focusing more on some keywords they are targeting, as well as the specifics of each car. These keywords should come from what they feel their strengths are, with local references included, like Provo, UT, Northern Utah, 40 South of Salt Lake City, UT, as examples. Additionally, I would have them use SoloSEO tools to analyze other local automotive sites doing well in the search engines, and then start targeting those keywords as well. Finally, they should also make sure the photos for each car are labeled clearly, and using an occasional keyword here and there, in a picture description, isn’t going to hurt rankings either. 
Once a car is sold, they currently take the content and the pictures of that car off the site. I think this is a mistake many of us make. Rather, I would suggest they create a sold page, or past inventory page, then organize all the cars by model and year on this sold/directory page. Keep all that content written about each car, and the descriptive photos for each in play for the search engines. If they spend time creating the content, then they should continue benefitting from it. Plus, it might help potential clients find a model of car they are looking for. Thayne does a great job finding cars according to a potential buyer’s specifications. He did this for me, and it worked out great. So, if a potential buyer found a car on Thayne’s site by browsing the past inventory, which takes no time from Thayne’s sales people (truly a major benefit of any well conceived site), and Thayne gets a new client to work with, along with all the specs he needs to find a similar car, it is a win/win for everyone.
Next, I would suggest they start a company blog, it is another easy way to add content. We of course love WordPress Blogging system, we use it ourselves, and highly recommend it to everyone. On the Independent Import’s blog I would have them blog about sales they are having on certain cars, about automotive tips, about information on recalls, about new performance parts or options to “pimp our rides,” and even about the new innovations BMW is coming out with all the time. The automotive industry is one of constant innovation and change, and this provides excellent and frequent topics for a blog. Keep the blog fresh, with one or two posts a week at least, and also let his current and new clients know about the blog. Many new car owners are passionate about their cars (especially BMW owners), and reading new info about their brand of car and possible improvements/options, is very interesting and will increase business. I’ll bet Thayne could get quite a good subscription base fairly quickly, I know I would sign up.
I would guess there are many of us who feel like we need to do better online. Our site is there, but we need it to perform better, if at all and bring us some new clients. This is most easily done through search. Look for ways to increase your content, adding new pages, and a blog. Then write about products, changes in the industry, and keep your content, don’t ever throw it away. It may need to be tweaked or placed on an archives page of some sort, but you worked hard to create it, let it continue to work for you, it will make a difference in search engine rankings. As far as all the free advice to Thayne, I will take it on trade for a M3 convertible, black… of course.
Visited 1653 times
September 7th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on August 7th, 2007
To small business owners, SEO cannot be seen as the “end all - be all” to their potential success, but it rightfully should be considered a “must do” in order to maximize their full business potential. Based on our own situation, and finally deciding ourselves we needed to spend time on SEO, we now understand that getting started in SEO can be a bit intimidating, and very confusing without the right information. The SEO world tends to speak in their own tongue, and their language wasn’t developed, or taught in any business classes I attended. These new terms, whether it was meant to be this way or not, seem to have created a bit of a “barrier to entry,” to use a term we are more familiar with. Essentially the SEO industry created an illusion of “if we don’t know the terminology, it will be difficult to understand or perform SEO, and even tougher to do it well.” I felt the same way at first, but that perception is simply not true. SEO done the right way, without all the tricks and tinkering (which isn’t all that effective anymore anyway), is actually pretty straight forward. Just as simple as learning about credits and debits in Accounting or how supply and demand affect pricing in Economics. Not too tough to understand with a little reading and some hands-on exercises.
So if SEO is important, and we can learn it, how much time should we spend on SEO as a small business owner? It is an excellent question, and ultimately depends on how much business a firm hopes to bring in through their online efforts. For example, if a firm has in mind that in 12 months they would like to have 50% of their sales coming from online sources, and they currently only enjoy 5% of total sales from the site, then they should probably spend a considerable amount of time working on the site, making sure all the pieces are in place, so not only will the site’s visibility improve, but potential clients will be happy with what they find. Conversely, if this firm wants only 50% of their sales from online sources, but they now enjoy 60% of total being online generated, then they should focus more attention on more traditional forms of marketing and advertising until this ratio changes.
To get started in SEO, I would recommend just setting aside an hour a day to dive in. At first start just by learning about SEO, either from some pretty good books on the topic here and here, or through a number of blogs we recommend to our readership, namely: Michael Gray (GrayWolf), Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl), Lee Odden (Online Marketing Blog), Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz), and Brian Clark (CopyBlogger). These books and blogs will provide good insight and instruction on the ins and outs of all aspects of SEO.
Once one has a basic grasp of SEO, they really should get themselves an account with SoloSEO, in order to put this knowledge to use, using the most comprehensive set of SEO tool on the web. Much like exercises in Accounting and Economics, actually using the tools, and seeing the results of your work, drives home the SEO concepts, and puts the finishing touches on the learning process. Through working with SoloSEO’s tools, a solid understanding of the pillars of SEO, namely keywords, links and content will form, and SEO will then seem not only doable, but pretty simple.
So once we understand what SEO “is,” then it is time to really understand our industry online, and review what our competitor’s are up to. This online Competitive Analysis can also be done using some of SoloSEO’s tools and reports. We must remember we are competing within a different marketplace, with new competitors, and how they have positioned their sites online, could and should influence how we position and optimize our sites today and in the future. There is not a pre-determined set of guidelines at this point for SEO, no matter what some might say, much of what we need to do to compete most effectively online will be determined by what our competitors have done and will do in the future. While the process of SEO is standardized, the focus of our specific SEO strategy will need to be flexible to face the challenges put forth by our online competitors. If we watch what they do, and manage our online SEO accordingly, then we can keep pace or outpace what they are attempting to do, and better our online exposure.
In my mind there isn’t a business out there today which cannot benefit from an online presence, especially a site that is well prepared, and skillfully promoted. Small business owners need to take every advantage, use every possible tool and strategy available, to insure their eventual, or continued success. I can think of nothing more vital, more accessible and more easily implemented (not to mention more affordable) than SEO. A site which runs well, and effectively targets the right potential clients, promotes a firm’s image in a positive way, while making sales, even while we sleep, or while we play golf (not that anyone would do this during business hours). Take the time to get to know SEO and you will quickly understand just how big your little company can become, and that realization can be quite jolt.
Visited 1608 times
August 7th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on July 6th, 2007
Just over a year ago Danny sullivan said “Look out Wikipedia, Here Comes Yahoo! Answers”. Yahoo! Answers is becoming not only a great resource, but also a social network (who isn’t, right?). I like Yahoo! Answers because people ask real questions and often get a handful or more of responses.
Sometimes links are all about ranking, but in this case you can get a good flow of traffic (Matt McGee on why he loves it) from a bona fide link on Yahoo! Answers. Every time I’ve jumped onto Yahoo! Answers, I’ve had a fun time. Not only responding, but also reading other people’s comments and questions.
Yahoo! Answers Made Easy
For starters, let’s make following your favorite topic really easy on Yahoo! Answers. They have a RSS feed, just like this blog and other blogs, that you can subscribe to and watch as new questions are asked.
http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=seo
Let’s say you are interested in GPS gadgets (i.e. you have a site/blog for GPS gadgets):
http://answers.yahoo.com/rss/searchq?p=gps
The name of the game is get there first (or early) and answer the question. If you answer it well, correctly, and in a thorough manner, chances are you get most of the attention and are selected as the best answer. Then “forever” afterwards if that search comes up in the SERPs you’ve got a great chance of getting some traffic.
The best way to use Yahoo! Answers is to primarily be there to help others. If you have something on your site or blog that is helpful, then point them to it. If not, point them somewhere else. A good mix of those would be very natural.
Do you ever have a hard time figuring out what to write? Why not take a question, or part of an answer to someone’s question, and expand it on your blog? Better yet, answer someone’s question on your blog (quickly) and then add it as a response!
Visited 3060 times
July 6th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on June 18th, 2007
Over at WMW there is a fun thread started by Habtom covering the Top 100 Ecommerce Tips. It’s kind of hard to read in a forum list, so I’ve put it together here for you (and fixed some spelling and capitalization). This has relevance to all sorts of aspects of Internet Marketing.
Before I give the whole list, here are some of my top picks:
99. Let the customer see the shipping charge without registering! Preferably on the basket or a easy-to-find ’shipping charges’ page.
94. Make your site incredibly easy to buy from - no registration if possible, live chat, 800 # - make it friendly and easy to buy from.
59. Have a “best sellers” or “most popular” listing. The boost from this has been noticeable.
49. Drop the “Create account” language. People don’t come to our sites to create accounts, they come there to buy things. I try to make the account creation process appear like the normal checkout process. If they enter an email that is already in the system, THEN I ask them to request their password to login.
35. Have a list of “recommended products” and “other customers also bought” with each item. This can be simply done in your database where you just connect products together and base it on what customers have actually bought. (okay, I admit, this was my contribution)
3. Test. Everything. A lot.
I really like #1 too, but I’m going to make you scroll all the way down to read it! Remember these are just random tips added one after another, so the advice is not always good in all circumstances. I do think there are some gems here, so go on and read through them!
Top 100 E-Commerce Tips
100. Never leave unanswered emails for more than 48 hours, or your customer is gone.
99. Let the customer see the shipping charge without registering! Preferably on the basket or a easy-to-find ’shipping charges’ page.
98. Make sure your forms use common names for fields so that they’re recognized by toolbars that have an autofill function.
97. Sites (mainly US!) that have address or phone fields that assume only a US citizen is going to purchase e.g. State fields that only allow a few characters entry.
96. (following on from 97) If you’ve got a country drop-down box, please list it in alphabetical order, and don’t put United States at the top!
95. Don’t just accept payment through PayPal. Many people have had bad experiences with PayPal and prefer to use alternative, simpler payment methods.
94. Make your site incredibly easy to buy from - no registration if possible, live chat, 800 # - make it friendly and easy to buy from.
93. Take a picture of your office and add it to your contact us page with your company FAX number on it.
92. Don’t bury your products in several pages of clickthroughs, implement a working search mechanism so the user can get to what they seek in two clicks, three maximum. Insure there are redundant methods of getting around and no point on your site is more than two clicks away . . . from ANYWHERE.
91. Keep your initial products pages light and clean, with links to product details if they actually want to read.
90. Build your site for the end user, not the search engines. This means leave off all the serp-y text on the initial products pages.
89. Give the user a sense of who you are. The web is a cold, anonymous place. Anything you can do to bring a sense of personality and assurance to your website will help.
88. if you use a site search, make sure it works better than expected. It should search more than product names. Make sure it can find products by SKU, Model Number, and even misspellings if possible.
87. Be sure to include links to your privacy, shipping, returns & exchange policies right out where the customer can easily find them. Tell them the truth.
86. Keep the customer informed about the status of their order before they ask
85. Re: Navigation - Use the same visual theme for every action required of the customer
84. Re: Product options - Make them clear and comprehensive. Answer every possible question on the product detail page
83. Make sure your site search can also search by size and color. If I’m considering a green skirt or blue towels, make it easy to find other items that would match.
82. Don’t use those standard drop down country forms containing places like North Korea or Bouvet Island (an inhabited speck in the South Atlantic. For heavens sake, don’t list known scam destinations as a ship-to.
81. Don’t start huge lists like this that require people to read every previous post thoroughly
80. If you only ship to USA (or wherever) say that right off and several times.
79. Drives me crazy when the “About Us” section says nothing specific about the seller and just has some obviously canned verbiage.
78. Mission Statements: Yuck! Luckily they seem to be dying out. No one gives a ****, anyway.
77. Goes without saying that spelling must be perfect. On slow days, have employees proof read old pages.
76. Bragging about yourself is ok if you have something to brag about. But better to not mention things like “Since 2005″ or “here’s a picture of our new puppy.”
75. If you’re new to ecommerce NEVER mention that. Invitation to scammers to hit you.
74. Get a real 800# (or 888), not a 866 or such.
73. Get the most web un-savvy person you know to test your site.
72. Customize product descriptions. Eschew text provided by suppliers which everyone else uses.
71. Listen to customers, invite their comments and criticism and act on what you learn
70. Answer emails in 8 hours max (certainly not 48)
69. Give street address but never “we’re in Puppyland Center, between Tony’s Pizza and the Shoe repair shop.”
68. Show good sharp graphics. Learn to use basic photo editing software.
67. Worth saying again, and again. Make everything fast and simple. Do you really need a wish list or tell-a-friend or even customer registration? Don’t just add to your site. Sometimes remove clutter.
66. (Follow on from 67) remove all non essential navigation elements from the checkout process. Have a single page checkout if possible.
65. Calling your customer to thank them and confirm their order instills immediate trust.
64. Make entering credit card numbers easy.
63. Install a really good stats system to track where your visitors bailed out of the purchasing process.
62. Pay good money for a proper interactive graphic designer (not a coder, web ‘developer’, or print designer doing a bit of moonlighting). If your web site looks professional, people will trust it and buy stuff.
61. Accessibility and usability - those 5% of ‘non-standard’ user groups all add up.
60. Add your 800# to every step of the checkout process with something to the tune of “questions or problems completing your order, call 800#)
59. Have a “best sellers” or “most popular” listing. The boost from this has been noticeable.
58. If your site ranks best in your niche, and If you sell something that is sold on many other websites (something drop shipped for you, for example), very slightly change the name — Tarenta to Tarento, Classica to Classico, for example. This helps deter people price shopping for the ‘product name’ elsewhere and in the shopping engines.
57. List your prices for every item clearly and upfront. There’s no space for a ‘price on application’ model online, none at all.
56. When using thumbnails to link to larger images give your customers larger images.
55. Pick the right product to sell. Something people actually want to buy. Preferably something lots of people want to buy.
54. If your target audience is concentrated in one country, host your website on a server and ip located in that country.
53. Promotional Offers: I believe offers are v imp. Now they need to be planned for first timers, repeat buyers and special offers for top customers.
52. Referral Program: Refer 2 friends and get x% additional/ discount always helps.
51. Actually have contact info - many sites hide their identity and location. Try to put the contact number somewhere on every page, it instills confidence.
50. Keep the 3 P’s above the fold on a product page. Product name, Price and Purchase link should all be visible without having to scroll.
49. Drop the “Create account” language. People don’t come to our sites to create accounts, they come there to buy things. I try to make the account creation process appear like the normal checkout process. If they enter an email that is already in the system, THEN I ask them to request their password to login.
48. Know your visitors - if significantly more people are first-time-buyers, don’t hit them with a login screen with a small link to register to the site - reverse the process.
47. Keep your cart on your domain - if for nothing else, it keeps your reporting homogenous.
46. Don’t use the “simple” methods of gateway processing where the visitor is redirected to the gateway site. It seems that on almost every implementation of these setups the webmaster fails to bring the most current site layout over to the gateway site and the visitor gets a whole new layout for cc errors.
45. Never tell the visitor to “Hit your ‘back’ button to correct”. I haven’t found a valid reason to do this yet - any issue should be able to be handled within the system.
44. Have a “Help” link very prominently displayed so they have somewhere to go if there is an issue.
43. For telephone purposes use a short and easy to spell domain name like … dot tld depending on locations or products use more than one, which redirect to a product or location page.
42. Get the credit card number first, ask questions later!
41. If you show a picture of the product and next to it a link that says ‘enlarge’ actually ENLARGE the photo rather than have it open in a new window exactly the same size as on the main page!
40. Ship fast. Preferably the same day and you are sure to get mails for appreciation.
39. Have points of re-assurance near the buy/add to cart button (bbb, bizrate, other ratings)
38. Use a proper ssl certificate.
37. If using paid advertising, don’t send them to your home page; send them to the relevant product page (or custom landing page) that is tied to the keyword you advertised!
36. If you sell software, allow immediate access to the full version and allow unlimited upgrades
35. Have a list of “recommended products” and “other customers also bought” with each item. This can be simply done in your database where you just connect products together and base it on what customers have actually bought.
34. Have a newsletter sign up and send out newsletters.
33. Don’t make the customer fill in the CC billing & shipping address fields when they’re the same, drives me nuts!
32. Vat number & Company Registration Number should be visible on the site in the UK to comply with UK Companies Act (updated Jan 2007).
31. If the product ships via a carrier, send an email to the customer with the tracking number with a link to the carrier to check status.
30. Use an XML Sitemap generator to create a sitemap to get a “big picture” of your site. Submit it to Google et al. and they’ll help you find dead pages, etc.
29. On category pages don’t just list product names, but include some unique content about the category for indexing.
28. Use a product rating feed or create your own system (if you have a sizable user base). A place for user-generated comments can be great, but it can also be a hassle (monitoring, lots of fake entries, etc).
27. If you sell the same object in different colours, offer them pictures of each colour.
telling a customer that you “also do this in blue” isn’t all that helpful because there are about fifty billion shades of blue.
26. Use a larger font (14+) for titles and product names to make them stand out and possibly increase conversions.
25. Stay away from dynamic URLs when possible.
24. Sign up for Hackersafe, Verisign and your related trade associations and display their logos to improve credibility.
23. Have a person answer the phone, not a recording.
22. If you cannot exceed the expectations created by your site, rewrite your copy. Underpromise and over-deliver.
21. Hang in there with the difficult customers-they become the most loyal.
20. Know when a customer needs to be given to your competition.
19. Consistency. Everyone has a different flavor, color, even brand. Key is to be consistant — have 1 text size and color for descriptions, one for links, one for category headers, perhaps another for main category links. At least theres a tone or vibe that your site is a statement vs a hodgepodge of stuff made by someone in their basement Be serious about what you are doing, and people will be serious about considering buying from you
18. If you use sessions, store them in a database, don’t append them to the URL, as people like the look of clean URL’s and often snip them to mail to friends to refer them to a particular product to purchase.
17. On checkout gather a name and phone number as the first 2 fields, store them before proceeding and ring all the customers that drop out before completing the checkout. (This alone turned a $1M business into a $5M business)
16. Make the font on your product copy readable. 12pt at least. NO funky fonts.
15. Make sure your buy button pops off the page and is big enough to be seen and clicked on.
14. Make sure the title tag on each product page is unique and reflects what is on the page. (It never ceases to amaze me how many companies in this day and age still have just the company name in the title tag of product pages). Oh, and product name first in the title tag. Not your company name.
13. Superstition does not work well with Business. What you may feel [to be] unlucky may be lucky for customers ranging from keeping Price Tag, Products, Colors, Day / Time of Shipping etc. [this one was weird]
12. Offer a strong guarantee. Don’t jast say this widget is guaranteed x days. Try for something like this: Try this widget risk-free for 30 days — if you don’t see an improvement in widget results — if this is not the best widget you have ever owned — return it to us for a full refund.
11. Add “District of Columbia -DC” to the list of drop down states, you be suprised how many sites are missing it…
10. And don’t forget PR, GU, VI and all the other US commonwealth and protectorates, that the Postal Service can ship to, at cheap postal rates.
9. Don’t forget US Servicemen/women abroad. Include APO/FPO state codes.
8 1/2. Add a 360 degree product view before the rest of the pack.
8. Play with the wording of your add-to-cart buttons. “Add to cart” is a nice non-threatening way to encourage adding items as some feel “order” or “buy” is too much of a commitment.
7. Be careful making a coupon field too prominent in checkout, especially in markets that are based on commodity goods such as electronics. Seeing the field may convince a shopper that was ready to purchase to exit and spend more time hunting for coupons. Consider relabeling as promotion code or something less descriptive (unless you are linking to a promo page with coupon codes to encourage larger sales).
6. Mine referral data of orders for search engine keyword queries encoded in the urls and further optimize for these terms for organic search or consider adding to your PPC campaigns.
5. Encourage impulse buys says a tip I read somewhere on the net, people don’t mind being asked “Do you want fries with that?”
4. If you’re going to ask customers to sign up for your newsletter during checkout, do it AFTER the payment is processed. Before the payment is taken, the customer is far more interested in ordering your product - but once you’ve taken their payment and they’re looking at your “Thank you for your order” screen it’s the ideal moment to get them to sign up…
3. Test. Everything. A lot.
2. Don’t assume the main goal of every commerce site is to make a profit. Publicly owned sites are often more concerned with selling stock and hitting wall street’s quarterly sales goals. That was true in the ’90s and somewhat true even now.
1. Amid all the costly free shipping gimmicks, 365 day guarantees, free return pickups, insanely low prices…don’t forget to actually turn a profit.
Visited 4696 times
June 18th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on May 7th, 2007
I love a challenge. In fact, if I don’t take on a challenge it drives me nuts. So when Darren Rowse came out with his group writing contest (project) with the topic of “Top 5″, I had to come up with an entry. I thought I would get creative and make a top 5 list of top posts from top experts in SEO.
Obviously I couldn’t cover more than 5 industry experts, as they are many more than 5. Also, if you don’t have a “Top Posts” page on your blog I couldn’t include you. Stuntdubl highly recommends you do that.
1) Michael Gray (GrayWolf) has a remarkable series on local search, but one of his top 100 posts on local search is titled 13 Ways to Promote Your Local Business for Free. He gives a comprehensive list of local search techniques and websites that anyone can make use of, no matter their budget. (Interestingly, GrayWolf’s review of SoloSEO is found on his top 100 posts page…neat!).
2) Todd Malicoat (StuntDubl) has a wealth of posts at his top posts page. One of the top posts that I will never forget is on The Link Building Cycle - 6 Steps of the Link Building Process. He goes through the entire process of building links, a great primer for anyone interested in SEO. I couldn’t leave out The SEO Playbook too, which will go down as a classic in Todd’s blog posts and SEO history.
3) In Lee Odden’s (Online Marketing Blog) most popular posts page he includes the top 10 posts in terms of traffic received. One that stood out to me is one of Lee’s signature topics, The Lowdown on Press Release Optimization. Lee was part of an excellent panel at PubCon last year on Press Releases. From his top blog post on press releases:
Other than press releases, another way to get into sites like Google news is to write articles and submit them to publication web sites and also blogs that are already getting picked up by Google newsbot. Perform a search on Google News for relevant keywords and note the sites that are getting picked up. Find out if they accept articles and press releases and submit.
4) Rand Fishkin (SEOmoz, which I prefer to pronounce as sea-moss just for fun) has a most popular ever page but you can also break it down to the past day, week, month, etc.. The top post ever related to SEO (first is his proposal) is Ranking Factors Version 2, which actually points to the actual article, but discusses its overall findings. This Ranking Factors gets help from industry experts to decide on what is important, what is not, and to what degree, in terms of ranking factors for search engine optimization. It is a must read (and must study) for everyone in SEO.
5) Brian Clark (CopyBlogger) is one of the blogs that really made a significant impact in our content business, and is a staple blog for anyone in Internet Marketing. In the sidebar of his blog he lists popular posts, and one that I love is How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide. He links out to an incredible list of resources that combat the topic of attracting links and increasing traffic. Refer to this list often, and you will find your SEO starts improving quickly.
These experts and others have provided a wealth of information for SEOs. Without much formal instruction in search engine optimization, this is where we can dive in and learn everything we can about optimizing for both users and search engines. This is one amazing facet of SEO, that SEO experts that charge thousands and thousands for this information will share it freely on their blog. It’s a fantastic community, and I have certainly grown in my knowledge by leaps and bounds just from learning from the experts.
Visited 5511 times
May 7th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on May 1st, 2007
I read an interesting/alarming Associated Press article by Dibya Sarkar, AP business writer, in the local paper yesterday. Four states, including Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia, have agreed to “free consulting services” provided by Google. Essentially Google is going to help these states make searching and finding online public documents much easier. While I am the first to admit the Utah state web site needs some serious help, I have been frustrated more than once looking for items which should be much easier to find then they are, I am not totally okay with the planned partnership. I will admit there have been occasions I have been navigating around utah.gov to no avail, not finding what I needed, and actually have attempted to use Google possibly find a page indexed in their SERPs, but with little success there either. Turns out states really haven’t done a good job making these documents truly public, there are those tax dollars at work again. But despite the mess, is Google the best way to go as “search consultants?”
There are those in the article who raised some concerns over Google’s occasional privacy gaffs, and the possibility that some private information might make its way to the search public. I think the hesitation is legitimate, none of us wants our Social Security number out there for the ID thieves to pilfer. So I too hope these states will be responsible and keep all private information private, even at the risk of holding some important documents back for now, before they go and throw the vaults wide open to the brutally efficient, ravenous spiders of Google.
From a business/SEO perspective this partnership also raises other concerns. Are we now going to be forced to compete for keywords against state governments and their Gigabytes of content to rank in the SERPs? Some industries will be hurt more than others, but off the top of my head I could see legal firms, business consulting firms, and accounting firms being big losers in search if all this content is indexed and added to Google’s already gorged servers. As more content pours online, competition for keywords is going intensify, and the situation may make search a more frustrating and difficult task if the SEs don’t change. This content boom adds a strong argument to the importance of categorized search ASAP. If the public is without a simple way to categorize search results, many businesses are going to find themselves buried in the SERPs underneath content created by their own tax dollars. How grossly ironic, how patently unfair.
Visited 927 times
May 1st, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Aaron R Stewart on April 19th, 2007
Lee Odden blogged about Google Categories yesterday. I wasn’t able to duplicate the categories look, but it did get me thinking about the ramifications to online competition if categories in search become commonplace. As well as how categories might influence our SEO strategies as business owners.
Competing in the non-online marketplace has been a focus of research, and resulted in various competitive philosophies put forth by some of the most respected academic business minds in the world. Michael Porter of Harvard fame is one who has essentially dedicated his entire academic life to the concepts of competitiveness, and is seen my many (including myself) as the foremost expert in traditional competitive strategic analysis. But it is interesting to note, competing online is a different animal, and requires a different approach many traditional marketers aren’t quite comfortable with. Let’s take the shoe industry for example. Locally I can think of maybe a couple dozen places I could go and buy shoes, depending on what type of shoe I was looking for. So these local shoe resellers now compete against one another to attract my business. They buy newspaper and radio ads, do mailings, maybe rent a billboard, but they each attempt to get their message out to us, to keep us coming to them, and hopefully staying away from their competitors. But they now also need to keep our attention away from online shoe retailers, which is quite a different task, but important as more potential clients find online shopping appealing. Personally, I can’t remember the last time I bought shoes from a local brick and mortar store. I usually buy from Zappos.com… because I love the huge selection, the customer reviews, the free overnight shipping, and the free shipping on returns. It is a fabulous, no hassle system. Not to mention I don’t have to drive to the mall, deal with the crowds, or with my 2 year old daughter demanding to ride the “wee” (her term for slide) at the mall’s germ ridden treehouse (playground). It is a cesspool of all things icky (bless my wife for always having some Purell on hand to keep me sane).
So as more brick and mortar shops finally decide they also need to have an online presence, they will quickly determine the online competitive environment is very different, and can be intimidating. Not only are there far more competitors, as the geographical bounds are erased, but there are also non-retail sites competing for the same precious keywords. For example, if you type in “running shoes” in Google, you will see both online shoes stores, but also sites which review running shoes listed in the SERPs. So online retailers have to not only compete against more than just other retailers for keywords, but against information sites as well, as they attempt to squeeze onto the first SERP.
I have mentioned in previous posts that we use SEO techniques to improve our sites, so they perform better than our competitors sites. We pay little attention to other sites competing for the same keywords, who aren’t selling the same products, or are just informational sites. For example, we personally don’t care if Wikipedia ranks higher than our site for a particular keyword(s), since a potential customer can’t buy the products we sell from Wiki. We don’t consider Wikiesque sites an important aspect to our competitor focused SEO efforts. But how would Google’s Categories SERP influence competitive SEO efforts? In the Google screen shot in Lee’s post, we can see the categories listed as Comparison Shopping, Reviews, Stores, References and Others. I would be interested to know how these categories were decided upon, and if these will be the only categories for every search return, or will the search categories change based on the term searched? Is the order of the categories consistent, or will it change based on the keyword searched? We will need answers to these questions to properly prepare our SEO strategies. Obviously Google will need to be aware of those which will attempt to game the system and get their site listed in the top category, or in as many categories as possible, without regard to which category they should properly be placed within. I would imagine Google will only allow any given domain to be included in one category, period, or will have some protocol in place to best deal with these issues and how to police the system to hopefully be as efficient and relevant as possible.
Despite all the potential headaches Google might face, I like the idea of searches organized by category. And what I like most as a business person is through a search engine category system, the online competitive environment would more closely mirror the non-online competitive world. Now retailers could compete to be included in the Stores section of a SERP, and Wikipedia and others will be relegated to the References or Reviews sections where they belong. Also, as a searcher out to buy a product, hopefully it would be possible to set my preferences to drop the sites in the Reviews, References and Others sections, so I would just get a page full of retailers for me to peruse, perfect! Then, if we also throw the whole concept of Local search into the discussion, all of a sudden I could see the same couple dozen local shoes stores mentioned earlier listed on a locally-based, shoe oriented SERP. That would be pretty cool, I still won’t buy from them, but it would be pretty cool. As they now would compete against one another, as they have been doing in the “real world” for quite some time. Pretty interesting stuff.
Visited 1758 times
April 19th, 2007
Aaron R Stewart
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Posted by Michael D Jensen on March 27th, 2007
Have you ever found yourself ranked for a popular one word keyword that you never intended on ranking for? Maybe we’re an odd ball, but the top one word keyword (besides our company name) that drives traffic to our site is “tagged“. That’s right folks, as in tag you’re it. Last year I created the Blog Tag Tree and it drew in literally thousands of links, many of which used the anchor text of “tagged”. Obviously this wasn’t one of those keywords in my keyword glossary, so I found it interesting how much traffic we actually get from this pretty unrelated keyword.
Content alone isn’t going to make it happen, links with specific anchor text is needed.
What one word keywords do you “accidentally” rank for?
Visited 1377 times
March 27th, 2007
Michael D Jensen
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