Today’s Volusion blog post discusses how you can use Twitter to help your search engine presence. You’ll receive information on how search engines rank tweets and best practices in optimizing your Twitter account for search engine success. Keep reading to learn more.
With the latest partnership announcement between Twitter and Yahoo!, the online community is in […]
Original post by Matt
Rishi Rawat of the Retail In The Eyes of the Everyday Customer blog posted a very thought provoking idea on his blog earlier this week: Could a retailer improve its natural search rankings by asking its email subscribers to Google its most desirable keyword phrase and click on its listing in search (especially if it’s on the second page of results)? Rishi calls his tactic “email marketing optimization” or EMO (not to be confused with emo or Elmo).
Click through rate in natural search could be a factor in Google’s secret-sauce ranking algorithm. SEOmoz estimates click through to account for 7% according to its Search Engine Ranking Factors report:
Note that SEOmoz’ research is based on the expert opinions of some of the world’s top SEOs, not of Google itself.
It makes sense that Google would consider click through rate as a sign of a web result being relevant to a search term. (Have you marketed yourself well in meta description tags?) Click through rates by human beings add that personal element to its computerized intelligence.
Another clue to the quality / relevance of a search result is the bounce rate, which is easy for Google to calculate the time elapsed from the click through to the click back.
A campaign such as what Rishi proposes is brilliant. His hypothetical email goes like this:
Subject: Search and win
Email Message:
1. Google gourmet chocolate popcorn.
2. Hunt down kukuruza.com.
3. Instantly take 5% off all our 27 flavors.
4. Promo ends 1/29/10.
Not only does this attract click through, but encourages customers to at least browse the site for something they want (27 flavors of chocolate popcorn — this I gotta see!).
Of course, the promotion could be reinforced through content spaces (banner images) throughout the site and the promo code auto-applied through targeted selling, writing a rule that all referrals from Google for the target keyword qualifies for the promotion in the cart.
Anyone going to give this trick a try?
Original post by Linda Bustos
One of the most complex industries for ecommerce is telecommunications or “telco.” Telcos may sell any or all of the following services: home telephone, cable/satellite television, dialup/broadband Internet/mobile broadband, mobile phone service. A telco may be “double-play” (offering any combination of two services), “triple-play” or “quad-play,” and often seek to bundle services to their customers.
Not only can services be bundled through online purchase, but often the services themselves are bundles within bundles. A digital TV service requires hardware, basic and premium channel subscription, length of term and may also involve promotional discounts. Mobile phone bundles are most complex – with selection of device (with hundreds to choose from), selection of plan, services, accessories, length of term and warranties/device insurance. Add to this that customers may want to port over a number from another wireless carrier, and needs to pass a more extensive credit check than a one-off sale. Current customers also need self-service tools to update/change their plans and services at any time.
If that isn’t complex enough, telcos also need to handle micro-geographic customers (regions and territories within countries). Available services, product selection, pricing and promotional offers vary by state/province, zip code, even down to home address for telephone, cable or Internet. The telco must employ targeted selling in order to show the content and offers (before checkout) to the right customers, collecting information either from the customer or through IP geolocation tools.
A telco or any other online business with micro-geographic customer segments (like grocery/fresh food delivery) has several options:
1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder
4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly
5. Do nothing (because do nothing is always an option, but usually not a good option)
1. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region before viewing product, direct customer to geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (Bell.ca)
2. Ask customer to enter zip code or select region and filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Verizon, ATT)
3. Use IP geolocation to automatically redirect to a geo-specific subdomain/subfolder (have not found a micro-geographic example, but many retailers already use this for country redirection)
4. Use IP geolocation and automatically filter product catalog or pricing/plan information accordingly (Rogers Wireless)
So now the question is – which is best?
Friction refers to anything in the sales or sign up process that causes psychological resistance to proceeding. Certainly interrupting the customer journey with a page or popup asking for personal information is going to cause some psychological resistance — especially when you’re asking for a home phone number or exact address.
Geolocation and filtering avoids the interruption that may cause landing page abandonment. Whenever you can cut out a manual step for the customer, you can expect better usability – provided your technology is working properly. Showing the wrong products/prices is worse than asking for customer input. But sometimes you cannot avoid asking for information, as geolocation don’t provide exact addresses or phone numbers, and are not 100% accurate all the time. So automatic redirection is not necessarily the best option in every case.
If you do need to ask the customer to select a region or provide personal information, I offer 5 tips:
1. Use a lightbox, not a page. Bell.ca’s lightbox shows enough of the product page underneath to assure the customer they will see the right page after providing the information. Verizon Wireless’ gatekeeper page is not unlike the forced registration page that customers loathe in the checkout process.
2. Include, in as few words as possible, the reason why you ask for this information.
3. If you ask for a telephone number or address, have a clear link to privacy information.
4. Allow existing customers to sign-in from the lightbox, and redirect them to the appropriate subfolder, or apply the catalog filter.
5. Store the customer preference in a cookie (rather than a session) as customers may research one day and come back to purchase on another day.
Whenever product pages exist under multiple URLs, you have a duplicate content concern. If you’re a Canadian telco with a sub-site for each province and a large product catalog, for example, search engines may not index your site fully because its allocated bandwidth to crawl your site is limited. If a product page is not indexed, it cannot be found in search engines. The best approach is to choose one region as the “canonical” region (perhaps Ontario), and apply robots.txt to the other pages.
If you’re using geolocation, you can automatically redirect a customer to the geo-specific subdomain or subfolder, or if you’re not using geolocation, prompt the customer to select his/her region.
What if you’re using geolocation plus a filtered catalog and a visitor arrives through search, comparison shopping engine, email or social media links and lands on a product that’s unavailable in his/her region? This is a good case for a lightbox that cross-sells similar items: “We’re sorry, this item in unavailable in your region. You may be interested in these similar products, or click here to launch our “Phone Finder.”
Okay, that’s nice but which is best?
Best solution depends on what’s technically possible for your site. The most advanced solution combines geolocation with catalog filtering – but again, geolocation cannot recognize street address or phone number. Often you can’t change a site structure quickly (or there may be a strategic reason you maintain subdomains/subfolders), or your ecommerce platform may not accommodate customizations like catalog filtering. The key is to make sure your solution is not too interrupting to the customer journey (check if your request for information page has high exit rate or bounce rate) and doesn’t cause search engine issues.
Ecommerce best practices for the telco industry
Selling wireless and media products online is a complex challenge which often results in a frustrating user experience and falls short of the expectations of seasoned online shoppers. Wireless and cable operators, wireless resellers, and handset manufacturers try to mirror the online shopping experience of their online retail peers, but despite their best efforts the complexities of backend provisioning processes and legacy business rules often surface for customers to see. For those telcos who have mastered selling online, the rewards are high—significant reductions in call center operation costs and increased ARPU.
In this webinar Product Manager Peter Sheldon of Elastic Path Software will discuss the best and worst practices that the top global telco brands employ in their online stores.
Webinar Takeaways:
- What are the biggest causes of shopper frustration and store abandonment?
- What best practices have emerged and what can we learn from other online retailers?
- How can complex availability, compatibility, and provisioning rules be simplified for a better online experience?
- How does the experience differ for new vs. existing customers?
- How can triple play and quad play operators simplify and streamline their online experience?
Original post by Linda Bustos
User-Generated Content (UGC) is hot topic these days because it’s a relatively cost effective way to close the sale, create customer loyalty, and boost SEO.
In case you’re just getting started let me take a step back. UGC refers to any content that users create for your site. UGC can be large-scale (like Wikipedia and YouTube, […]
Original post by Kate
A couple weeks ago, Internet Retailer announced that manufacturers selling direct to consumer is the fastest growing online retail category in its Top 500 Guide. Gearing up for our next webinar about direct to consumer retailing with Sally McKenzie, we mentioned some benefits and drawbacks of manufacturers selling direct-to-consumer online. Today I want to focus on how manufacturers can overcome the challenges of competing with retail partners online, and leverage the strengths of a branded site.
Keep in mind, there are 4 types of manufacturers who sell direct to consumers online, those with:
This post focuses on the first 2 — manufacturers who compete with retail partners (who may also be restricted in what/how they can sell online due to channel conflict).
Why do manufacturers lose consumer sales to retail partners?
Manufacturers that sell through retail partners may lose sales to retail partners because of any of the following:
How can the manufacturer overcome these challenges?
Awareness: Spread the word
Before you say “thank you, Captain Obvious,” hear me out. Awareness of your online store is important. Don’t be afraid to bid on your own branded terms in paid search. Put your URL on packaging (although this may upset some retail partners). Put your store URL on all catalogs, direct mail, TV and print advertising. For manufacturers who run their stores as separate URLs, subdomains or subfolders, choose a URL that clearly communicates the site is transactional, and redirect to your existing store if necessary.
Awareness: Drive new traffic through an affiliate program
Many manufacturers will not compete on price with retail partners, and will sell at full MSRP (manufacturer suggested retail price). While this may reduce your competitiveness, your margins will not suffer. Fatter margins can be passed off to affiliate partners who will promote your products on their popular product review blogs, shopping portals, newsletters or other web sites.
Awareness: SEO your content, and SEO some more
Branded sites have the search engine ranking advantage of a keyword-relevant domain name, but often rank lower than retail partners when attention isn’t paid to title tags, keyword-rich product descriptions, SEO friendly customer review content or worse, the site is built in full Flash without SEO.
I always tell retailers to write their own product descriptions and not use the stock manufacturer description. I would suggest to manufacturers to also write custom content for their web stores, and not use the same as is distributed to other retailers and affiliates.
Customer experience: Content
Though some customers prefer to buy from a retailer (whether online or offline), many will check out your site for more detailed product information to research before purchase. It helps to have better content than your retail partners to meet their initial expectation of good information on your site such as product videos, 360 degree imaging, downloadable manuals and in-depth product descriptions can attract customers.
Persuasion: Value propositions and assurances
If the content on your site “sells” the customer on the product, you win even if the purchase happens through a retail partner. But converting that customer on the branded site has several advantages such as higher margin, the collection of customer data and the ability to re-market to that customer. The secrets to converting the customer lie in your value proposition(s) and point-of-action assurances.
Consider Apple.com. You can buy an iPod from any electronics retailer, but only Apple throws in free engraving:
Plus it beats or at least matches any other retailer’s shipping offer - ships free, within 24 hours.
Point-of-action assurances include size charts, shipping arrival calculators, pre-checkout shipping and tax calculators, links to return policies, guarantees, security seals and so on.
Added value: Personalized products
Speaking of personalization, manufacturers have the unique ability to offer value-added services like build your custom product that retailers don’t. Some brands already doing this include Sigg water bottles (though Cafepress), Flip video recorders, Etnies shoes and Timbuk2 bags.
Retailers like Etnies already allow customers to share their custom creations with friends via email, but how much better to share with your social network in this Web 2.0 times by posting the image of the custom product to Twitpic, Facebook or a personal blog?
For example, Shutterfly allows its customers to create custom photography books and embed it on any website:
Customer service: Help them find the product in-store
Sometimes product is out of stock on your site, or you may only sell that SKU through retail partners. Patagonia has the ability to check its partners’ store inventory and redirect the customer to the retailer for purchase which is win-win-win for customer, manufacturer and retail partner.
While you don’t claim the sale yourself, you’re still putting money in your pocket and providing a good customer experience.
If you’re interested in ecommerce for the manufacturing industry, you don’t want to miss our webinar next week From Manufacturer to Retailer: Expanding Your Brand through Ecommerce. We’ll be covering:
• Blending brand form and function: making the transition to interactive, direct marketing
• Striking the balance between direct selling and promoting retail partners
• Assorting and pricing for ecommerce
• Making solid ecommerce technology and infrastructure choices
• Resource and organizational planning for success
It happens Tuesday, August 25, 2009 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT. Sign up today!
Original post by Linda Bustos
In our forums people have been asking “How often should I update my site?” The quandary, our forum users pose is “If I update my site too often it may alienate returning customers but if I don’t update it often enough it could hurt my SEO efforts!” Our marketing team discussed this issue in depth […]
Original post by Kate
When you think of keyword research, you likely associate it with search engine optimization and the importance of including keywords in various tags and body copy to appear higher in search results. But keyword research is essential to your entire online marketing strategy, and has applications beyond SEO, including:
Information Architecture
When you first set out to organize your site structure and decide on how to label your categories, you may have to make decisions between synonyms - especially for e-commerce sites. For example, you might have to choose between “athletic shoes,” “runners,” “running shoes,” “trainers” and “sneakers.”
How do you make your best guess which is most popular? Head off to Google Trends and compare each term, and make sure you set which geographic market you operate in, as there can be regional differences in preferred terms:
One thing to watch out for is some terms have more than one meaning - like “runners” (table runners, stair runners, wedding runners, runners knee, etc) or “trainers” (personal trainers, game trainers, dog trainers). You may, from this graph, conclude your best label is “running shoes” as it far outperforms “athletic shoes.”
If your site has been up for a while and you’re considering a restructure, you may also check on your pay-per-click data, comparing these keywords for impressions and clicks to your site, which would indicate that the search performed had intent to find information on products you sell. A searcher looking for “dog trainers” is not likely to click on an ad for “Nike Trainers.” If you get far more traffic for “runners” than “running shoes” then you may reconsider your current category label.
Using the customer-preferred term also aids in usability. People scan for “trigger words” that match exactly how they describe the product themselves. Customer thinks “where are the running shoes?” and scans the menus for that term, and may miss the lonely “athletic shoes” at the top.
Internal Site Search Optimization
Your site search may not be returning results (or the results you want) for user searches because your customers describe your products in ways you never thought of - including mis-spellings.
There are several ways you can research terms to tweak your search tool. An obvious one is your internal site search logs - mine them for frequent searches and test what results appear. Proactively, you can use the Buzzillions reviews site which employs customer tagging, Amazon tags, a thesaurus or the Google Keyword Research Tool to look for synonyms.
Sourcing New Products
Does your internal site search log reveal customers are looking for Nike First Touch II Astro Turf Trainers en masse? You might consider adding it to your product mix if it’s a hot item. You can also surf Amazon Bestsellers and use the Google Keyword Tool and segment your keyword results by last month’s search volume (to identify current winners).
Pay Per Click Advertising
Of course, keyword research is essential to PPC advertising. But many marketers stop at the Google Keyword Tool or an enterprise tool like Keyword Discovery.
One of the tedious aspects of PPC keyword research, and most difficult to thoroughly perform with just the traditional tools is negative keyword research use eBay for negative keyword research and hack Google Analytics to expose the exact search phrases for your broad matched PPC keywords.
Email Offers
You can identify hot products using Google Trends, Amazon Bestsellers lists or your Analytics, search and sales reports and use them in your email campaigns.
Original post by Linda Bustos
Search engines don’t just spend their energies trying to outsmart webmasters (or rather, SEO practitioners) — they also give back to the webmaster community. Webmaster tools offered by Google, Yahoo and MSN, help site managers identify various problems with their sites, along with other features.
As the TopRank blog illustrates, you can use Google Webmaster Tools for:
But that’s not all, you can also check out which of your site’s pages have links from other sites (the more relevant links you have from respectable websites, the better). This can help you recognize links from bloggers (maybe it’s positive or negative feedback), partners and other sites. It can also help you track your link building / marketing strategy — just don’t expect the tool to show you every single link Google knows about.
You can also use the “page not found” report to locate URLs that other sites have linked to that don’t exist on your page (a typo or a page that doesn’t exist anymore). You can “save the link” by redirecting that link to the proper page, or contacting the webmaster of the other site to fix the link.
There are cases when you need to block search engines from crawling certain pages or areas of your site. For example, your staging site and secure pages. Other times you might find a rogue URL that slips into the Google Index that you don’t want in there, like a URL with a session ID. The worst case is someone Google’s your website and that session ID appears instead of your home page, with the page title “ERROR” — I’ve seen it happen.
Google’s Matt Cutts describes how to prevent search engines from indexing your pages, and how to use the URL removal tool if you need to in Google Webmaster Tools:
Get slapped with a Google penalty? You can use Google Webmaster Tools to request re-inclusion (after you fix the reason why you were penalized).
Google’s not alone in offering webmaster tools. Yahoo and MSN (Bing) offer their own too. You’ll need to sign up for them each separately (with Yahoo ID and Windows Live accounts, respectively).
Here are links to get you started with webmaster tools from the big 3 search engines:
Google Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Site Explorer
Bing Webmaster Center
Original post by Linda Bustos
I returned this weekend from a week’s holiday and for the first time in 2 years, I didn’t take my laptop with me on vacation. (The magic of Wordpress’ scheduled posts kept Get Elastic alive while I was gone). With 250+ blog posts chilling in my RSS reader, I couldn’t wait to catch up on what I missed in the world of retail, marketing and tech geekery.
One of the events that happened while I was away was SMX Advanced in Seattle (Search Marketing Expo). Fortunately there’s always a ton of liveblogging coverage, as often breaking news from search engines get announced at these events, like support for the canonical URL tag. Because search engines are constantly working on improving their own tools and minimizing search engine spam, the “rules” and best practices for SEO (search engine optimization) also change. It’s important for SEO professionals, marketers and webmasters must stay on top of these changes as not to give outdated advice, and for bloggers to update old posts that may contain outdated advice.
While catching up I learned 2 important things about how Google follows links on a website:
1. How Google Handles the Nofollow Attribute
In 2007, the SEO world was a-buzz with a new trick - PageRank sculpting. The idea was you could control the flow of PageRank between pages of your site by plugging up “leaks” to pages like Contact and Privacy, so more PageRank would be applied to your product and category pages. (If you’re not familiar with the PageRank concept, please refer to this video explanation).
I recommended Stephan Spencer’s concept of PageRank sculpting for retailers in late 2007 as a “Killer SEO Trick Only 1% of Online Retailers Use” and referenced the practice in 9 Privacy Policy Usability Tips, Tips for SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs and Dodging Duplicate Content Filters While Assisting Affiliates.
What we understand now is that Google no longer treats the nofollow attribute the same, and the “trick” doesn’t have the same benefit as it had before. The nofollow attribute will still prevent PageRank from passing to nofollowed links, but there is no boost to links without the attribute - the juice just “evaporates.” If you’ve used the technique before, there’s no harm, there’s just no benefit anymore. The disappointing thing is that if you have a large number of links on one page (including links in comments on blog posts), they still dilute the link value of more important links on the page.
This is a perfect example why any internal SEO expert or SEO consultant you may be working with reads blogs, attends conferences (or at least keeps up with the event coverage) and stays on top of the industry, otherwise you may get advice that is either a waste of time or at worst, get you banned from search engines. It’s also important for bloggers like me to update old posts to reflect new information.
2. How Google Handles Javascript and Flash
Equally if not more important, your web developers should understand how Google and other search engines handle Flash, Flex, AJAX and Javascript. Google annnounced advances in searchability of Javascript and Flash at its own Google I/O event, and Vanessa Fox’s explanation is a must read for all of your Web developers. Whether you’re working with internal or outsourced devs, send them this article today.
Original post by Linda Bustos
This is the final installment of a 4 part series on mobile commerce design and usability…
Part 1: Home Pages and Navigation
Part 2: Search and Category Pages
Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary
Part 4: Forms and Checkout
This series is based on a review of 10 mobile ecommerce sites: Best Buy, Target, Sephora, Moosejaw (old and new design), Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Ralph Lauren and Tickets.com. (Links point to mobile versions of each site)
As I mentioned in Part 3: Product Pages and Cart Summary, Best Buy, Sephora, Target and Moosejaw’s new site don’t support mobile checkout. Sites mentioned in this post are Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Sears2Go, Moosejaw’s old site and Ralph Lauren.
I typically recommend ecommerce sites to include the following in their checkout processes to maximize conversion:
When “checking out” mobile checkout processes, I noticed that none of them showed the progress indicator, linked to a privacy policy or had a “click to call customer service” link (perhaps because you can’t talk on your handset and input information at the same time like you can on a computer). I was unable to tests personalization/tagging capabilities.
At least one mobile site followed each of the rest of the best practices:
Guest Checkout Option
Nobody wants to be forced to register before checkout on the Web, how much more on a mobile device!
Barnes and Noble states explicitly that registration is not required, and hints that registration has a benefit — faster checkout next time:
Sears2Go also explains the benefit of registration and allows guest checkout, but puts the guest checkout option first and includes a bold button with the label Guest Checkout. Sears understands customers don’t necessarily read text, and Guest Checkout is self-explanatory.
Showing guest checkout first can improve conversion, as the customer is less likely to assume he/she needs an account or will be forced to create one to proceed. This approach assumes the customer wants the fastest checkout possible, which customers appreciate.
Ralph Lauren combines the sign in page with the first step of checkout (billing and shipping information). This approach can reduce the total number of steps.
Amazon’s simple log in is consistent with its Web checkout. It’s actually a required registration — but it appears so easy it doesn’t feel like a forced reg, your account creates itself as you go through the checkout process.
The downside to customer log in is it relies on email and password combinations which returning shoppers often forget (you have to remember at least your email address to request a password hint). Many simply create a new account - making it harder to reconcile customer information (one loyal customers looks like 5 flaky ones). This is an issue for both online and mobile channels.
Security Assurances
Despite the public’s fear of mobile payment security (as discussed in our Multichannel 2.0 webinar), none of these mobile sites had security assurances except for Amazon’s link “Why using a credit card is safe”
Ask For Email in First Step
The earlier in the checkout process you ask for an email address, the easier it is to follow up with a customer if the cart is abandoned with a triggered recovery email. Though the idea of chasing after a customer for changing his or her mind is controversial, many retailers have managed to save sales this way.
Of course, Amazon’s first step is the email address. The rest ask for an email address after 8-10 required fields on the Billing/Shipping page. Because some folks are paranoid about giving away any contact information, B&N includes “Your email address is required so that we can contact you about your order” and SearҀGo uses “Tell us where to send your confirmation email.” It might help to include a one-liner about your email privacy policy (i.e. you won’t share the address or send promotional emails.) Unfortunately Ralph Lauren has no assurances, and even pre-checks the email list permission box.
Perceived Difficulty of Forms
The longer the form, the more tedious it appears and the less the customer wants to bother with it. But most customers recognize asterisks (*) separate the required fields from the optional, so it’s key to include them.
It’s not a good idea to provide unconventional instructions like *Bold fields are required (which fields are bold below?). Never assume your customer is going to notice.
Allow Quick Copy of Billing Address to Shipping
This is standard for new customers, while returning customers and account holders should be able to select from existing shipping addresses and billing methods, like Amazon:
The only thing that’s confusing on a mobile screen is which button corresponds to which address when you have more than 1 or 2 to choose from. A little triangle marker pointing to the address on each button would help. An incorrect shipping address is a major problem.
A side note: Moosejaw’s old site (the new site has no checkout) had a time-saving feature where you enter your phone number in the first step, and based on your area code your city, state and country are pre-filled in the Billing Address step.
Estimated Arrival Times
I’ve mentioned before it’s a good idea to show actual dates of estimated arrival rather than “X business days.” It requires less thinking for the customer. Of the 4 sites, only SearҀGo provided dates rather than days:
Edit Cart in Process
Many retailers like Amazon remove navigation when a customer enters the checkout process in hopes to keep the customer in the funnel, but this can be a problem if the customer wants to make a last minute edit or add more products to the cart. Barnes and Noble allows cart editing, and Sears2Go allows an escape back Home or to the Shopping Cart summary. Even Amazon has a “Shopping Cart” link in it’s mobile checkout.
Alternative Payments / Pay by Phone
I didn’t notice any alternative payment options like PayPal mobile, but Barnes and Noble interestingly provided a Pay By Phone option. This isn’t a bill-to-phone-bill option (as discussed in the Multichannel 2.0 webinar), rather you can “Call 1-800-843-2665 (1-800-THE-BOOK)” to complete your order. You will be given a confirmation number to cite when you call after you have completed your order (on your phone and by email).
Perhaps some customers perceive this as more secure than entering a credit card over an unsecured mobile network, although placing an order by telephone carries its own security risks. It might also be a headache for Barnes and Noble if customers complete orders and don’t follow through with the phone call authorization.
With only a handful of reference sites, this series is not intended to be a best practices guide, rather a collection of recommendations based on observations. Please keep in mind I was viewing these sites with the iPhone and experiences on other devices may vary.
Most usability guidelines for the WWW carry over to Mobile Web, while common usability problems are exacerbated by mobile devices’ smaller screens and keyboards (or lack thereof), flakiness of mobile Internet connections and lack of standards between mobile designs, browsers and operating systems.
My recommendation is to have a mobile friendly site if the mobile channel is part of your retail strategy (whether for transactions or just customer service). When designing for the mobile Web, make sure you check out competitors’ sites in your industry, test your site on many different devices and involve real users in your testing.
I would love to hear your thoughts on your experience on mobile commerce sites, on this blog series or about your own efforts with mobile commerce in the comments.
Original post by Linda Bustos
PPC and SEO are two acronyms that are thrown around a lot by businesses these days. But what exactly is the difference between the two? Please see our chart below for a full explanation of the differences:
Note: While some small businesses prefer to rely solely on PPC because it is faster and often much cheaper […]
Original post by Kate
Welcome to PPC Myth week! Today is the first installment of a 3 part series challenging common misconceptions about search marketing and analytics.
Myth #1: Organic search more qualified traffic than paid
I was surprised to see in print one of the most respected search marketing gurus state “Organic searchers who click on your pages are highly qualified visitors to your site. They are much more likely to make a purchase than some other kinds of visitors you receive.”
In fairness, the guru went on to explain that banner ad clickers are less qualified than searchers actively looking for a product in a search engine. Nevertheless — to claim that organic searchers are highly qualified is false. It also implies that organic search converts better than paid search, comparison engines, email traffic, affiliate leads and so on. This just ain’t so.
1. SOME organic traffic is better “qualified” than others.
Remember, in this context “qualified” means more likely to purchase. If you look through your organic search referring keywords, you’ll find a number of non-transactional terms, and transactional terms that are not necessarily close to purchase or even relevant to what you offer.
Examples from the 2010 Olympic Store:
Also, organic conversion can vary by search engine. It’s possible for your market, traffic from Yahoo, AOL or MSN sends you more shoppers and Google sends you more information hunters.
2. SEO vs. PPC - it depends on the keywords.
PPC traffic “quality” also depends on which keywords get clicked - especially if you’re using the broad match type. In fact, broad match can trigger some really un-qualified traffic. If you were only bidding on a certain number of close-to-purchase keywords with the exact match type - you *could* argue PPC is more qualified than SEO if your conversion rates also confirm so.
3. Other channels - it depends…
Comparison engine traffic is *typically* closer to purchase since visitors have already evaluated your offer against competitors and the product against other alternatives, comparison engine traffic should convert better in theory. Your results may vary.
Similarly, email and affiliate referrals have been exposed to your brand and offer before clicking through - you’d expect better results for these channels than search. Again, your results may vary.
Type in traffic (no search engine or other site referred the visit) indicates brand awareness, and perhaps preference. Repeat customers, brick-and-mortar customers or people responding to offline advertising may convert higher than SEO/PPC traffic that’s also clicking on several other results to compare. But direct traffic can also indicate you should filter out your own staff’s IP address or you have missed Javascript tags on some pages (causing a null reference).
So what’s the point of this rant? I don’t want anyone making decisions to invest more into SEO than other channels because they heard that organic search is the most qualified traffic. I don’t want you to set the wrong expectations on organic search, and set goals like “increase organic visits” or “increase conversion for organic visitors.”
Original post by Linda Bustos
A common SEO problem for ecommerce sites is CMS (content management systems) that create different URLs for a product that lives under multiple categories. The main reason this is bad for SEO is search engines only allocate so much bandwidth to crawling your site. If most or all of your product pages have duplicates, you’re less likely to get your site fully crawled and indexed — meaning lost organic search opportunity.
The above shows 6 copies of the product page for Abercrombie’s Clarissa skirt are currently indexed in Google. Half of the links lead to a 404 page, the rest look like this:
http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?storeId=11306&catalogId=10901&productId=482314&langId=-1&categoryId=12280&parentCategoryId=12203&colorSequence=01
http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?langId=-1&storeId=11306&productId=482314&parentCategoryId=12203&catalogId=10901&categoryId=12280
http://www.abercrombie.ca/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_11306_10901_482314_-1_12280_12203
The best practice is to use a global alias for the product page URL for the UI to look up and render instead of the category-specific URL. If you wish to maintain breadcrumb trails, use a session ID or cookie to track which categories the customer clicked to locate the product. If the visitor lands on the page without browsing through a category menu (search engine referral, affiliate link, PPC ad, email, site search etc), default to a parent category.
Keep in mind that session IDs can get crawled and indexed by search engines, creating even worse duplicate content issues (and security issues with some ecommerce platforms). To block search engines from crawling URLs with session IDs, use this syntax in your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?
Other benefits of reducing duplicate content is it prevents Page Rank dilution and may simplify your web analytics (product page views and conversions aren’t spread over multiple URLs).
Original post by Linda Bustos
The “Big 3″ search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) broke big news last week with the announcement they will support a Canonical URL tag to help webmasters (and search engines) better manage duplicate content issues. Duplicate content refers to identical or near-identical blocks of text on more than one page in a search engine’s index.
Examples of duplicate content on ecommerce sites:
Duplicate content problems include:
Duplicate content can also occur across domains, like multi-stores with country-specific domain extensions like yoursite.co.uk or if many retailers are using stock manufacturer descriptions. The Canonical URL Tag does not remedy this situation.
Up until February, 2009, webmasters dealt with duplicate content by “sculpting PageRank” with rel=”nofollow” attributes, rel=”noindex” or using 301 permanent redirects. Now you can specify which is the original version of your content with the
tag and rel=”canonical” attribute in a page’s head section, like:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://estore.com/womens/sweaters/esprit/B3H4H5"/>
Which *should* nudge search engines in the right direction when choosing which URL to display.
I say *should* because search engines consider this a hint rather than a directive - much like my hairdresser, you can give your suggestion but it’s going to do whatever the heck it wants. Nevertheless, I believe this will help a lot of online retailers’ SEO efforts and reduce the headache of duplicate content.
Bonus if you got the “canon” and “shot” pun in the title, yes I know it’s kinda lame.
The ecommerce platform of the future
When: February 18th, 2009 @ 9am PT/12pm ET
Presenter:
Brian K. Walker, senior analyst for ecommerce technology, Forrester Research
Register to Attend…
Original post by Linda Bustos
This is a guest post / case study contributed by Dr. Pete Meyers of User Effect.
When economic times are tough, even the most level-headed of us sometimes make the mistake of changing our websites just for the sake of change. If the money’s not coming in, something must be broken, right? Maybe, but without knowing why it’s broken, you’ve got a good a chance of breaking it even more. Consider this post a parable in the dangers of overreacting.
Step 1. The Imaginary Problem
Recently, I was working with a client in the event industry who was concerned about the bounce rate on a key page and the strength of their call to action. To make a long story short, we had a page with multiple buttons, calling users to 3 different actions based on their preference. Those buttons looked something like this (altered slightly for client anonymity):
The client felt that we simply weren’t creating enough urgency with the relatively weak “Enroll Online” call to action. There was a certain logic to that argument, and it fit some conventional wisdom on conversion tactics. As usual, the biggest mistakes often have a certain logic to them.
Step 2. The Ill-advised Solution
So, we set about creating 3 variations on the first button. The logic was that “Enroll Online” was too vague and wasn’t conveying a sense of urgency, so we created a version with “Now” and the more emphatic “Now!” Exclamation points are always a wild-card in calls to action, in my experience, so it seemed worth testing. The new buttons (versions A, B and C), looked like this:
Step 3. The (almost) Disastrous Results
Fortunately, we ran a split-test (A/B/C) through Google Website Optimizer and saw a disturbing pattern very quickly. The most emphatic option (“Enroll Now!”) was showing a 37% drop in conversion! Although version B eventually leveled out a bit and only showed a minor loss, both “Now” options performed worse than the original.
What Happened?
Interpretation is always the hardest part of testing, but I think the story goes something like this. In our rush to make a change, we forgot something very important: most of our visitors require multiple visits to convert. They typically have to compare events, get budget approval, etc., and tend to come back a handful of times before enrolling. By pushing them too hard to enroll Now!, we ultimately forgot who our customers were.
Lessons in Overreacting
Of course the lesson here is an old one: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. We didn’t have the evidence to suggest our buttons were at fault, and in the rush to change the site, we fixed something that should have been left alone. The second lesson is that testing might just save your life, or at least your ROI. Ultimately, this negative change only went out to a third of our visitors for a couple of weeks. Had we rolled the change out without testing and run it for a few months, that 37% conversion drop would have easily cost my client thousands of dollars.
Dr. Peter J. Meyers is the President of User Effect, a former start-up executive, cognitive psychologist, and (nearly) lifelong programmer. For the past 11 years, Dr. Pete has worked directly with business owners and executives to improve their online return on investment. He has recently published a new e-book: Converting The Believers, a guide to using analytics, usability and testing to drive online sales.
Selecting the Right Ecommerce Software in Six Weeks or Less
When: January 21st, 2009 @ 9am PT/12pm ET
Panelists:
Bill Mirabito, Founder and Principal Analyst, B2C Partners
Jason Billingsley, VP Innovation, Elastic Path Software
Register to Attend…
Original post by Linda Bustos
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