E-Commerce for All

Are you feeling that “spring is coming” bug? Well, rightfully so, because right now is the time to plan for your spring marketing and tidy up a bit from the winter sales.

Most ecommerce stores have some season trending. This is very unique to both the store and the product line. So a store selling green widgets can be expected to trend sales in a similar manner to another shop selling green widgets… But not exactly, as they are many additional metrics that influence one’s sales.

So you should be planning for your spring and early summer products, marketing and trends now… So that you are prepared for this period in your business. Even especially if traditionally spring is a low volume period for sales.

Here is a checklist of sorts to help you get started for planning any marketing period, including this spring.

Trending: Unless you site is brand new, you should have some sales and traffic data that you can use to trend or predict the data for the upcoming period. I tend to concentrate on sales and traffic. I use both as they can be very unrelated for some websites. There are clearly some periods where even if the traffic is there, conversions are down… So to properly trend our potential for this upcoming period we should use both. You may even have other metrics such as, bounce, average order or similar that are specifically a target for your store.

Gathering the data is the easiest part, as you should be using a proper analytical stat program to record your data. We will use Google Anayltics for our example, as it is very popular.

When gathering your data, we are looking for specific trends within the matching period from previous years to predict, affect and produce a proper marketing plan for the upcoming period. So login to Google Analytics and lets get to work.

So we will pull data for all of March, April, May and June to cover our bases and provide some overlap. You will want to pull at least on year, more if you have them. I would not be concerned with using more than 3 years as things in your business and on the web change very quickly and it’s not likely to be very relevant any longer.

The example store I am using had a 2009 average daily visits of 279 uniques a day. There conversion rate for the year was 3.87%. You can see by the graph that holiday traffic is a crucial part of this store’s success and that spring is rather soft by comparison. You can also see that our spring period it right at or just a bit above average for them.

2009 Unique Visits

We can clearly see from this data, that traffic could be improved for this period…. Especially because they have a genuine promotable product line for spring sales. Now let’s have a look at conversions in relationship with this traffic… Do they convert well in this period?

2009 Conversions

We can see that last year, while traffic was average, they converted pretty well the end part of spring. looks very much like March should be our focus area.

Next you will determine your trend. You can use data from previous tears to do this… But if you lack that data no worries, this old restaurant manager has the equation to get you close.

Obviously, any data you do have is clearly relevant… But let’s say you have little or none. To determine your current rate of growth in both of these metrics we will poll the last 4 months. This is a weighted process with the greatest weight on the most recent data.

This applies to any metric. Gather the data for these metrics for Nov 2009, Dec 2009, Jan 2010 and Feb 2010.

We will start with March’s data from last year 8,043 unique visits and a conversion rate of 3.13%.

• Nov 2009 8,789 & 4.85%
• Dec 2009 14634 & 4.5%
• Jan 2010 7,604 & 3.67%
• Feb 2010 6,395 & 3.52%

For this purpose, with holiday data so much higher we will exclude Nov & Dec, unless we have 2008 numbers… Which we do. Nov 2008 7,419 & 3.18%, Dec 2008 8,861 & 4.00%, Jan 2009 6,146 & 2.99% and Feb 2009 5,742 & 3.22%.

Here is the math:

The math is easier than it looks….

Step 1: YOY growth, which is simply current year minus previous year.

Step 2: Trend. Like I said we will weight this for the most current monthly data. So 100% being the whole, we will use 12.5% from Nov & Dec, 25% from Jan and the remaining 50% from most current Feb. Something like this:

• 1 part : Nov. 18.49% plus Dec. 65.15% = 83.64 divided by 2 = 41.82%
• 1 part: Jan. = 23.72%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%
• 1 part: Feb. =11.37%

= The whole (88.28) divided by 4 = (22.07%) Current Trend

Last year March (8043) apply trend 22.07% = (1775 growth) This year March forecast (9818) unique visits… Into 318 average daily visits.

Check our math:

Last year average daily visits March = 260

This year forecast = 318

% of predicted growth = 22.3%

**Note that rounding changes these just a hair, but not to worry this should be pretty reliable data.

So this “math” can be applied to the entire period as a whole, or each month individually computed. The point here is to have an idea of what to expect, AND and basis to measure the effectiveness of your marketing this spring. For example if you did nothing last spring, and you know (above) what to expect if you do nothing this spring… Then you have a pretty good benchmark to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign this spring.

admin E-Commerce Marketing, Small Business

Ranking Factors

SEOMoz’s 2009 Search Ranking Factors survey uses a collective polling of some top names in SEO, including Aaron Wall, Michael Gray, Jill Whalen, Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox  and 67 additional top industry contributors who are invited to give their opinion regarding the weight of algorithmic factors for natural search in 2009.

The value of this report for the average website owner is huge, for me it is both highly valuable and thought provoking information, and some redemption as well.

Google and the other search engines use a highly complicated, algorithmic math program to analyze and rank websites in organic search. These algorithms are not made publicly available, thus SEO’s, like myself spend most of our time testing theories and analyzing statistics in order to develop effective SEO campaigns.

2009 was a pretty tumultuous year for organic search, all three of the top search engines made huge changes to their algorithms and we also saw the launch of Bing. These events made significant changes in the way we think and optimize websites. Fact is, 2010 is already looking to be an even bigger year of changes and SEO’s will need to keep their ears to the ground to keep up and be successful.

If I had to pick a phrase to best describe SEO, it would be:

Analyze, adapt and overcome

Top 5 2009 Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links (73% very high importance): This is simply other websites linking out to you with good anchor text. Anchor text is the visually click-able part of the link. We want to see links such as “SEO Services” opposed to “Click Here” to add the proper weight to the link. I personally strongly agree with this opinion from the panel, but would add that the surrounding text of the link, or lack of text is probably just as important. So essentially a link list is not nearly as effective as a link in the middle of a related paragraph for example.
2. External Link Popularity quantity/quality of external links (71% very high importance): This ranking factors hasn’t changed too much, basically, more links are better… More of the better links are substantially better. What makes a link better? Links from trusted, authoritative or seed sites carry more weight, links from topically related pages and domains carry more weight and more is still better. I very much agree with this and would add only that, getter better links is far more important than the number of links.
3. Diversity of Link Sources links from many unique root domains (67% very high importance): This means that for example, 10K links from different pages in the same domain is not as effective as 10K links from 10,000 different domains. You will hear many say that Google only “counts” one link from each domain, and while I disagree, I will say that they are severely discounted. So I agree with this finding as well and you should be seeking out as many backlinks from different domain sources as you can to get the most from your link building efforts.
4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag (66% very high importance): Your title tag is not a Meta tag, but rather an element tag in the <head> of your pages. This is the information between the <title> tags and what generally displays in your browser tab heading as well. Your title tag and its relevance to the page’s content is hands down the number 1 on page ranking factor. Proper use of keywords in this element carries a great deal of weight. The more relevant the tag to the page’s content, the more weight. Additionally note that the first words (left to right) are also given a bit more weight that the words further right. I strongly agree and this is probably your best time spent with your on page optimization.
5. Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted (66% very high importance): This is a little more difficult to understand, but essentially, just like PageRank, your distance from the trusted domain also factors as a degrade in weight/score. So if I have a page about “Green Bananas” and I have a link from GreenBananas.com that is best, but if GreenBananas.com links to FreshBananas.com who links to me, the weight is less. I very strongly agree with this, but conclude that most people are not able to determine what a trusted domain is. So for the sake of application, shop owners should concentrate on topically related links.

There are quite a few more ranking factors that were polled and we have found some additional tools for shop owners in these as well.

• Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com): Without being spammy, hard to spell or easily confused, using a keyword in your domain name is a very effective tool. Avoid dashes, non-phonetic words, number/letter substitution and urbanized spellings… But yes, clean short domain names that carry a keyword will give you a leg up.
• Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag: The very first heading tag on your page should be an <h1>. Proper, not spammy use of keywords in this tag carry some weight and should be executed by shop owners. Note that a heading tag logically describes the content right below it, and thus another on page factor of importance…. Most important as close to the top of the page as you can achieve, is given more weight than the content after/below it. (Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words in HTML on the Page)
• Existence of Substantive, Unique Content on the Page: Uniqueness! Is your page’s content duplicated elsewhere on the web, including your own site? Is there enough page unique content to allow the page to be considered unique within your template’s repetitive textual content? Using the manufacturers description is probably the biggest mistake we see here, it’s duplicate. Additionally, products and categories without a decent amount of unique text are duplicate with your own pages.
• Recency (freshness) of Page Creation: This is one I have been preaching for over a year. Google especially, wants to know that the lights are on AND someone is home. Set your mind and schedule to create at least a new page a week.
• Use of Links on the Page that Point to Other URLs on this Domain: Are you linking to yourself with good anchor text? How about your category menu, those are links too. Most effective internal linking will come from links to specific pages within a body of textual content.
• Historical Content Changes (how often the page content has been updated): Your Zen Cart helps you a great deal already with this, by displaying changing content features in your pages…. But updating your pages frequently helps you rank.
• Blogging and Engagement with the Blogosphere: Blogs are a very highly effective means of both delivering and maintaining fresh content… add the link bait factor and this becomes a must have tool for every shop owner in 2009 and more so in 2010!

Here are some comments on these factors from panelists you may find very interesting:

Russell Jones – If Google only ranked the “tried and true”, their results would be old and outdated. Recency is a valuable asset when links are hard to come by.

Andy Beal – Keyword use in external link anchor text is one of the top SEO factors overall. I’ve seen sites rank for competitive keywords—without even mentioning the keyword on-page—simply because of external link text.

Andy Beard – Keyword Use in the Meta Keywords Tag – ignore them unless using a blogging platform which can use the same keywords as tags. Google ignores them.

Christine Churchill – Taking the time to create a good title tag has the biggest payoff of any on-page criteria. Just do it!

Peter Wailes – Domain name keyword usage gains most of its strength through what anchor text people are then likely to link to you with, not so much from inherent value, which is lower in my opinion.

Peter Meyers – Anecdotally, it feels like freshness is more important than ever. I’m amazed how often a blog post ranks within the first day, holding a top-10 position before finally settling a few spots (or even pages) lower.

Ann Smarty – Domain strength is a highly important factor (still). We keep seeing pages with 0 strength of their own hosted on reputable domains ranked very high for very competitive words.

Ian Lurie – Use of Adsense/Google Apps/Google Search or other search engine-owned tools, though, won’t impact results at all. If your site is so hurting, SEO-wise, that you have to point an Adwords ad at it to get crawled, you’ve got bigger problems.

Adam Audette – CTR on a search result is a large cumulative factor, and brings in page load time as well, which is something we’re very focused on at present.

You know, it’s funny… At least our customers find it humorous, but most of the SEO you need is really common sense. Imagine if Google was your business, what kind of websites would you want to deliver your searchers (customers)? Hard work, lite reading and an overall drive to be successful are exactly what every shop owner needs to succeed. If someone told you this was going to be easy….. They lied!

admin E-Commerce SEO

Ecommerce Blogging

The need for “fresh” content has sent many shop owners looking for a blog. We have built many WordPress Blogs for shop owners in the last few months…. shop owners who realize the need to deliver content in a more effective manner. So today I want to give you some tips for looking at your planned or existing ecommerce blog.

First off, no offense meant to other blogging software… But I highly recommend WordPress. The features, speed and ease of use is the perfect match for most shop owner’s needs. Add the awesome widgets and other tools to take full advantage of your content for social media, and you have the perfect application for your online store’s blog.

Caution number 1…. I do NOT recommend that you host your blog anywhere else except your OWN DOMAIN. Something store.com/blog is perfect! Subdomains are redundant and unnecessary as well… They are in fact viewed as folders by Google and not a separate site anyhow. Host your own blog as the content is far more valuable to your business than any link from it hosted elsewhere.

Caution number 2…. I do NOT recommend using a module to integrate your WordPress within Zen Cart. Fact is you lose a bunch of WordPress ability and worse the issues caused by the integrations.

I agree that you want your blog consistently branded to look like your shop’s pages, but the level of skill needed to create a good looking, branded WordPress theme is pretty low as far a templating software applications goes.

Here is an example we did recently for a Zen Cart owner to port his offsite blog content in to his own site http://www.horseprerace.com/blog/. Notice that while it’s a blog the navigation on both the store and blog are linked to each other and it’s consistently branded (styled).

Caution number 3…. Do not build a blog unless you have something useful to post. Things like articles about your products alone will not fit the bill. You have to create content that is useful and searchable. A great example is another customer we built a branded blog for, Silver and Pewter Gifts. This Valentine’s Day post is excellent, and EXACTLY the type of content you will need to attract readers, searches and backlinks!

Creating valuable and unique content for your website is a big commitment…. with big rewards. The most effective thing you can do it create 1-5 brand new pages with great content on your site weekly. Google especially respects the frequency of the content and rewards you in rank and crawl rate increase.

But how will you write all of that content? Well, to be honest… you don’t have to write it all.

You can hire a writer to create content on the topics you supply. Make sure to check their copy here so you know it is unique and not copied. Content that has been duplicated… just doesn’t rank well.

You can solicit guest bloggers… Employees, distributors, high school kids… you name it. Find people who are passionate about your website’s theme and let them express themselves. You will find that many more are interested than you think…. AND guest bloggers are a great way to help to promote your blog as well.

You can buy private label articles related to your content needs…. BUT these articles, unless unique will need to be rewritten to remove the duplicate content. However, they are excellent inspiration for the new writer and provide a nice framework for the post.

You can write great blog posts yourself. Just jump in. There are ton’s of great resources availiable to help you get started. Check some of these out:

• Writing great content http://www.problogger.net/how-to-write-great-blog-content/
• What makes great blog writing http://writetodone.com/2008/01/10/what-makes-great-blogwriting/
• One of my all time favorites… Writing great blog headlines/titles http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/

Some things I would like to add….

Blog with your own voice, words from you with your passion and emotion will be the most effective content and serve to build your readership as well.

Write your posts in 2 steps… If you are like me the ideas are just swimming around in my head and I can’t even type fast enough to get them all down. So when I finish fishing my head for ideas… I have to reorder, restructure and polish the gibberish I have pounded out on my keyboard. I am am really so bad that I will generally have 3 to 4 sloppy copies before I am done… My brain is much faster than my fingers. Read every post in preview view all the way through at least twice before you embarrass yourself by publishing poorly written or unprofessional content.

Lastly… NEVER leave a user comment unanswered. NEVER

admin E-Commerce Marketing, E-Commerce SEO

Google Social Search

Impressed? Well you should be! Google has just supplied you the glue to bind and promote your entire social media campaign! In October 2009 Google released the new Google Social search for the purpose of experimentation. The experiment, deemed successful as many jumped in and tried it out, is now released in the Beta public format.

Cool, how do I get started?

If you have a Google profile already, just update it. If not get one!

Most of the information is general social media profile stuff…. But low and behold some great networking opportunities exist too.

1. The ability to supply a short Bio in html, including those precious links!
2. Custom links to your blogs and other promotable websites … and Your Google reader and YouTube profile as well.
3. Contact Info
4. Last but certainly not least…. a Cool Vanity URL with your username to link to. Here is mine http://www.google.com/profiles/MPrough

Missing?

Well there are a few things we like to see in a social media platform that are missing… Well maybe not implemented yet.

1. RSS feed opportunities … Well we can add a link, but…
2. Better image loading opportunities
3. More robust business related tools such as testimonials and recommendations

All in all, great way to give your social media campaign a nice boost…. In true Google fashion, for FREE!

admin E-Commerce Marketing