I know.  I know.  You’ve heard it before from us, but the simple truth is that this small and easy task GREATLY improves your rankings.  It increases your chances at long tail traffic and Google loves, loves, LOVES fresh content.  So, why aren’t you doing it???

We constantly have clients asking us, “what can we do to improve our rankings?  Yes, I know all about the on page tactics – H1 tags, alt tags, meta data and link building, but I want more!”  To which we respond, “you should blog, consistently and get fresh content on your site.  Give the bots a reason to come back to your site.”  And BAM!  We get the blank stare and nod from our clients, but NO IMPLEMENTATION!

Seriously?  This is not a hard thing to do.  Set up a Wordpress blog on your site and get after it.  Why only $10 a week?  Because 2 posts a week will vastly improve your rankings, depth of site and long tail traffic.  2 posts take about 1 hour of work.  You can hire a high school student to do this, and they’ll count it as a good pay rate!  So, why aren’t you doing this.

Blog.  Blog often.  Blog as much as you can.  The internet is based on content, fresh content.  Don’t let your site become stale and useless to the spiders.  Be dynamic.  Be fresh.  Be original.  Be unique.  Use your keywords and write all about them.  Suck it up.  Do the boring work or hire it out for $10 a week!  Do it consistently and watch your sales improve.

As ecommerce owners, there are hundreds of things you have to do.  You have to split your time in site maintenance, customer service, product fulfillment, shipping, social marketing, real life marketing and about a thousand other chores.  It’s easy to lose site of your prices and let this task slip, but it’s critical!  If your prices aren’t competitive, you are losing out on sales.  It’s pretty simple.

So, how do you check?  Are your products selling on other sites?  If they are, then just do a Google search for your product title.  Take a look at all of the companies on the first page.  What are their prices?  Don’t forget to check the sponsored links as well.  Next, compare in Google Base (Shopping) and Amazon.  Are you competing?

One mistake that is easily overlooked here is your shipping cost.  Buyers want to feel like they are getting the best deal.  Internet shoppers, who are notoriously price sensitive, will drop you like a bad habit if they can get the same product for a lower price elsewhere.  So, don’t forget to include the cost of your shipping when you are comparing to other sites.  One extra tip here is to offer flat rate of free shipping and if necessary, increase your price.  You can still compete with other sites, but this makes it easier for customers to calculate the total cost without having to take the bothersome time to go through a checkout process.  You’ll be rewarded by this effort.  Trust me.

So ecommerce owners, get out there and make sure you are implementing routine price checks.

Price Check

So, how do you do it?  Let me just say that Google Analytics is your friend.  Let’s look at 5 steps to improve conversion rates.

1.  Troubleshoot Bounce Rates – Where are you missing out on sales?  A great report to look at in GA is the Top Landing Pages report.  Hit the Content tab and then the Top Landing Pages.  In particular, study your bounce rates.  Bounce rates are the percentage of single page visits resulting from this set of pages or page.  So immediately, this report gives you some red flag pages to work on, those with a high bounce rate.

2.  Compare Time Periods – Use the calendar feature in GA to your advantage.  I like to use at least 3 months worth of data when doing conversion rate analysis.  I also like to use the Compare to Past feature that allows me to track improvements or declines.  Set it to compare weeks, months or years.

3.  View Keyword Conversion Rates – Now that you’ve looked at your best and worst pages from a bounce rate perspective, apply the same idea to your keywords.  Click on Traffic Sources and then the Keywords report.  Which keywords are performing the best?  Which are the worst?  Is it price?  Is it selection?  I like to look at my top 100 keywords from a traffic perspective and view all of their conversion rates.  If it is high, 3% or higher, I’m going to do anything I can to drive more traffic to that page.  If it is low, 1% or lower, I’m trying to figure out why so that I can fix it.

4.  Research Your Competitors – So you have 10 products in your “xyz” category, and you think you are the cats pajamas.  Yawn.  Joe Schmo searcher sees 50 products on your competitor’s site, which renders you irrelevant.  Oh yeah, and it’s $10 cheaper when I look in Google Shopping.

Compare your site to others on the internet.  The simplest way is to Google the keyword phrase you are targeting.  Drill down into every website on the first page as well as the PPC ads.  Study your competitors products, selection and prices.  Can you match them?  Can you beat them?  We always tell our clients that your goal is to reach Comprehensive Saturation for a particular category on your site.  We define this has having the best perceived selection on the internet for a particular search phrase. If your competitor has 20 products for a keyword phrase, then you need at least 20.  Think of your category pages as sub-niches in your niche market.  Become successful in categories one by one and your conversion rates will improve.

5.  Make the Changes and TEST, TEST, TEST - Do whatever you need to do to be as good or better than your competitors.  Add more vendors and their products.  Be competitive on pricing.  Experiment with shipping options.  Make the changes on your site and test their impacts using Google Analytics.  If done correctly, you should see in increase in conversion rates and sales.

I can go on and on with this list and that’s what makes Marketplace Earth great partners to work with.  We have ecommerce experience from our own stores, and we know exactly what to look for to help improve your sales.  Yes, hire the SEO company to help get you traffic, but what are you going to do to convert that traffic to revenue?  SEO is useless without conversion.  But with great organic traffic and high conversion rates, the marriage couldn’t be more beautiful!

THE WHAT:

Unique content is basically self defined.  It’s something that you’ve created on your website that is not found anywhere else on the internet.  If you’re getting that uh-oh feeling about all that cut and pasting you’ve done, you should!  Cut and Paste is the enemy of unique content.

You can place unique content into 3 categories:

1.  Editorial – Producing something yourself on your site, hiring out journalists, hiring out copywriters are all ways to create your own editorial content.  This can be done by you or be outsourced.

2.  Machine Built – Something like the results you would see inside Expedia where there is tons of information placed together around data points.  They compile a lot of info in unique fashions.  This is scalable, but you have to be careful with this.  The engines may be able to discover that this is not truly unique.

3.  UGC – (User Generated Content) – In the opinion of many SEOs, this is the best kind of content, but it’s tough to generate.  You want to be able to build a community and figure out how to get people to do this for free.  Think of how powerful and scalable this can be – YouTube, Reddit, Digg.  If you can create this, go for it.

THE WHY:

1. The Search Engines Want Unique Results - Is it because they are jerks?  No.  Unique results help their users.  Think about it.  If you are looking for “Halloween costumes” online and you find the same thing again and again and again, you’re going to get very frustrated.  This happens in the travel world web sites a lot.  And by the way, the search engines are VERY good at identifying what’s unique and what is not.

2.  It Creates Value for Your Users – The search engines want to give proper credit to the citation source, and they want different results on their SERPs.

3.  Higher Rankings – This is really the one that matters.  Unless you are able to create unique content on your site, you will never be able to rank well.

So, there is a bit of the what, why and how.  Think through these above ways of How to create unique content and decide what makes most sense for your organization.

Let me put it this way, Dustin Woodard performed an investigation and found this out:

“It turns out that, at least in this particular three-month data set, the top 100 terms accounted for just 5.7 percent of all search traffic.  Expand to the top 500, 1000, and 10000 terms, and just 8.9 percent, 10.6 percent, and 18.5 percent of all search traffic is involved, respectively.

This means if you had a monopoly over the top 1,000 search terms across all search engines (which is impossible), you’d still be missing out on 89.4% of all search traffic.  There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend.  To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”

That’s one long lizard’s tail.  So, to neglect the long tail, you’d have to be crazy!  Here are 2 more great reasons why you should target the long tail:

1. Low Cost.  Low Risk.  - long tail phrases are less competitive and therefore are less costly to capture
2. High Conversion Rates – the more specific a long tail phrase, the more likely the searcher is ready to buy.  Think of a man looking for “men’s shoes”.  Now think of that same man searching for “men’s Nike red running shoes”.  This guy knows what he wants and if you bring him into your site, you may win the sale.

Here’s a great chart to illustrate:

Long Tail Traffic Benefits

Now, the most pressing questions is, “how do I capture long tail phrases?”  Here are a few ideas on where to start from Marketplace Earth:

1. Page Titles – When you sculpt your Meta Titles, don’t simply stop at the head phrases.  Use variations of your keywords to drive long tail traffic.
2. Product Descriptions – This is a huge element.  Take the time to craft unique product descriptions.  It will pay off!  Train your cataloguers to use Wordtracker and other search tools and use variations of the keyword when writing the descriptions.  If at all possible, get this content on your key, category landing pages in the form of short or small descriptions.
3. Blog – This is a simple way to get more and diverse text content on your site.  The search engines will eat it up, and you’ll have more chances to drive the long tail.

Moral to the story, don’t neglect the long tail!  It’s a powerful force and will help you bring in more traffic and sales to your business.

Many ecommerce owners have spent tons of time and energy on their home page, but remember, we live in a long tail world.  Your home page is not the only welcome mat to your website.  In fact, one of MPE’s top strategies are to target long tail keyword phrases.  So, are your deeper landing pages a nice greeting for your visitors?  If not, here are a few tips:

1. Reassuring Policies – Trust is key.  If you have privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them.  Don’t keep them to the home page only, and don’t sink them to the bottom of your page.  Reassure your visitors when they first enter.
2. Testimonials - Do you have reviews on your site?  Again, a customer testimonial goes a long way in earning a visitor’s trust.  Don’t hoard these on your home page only.  Amazon does a great job at this.
3. No Credit Card Forms – Think of your first time visitor as a first date.  Are you really going to try to round third and head for home the first time you go out?  Yes, we want the sale.  Yes, lead them to the next step.  But, let’s not get too pushy here.
4. Email Collection - Invite them to come back. If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS.
5. Look at Bounce Rate by URL – Dig into your Analytics.  Don’t only look at your home page.  Look at all of your landing pages.  Try to identify what’s working and what isn’t.  Then, make changes that will impact accordingly.

So there you go.  Break the myth that visitors are coming to your site only through your homepage.  Realize that your landing pages are just as critical to driving sales and work at upping your conversion rate.

Because of this, Marketplace Earth is obsessed with conversion techniques, especially ones that result in huge revenue increases.  This article is one in our Conversion Tips category aimed at helping our clients increase their revenues (and ours!).

Anyone who has any experience with owning or running an ecommerce store knows that there are a million little variables to running a successful business.  Because of our extensive experience marketing ecommerce stores (and because we’re store owners ourselves), we have identified 3 main “pillars” to successfully converting browsers to buyers:

1. Selection.  Let me say that again.  ”Selection”.  Deep selection.  We use the term “deep” because so many ecommerce stores are a mile wide and an inch deep.   They have limited “depth of category”. The number one thing that customers are looking for is selection.  If they think that others have a better selection, they will go to where the largest selection is.  Limit the number of categories on your site and provide the best selection that you can.  You will make more money this way.
2. Price.  Price is important to internet shoppers, although not quite as important as selection.  If you have the selection, work on your pricing.  Perform competitive analysis in your industry.  Create loss leaders in your categories with the purpose of selling accessories or companion items.
3. Trust.  Trust (or a lack of trust) is a major factor in low conversion rates.  How is your site designed?  Does your store look like it’s run out of a basement?  Potential customers would rather buy from a store where they don’t have to wonder if they are going to get their product, or if the order is going to be filled properly, or if their credit card or personal information is going to be distributed around the internet.  There are many things that you can do to increase trust with your potential customers:  A professional designed store, Trust seals from SSL Certificate issuers, privacy policies, aggressive bug testing, easy customer feedback mechanisms, the list goes on.

Good tuning!