The Ecommerce SEO Specialists

How are you doing at reviewing your landing pages?  Do you dig into your Analytics frequently?  Are you obsessive over finding the best practices that will lead to the most conversions?  Or do you just let it slide and “take what you can get” from your traffic.  Hopefully not!  How would a 2% conversion rate vs. a 1% rate affect your sales?  We’re talking double the revenue!  So, we should always look at how we can be converting better.

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.

When you partner with Marketplace Earth, one of the first things we will do for you is provide extensive keyword research.  After all, it goes without saying that Search Marketing is driven by Search Traffic.  In the world of Search, we must be able to choose the best keywords that people are already searching for that will yield the highest amount of revenue.  So, how do we do this?

Well, when we begin our initial research, it normally will end up looking like a giant excel sheet of words with no real direction.  We compare numbers from Google Adwords Researcher, Wordtracker and other tools to compose this list, but now we have to narrow it down.  Here are the top three ways we categorize this list, and offer suggestions to you on which phrases are the best:

1. Traffic Volume - Does it have lots of search volume relatively speaking?
2. Intent/Visitor Type - What are people looking for in this search, and are they the person you want to have visit your site?
3. Conversion Rate - Will a visitor on this particular keyword phrases lead to a sale?

We also recommend running trial campaigns through PPC to give you valuable data on search phrases, the intent of the visitor and if it will convert.  With solid data on these three factors, you can priortize what was once a list of random information into Low, Medium and High priority phrases to target.

Keyword research is critical to the success of your SEO campaign.  Don’t neglect this stage of the process!

Several of our clients lately have asked us whether or not it is a good idea to have a blog on their site.  Our answer is an emphatic yes!  A blog on your website can greatly increase the performance of your site, and it is surprisingly easier to upkeep than you might think. 

Here are a few advantages of adding a blog to your site:

• Build the Content of Your Site -  If there is one thing that search engines love, it’s great text content!  Blogging allows your site to fit better into the original purpose of the internet - a hub for information.  While building informative articles, the search engines will give you a little extra love. 

• Become the Industry Expert - The more knowledge you share online, the more people will come to respect you as the industry expert.  If you are an expert, people (and search engines) will trust you, which in turn leads to more customers.

• Gain Links - As your readership grows, people will begin to link back to your site gaining valuable link juice. 

• Grow Your Business - Blogs build familiarity and positive branding and if I remember my business school training, the cardinal rule was  - people do business with you because they know you, like you and they trust you - blogging accomplishes all three (and they show off your expertise in a subject).

• Build Brand Recognition - If you blog the right way, you should develop a faithful following in no time.  One of the great things about blogging is that it creates credibility and a readership of devotees. 

• Share Knowledge - Blogging not only allows you to show off your expertise in a field, but you can do so freely.  When people get something from you for free, they are much more likely to become a customer.

• Record a Written History - Let’s face it.  We are forgetful people.  Blogging allows you to journal the chronicles of your business.  You can look back and use it as a timeline for specific achievements. 

• Create a Personal Voice - If your only contact with customers is in the form of PR, your business can begin to sound like a robot.  Blogging allows you to create a personal voice that people feel comfortable with.

• Make More $$$ - Building your site with quality content, more visits, higher domain trust, being viewed as an expert and becoming more personal in the eyes of your readers all lead to one thing - more sales.

If you are interested in setting up a blog on your site, please let us know.

Whenever you make changes to a web site, one of the most important considerations should be how to use “redirects” to alert the search engine to your changes to avoid having a negative impact on your search rankings. Whether you’re moving pages around, switching CMS platforms, or just wanting to avoid duplicate content and PageRank dilution, you’ll want to employ redirects so as not to squander any link juice (PageRank) that your site has acquired. There are multiple ways of redirecting, and it’s important you get it right if you want the SEO benefit without risk of falling outside search engine guidelines (such as is the case with “conditional redirects”).

Read more here: Redirects: Good, Bad & Conditional 

If you’ve been on the fence as to whether or not to start your own e-commerce store, there is no time like the present.  Due to recent and continual hikes in gas costs, more and more people are turning to the web to tackle their shopping.  Customers are finding the experience more welcoming than before as e-commerce websites continue to improve in usability.  Check out this recent article that states a number of mega-retailers reporting growth in online sales, including Gap, Victoria’s Secret and J. C. Penney — all are experiencing double-digit sales growth at their shopping Web sites.  

Have a online store already?  Take advantage of this current panic by being creative with free shipping promotions.  Several stores are reminding their customers of the high gas prices.  EBags.com, a purveyor of items like dainty clutches and backpacks, sent more than a million members an e-mail message late last month with an illustration of gas pumps set at various migraine-inducing prices. Then there was a pump that said “eBags.” It was set at $0.

More and more people are turning to the web, which means new people are becoming familiar and comfortable with online shopping.  Online sales are expected to climb from $175 billion to $200 billion this year, which makes it a perfect time to enter or grow in the ecommerce world!   

As we are mid-stride in the Christmas shopping season, we are on track for the best year we’ve ever had.  The optimization work that has been done year-to-date is paying off for our retailer clients (and us!).But it’s not too late to start optimizing.  Depending on the search phrases that are best for your industry, get started now in working with an SEO firm for the next holiday season.  Don’t wait until next fall, as you will likely not rank very well for the holidays.Plus, once you start doing SEO properly, it often requires making crucial changes to your software  which can take time.  Get a head start on next Christmas and start optimizing now.

With our wide variety of Ecommerce clients we can easily see the effects of the same links and the same on-page SEO techniques across different sites and the biggest factor in Ecommerce SEO by far is…

Domain Trust

Google slipped this variable into their ranking algorithm a couple of years ago and they seem to have increased its importance until today where it’s the dominant factor in competitive SEO.What are some elements that seem to effect domain trust?

• Length of time the domain has been in Google’s index
• Types of links and length of time those links have remained static
• Number of pages indexed within that domain
• Authority sites that link to that domain

When one of our clients seem to be suffering from a lack of domain trust in Google we initiate a careful, long-term sustained effort to increase their domain’s trust. There are no quick shortcuts to increasing domain trust (unless you have an old trusted domain you can redirect).So if you’re launching an Ecommerce business using a new domain with no domain trust, understand that building domain trust is going to dominate your SEO efforts during the first 18 months of your new online business.