Posts tagged ecommerce
Taking Over the World: Setting up Your Site for Effective International SEO
Feb 18th
The Internet is the great equaliser, allowing small businesses to compete with large, and everybody to put forth their own opinions. While there are some advantages to being a big fish in the WWW pond, there are also some tricky issues to contend with. The first of these is hosting and targeting for international websites – today we explore some SEO based recommendations for businesses that are trying to take over the world! More >
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Pt 3
Apr 27th
This could very easily have been a 50-part series, rather than just 3! Today we look at some more of the ways the internet has changed our lives … for the same of a little bit of nostalgia, and a little bit of perspective on the importance of internet marketing!
- We can talk to people overseas for free. Skype and other VOIP programs are making global business and other contacts not only possible, but affordable.
- Services are available at any time of day. Here we don’t just mean the possibility of buying something at any time of day (only to have it delivered when it suits the post office). There are also services we can access 24/7 – online libraries, netbanking, etc. Service based business need to take note – internet marketing is not just for ecommerce!
- People have access to undesirable information they wouldn’t have had before. Information about explosives, drugs, and all sorts of illegal activities is now on the net .. and very hard to police without infringing free speech, or running into practical barriers.
- Youtube! There’s no other way to explain the mostly pointless, sometimes hilarious, occasionally very useful phenomenon that is Youtube.
Despite the negative aspects of the net, we know we could never do without it!
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Part 2
Apr 22nd
Last time we began our look at how the internet has changed our everyday lives. Truthfully, it’s hard to imagine how the internet, Google, and therefore SEO haven’t had an impact on some aspect of life! We continue to nut out the specifics.
- Business is now often conducted with no physical customers. Ecommerce couldn’t have existed before the internet – now some of the biggest companies in the world don’t actually have a storefront that people can walk into.
- Businesses are often run with no physical employees. Okay, maybe not completely – but telecommuting and freelancing have seen an unprecedented explosion since the internet became commonplace in people’s homes.
- Copyright has become much easier to violate, unfortunately. The music and movie industries are suffering especially with the invention of peer-to-peer technology, after the first incarnation, Napster, was successfully shut down.
- People are now able to publish their own thoughts about something, and have it accessible to a multitude of people at the same time, via Blogger and WordPress’s free platforms.
It’s amazing – and we aren’t finished yet! Stay tuned.
How Has the Internet Changed Our Lives? Part 1
Apr 20th
There is little question that the internet has changed our lives. But sometimes, when you’re looking from afar at a forest, it’s difficult to see the trees! Today we begin a multi-part look at the specifics of how the internet and web marketing have changed our lives, right down to the nitty-gritty.
Things were very different before the internet...
- The word “Google’ entered our vocabulary as a verb – to “Google” something
- The net has made it possible for us to buy whatever we need, from pretty much anywhere in the world. As long as you’re willing to pay the delivery charge, of course.
- We can now hunt down (no, not ‘stalk’!) old friends from school, thanks to the one social networking site that just about everybody on the planet uses – Facebook.
- We can also keep in touch with people we have no interest in stalking far more easily via any social networking site.
- The internet has made the world seem a lot smaller. Prior to the real development of the online environment, we depended on the television news (or the little-read ‘World’ section in the Saturday paper) to get our overseas news. Now we can get intimate details about almost any other country’s politics, culture, challenges and people.
It’s amazing to think of a world without internet and web marketing now – we continue our overview of life pre-W3 next time!
Slippery Websites – Do You Have One?
Mar 16th
I love the metaphor of ‘slippery’ for a website – I can just imagine the site trying to hold onto visitors that are like egg white … they fall apart in your hands and slip down your wrists. Or the site itself can be like a slide – people arrive at the top, and quickly make their way off at the bottom. If your SEO can get people to your website without a problem, but have trouble making the money you should, we look at some steps to take to slow the journey.
Is this how slippery your website is?
1. Find out who you are selling to
So, so many companies say “We sell to whoever needs our products”. This may be true – but every company finds that a large portion of their customers are derived from a certain demographic segment. They might be mostly women, they might be mostly of childbearing age, and they might be mostly located within your physical area. Demographic analysis of your current customers is the first step to getting rid of that slip.
2. Understand your market
Understand their preferences for colour, their design sensibilities, the way they search for information, etc. Then pander to those sensibilities in your website, whether or not they also appeal to you. Everybody is different … and the only people you need to please are the ones that are keeping you in business.
3. Do usability studies
Jakob Nielsen is the grandfather of usability (often the grumpy old man of usability, actually J), and his blog at www.useit.com has lots of good usability info, hints and tips for where you might currently be going wrong. Of course, there is no substitute for an expert eye in this arena … many web marketing specialists work on usability and web design as well as SEO.
4. Build trust on your website
If you don’t have SSL security certificates, a https: connection for your credit card entry page, security certificates for programs like Verified by Visa, etc, there are few customers now that would entrust you with their money.
5. If you have an ecommerce site, link to other products from many places
If consumers can’t quickly find what they want, or don’t see any indications that you might have what they want, they will often click straight off. Use Top Seller widgets, ‘Also Recommended’ sections, and include ‘Customers who purchased this item also bought’ sections, a la Amazon.
Conversion optimisation is a big topic and you can spend years refining it – but without it, every SEO dollar you spend could be wasted.
3 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Web Marketing Success
Feb 10th
Ecommerce sites have created some of the greatest success stories in the world wide web. Just think Amazon and eBay, and you’ll start to get an idea of how many dollars are generated through ecommerce and the associated web marketing. It’s actually likely that the cheapness, availability and choice that buying on the internet provides, actually boosts the number of dollars spent worldwide and shores up the world’s biggest economies.
How healthy is your website's shopping cart?
So how do you get a slice of the pie?! If you have an ecommerce site, today we are looking at 3 big tips to make life easy for your customers, and therefore sell more online.
1. Look at what happens after the click
There aren’t many actions that you should take without first investigating them. When it comes to ecommerce, it is vitally important to see what visitors do after they land on your site. What is your bounce rate like? What pages do they go to most? What pages do most people exit from? This information forms the building blocks of a successful ecommerce site.
Smart ecommerce sites (and those with a reasonable marketing budget) can also gain plenty of benefit from customized usability testing, eyetracking studies and heat mapping.
2. Add ratings and recommendations … and personalize them
The easiest way to understand this tip is to think of how Amazon interacts with you. If you have an ecommerce site of your own, but no experience with Amazon, go check it out now! While there are some complaints about their site, they generally represent the embodiment of best practices in ecommerce.
Amazon provides personalized recommendations for new products based on what a user has viewed before, and what they have bought before. eBay now does the same.
You can also provide ratings from other users based on a person’s behavior on your site – don’t wait for them to click through to a product page to find out that other people love a product.
3. Add a Live Help function
Most of the problems that people encounter with ecommerce sites can be overcome, or at least mitigated, by offering a Live Help service. When something happens that a consumer isn’t expecting, they don’t have to go searching for their product all over again at a different site. That is actually a lot of work – though it is possible. Live Help keeps customers on-site, even if:
- There isn’t enough product information on a description page
- An error occurs during checkouot
- Return policy is not clearlt stated
- People need to enquire about shipping
- The product is expensive
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #2
Feb 5th
One of the best-selling books of all time is Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’. Everybody wants to know how to get inside other people’s brains and make them do what we want them to … even when we get past adolescence! Today, we are giving you another tip for that very purpose. We’re looking at web marketing with neuroscience; how you can use the quirks and peculiarities of the human brain to get people to take specific actions on your site.
Brain cells - the only real marketing tools!
Put the most important thing to your business first
In our minds, what comes first is unconsciously regarded as the best. This may be driven by our largely hierarchical society, which has retained that basic structure since the time of our furry ancestors. Or it may not. However this quirk came to be, it is a very real phenomenon in our minds. The number one result in Google gets a whopping 56% of the clicks, according to one study – not the 10% you would expect if all the results on the page have roughly equally valuable content. In many cases content is equal – but our perception of value is different. Whenever you have several items on a page, and one is more important to you than the others, put it first. For example: Of note: If you have a not-so-good product or blog post in ‘first’ position on your site, and visitors go to it expecting to get an optimal example of what your business is like, you are doing your business a major disservice. Your visitors may leave and never come back, believing that the lower quality item is the best you have to offer. A professional SEO Company like us, can improve content quality and top rankings to ensure you get more traffic and enquiries.The web marketing tactic: