Your brand just may be your most valuable asset in your business. When you’re an online business, reputation is really a huge determining factor of your success. Have you heard of reputation management in search? It has become a popular service among search marketing agencies as small to large businesses understand what is at stake when we talk about branding.
If you see for some website domains, you’ll see websites like RipOffReport.com which can do some serious damage to your brand as a customer complaint can literally rank second or third in the engines for your domain name. If you want to start building a long-term business with your website, make sure you start protecting the name so when people try to find reviews and look at social media sites about what people are saying about your brand, you have some control.
Sometimes we can over-complicate what search engine optimization is and how to go about optimizing our websites. Sure…there are tricks of the trade but to truly succeed, you must start out with the very basics. Some that are getting late into the game and choose to optimize their own websites and want to see results fast, start reading everything they possibly can and implement 5 different things at once.
I found an image on Free-SEO-News.com that talks about the SEO pyramid. Let’s look at this also as prioritizing your search engine optimization and the most basic and important elements to optimize your website.
This image starts from the bottom up and I think for SEO PURPOSES, in a very very simplified effective SEO strategy, it’s on point EXCEPT maybe having conversion optimization there which is really part of design, and not so much SEO. Nevertheless, design can definitely have an impact on your SEO, but it would be the top one on the pyramid, in my opinion.
People always ask and want to know how to generate Google sitelinks. What are Google sitelinks? Chances are if you don’t know what they are, you have seen them and you want them. Yes you do. They are the links that the Google algorithm generates on branded keywords/domain names when typed in the search bar.
Have you done that for your website and not seen these sitelinks? That’s normal. Sitelinks comes with time and are generated automatically by Google. These links can be random links as again, they are generated by a ‘robot’ not a human. Many SEOs talk about how these sitelinks are generated but there is no one specific detailed explanation how you get sitelinks. There are some facts about sitelinks though that we believe matters and is how you get them.
1) Domain Popularity: your domain needs to have a decent amount of popularity and what I mean by popularity is traffic. Traffic is 100% a part of why Google generates sitelinks for branded search queries.
2) Domain Authority: when we talk about domain authority we are talking about the popularity of the domain links wise. It’s not always about the amount of links though but where those links are coming from. As long as you have good inbound links from OTHER authoritative websites, you’re doing a good job with your link building.
If there is one thing that will give your ecommerce business long-term success, it is creating evangelist for your brand. How do you do that? Simple. You let the customers do that for you. In order for the customers to do that for you effectively, they really have to love your brand and what you do! This is what you can call SUPER FANS. If you can create a few super fans, you’re in a good place to start recruiting some more and they will recruit more as well.
Remember, in this day in age, everyone has a voice. Everyone has a Facebook account, many have a Twitter account. That means anything that is posted is at least by another person, right?
Businessweek has a great piece which was contributed by Eric Groves, Senior Vice-President of global market development for Constant Contact, one of the largest email service providers of email management of newsletters, etc for businesses. He list 3 main key practices that can really turn visitors into returning customers and SUPER FANS!
Create super fans by:
1) Create a Great Customer Experience: We’ve talked about this in this blog many times and it doesn’t take a genius in business to know or understand that customer service these days is everything for online businesses. HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean its something simple to do, especially if you are understaffed in this economy which is the case for many small businesses. Some tips suggested to create a great customer service experience are:
Shopping cart abandonment….us internet retailers hate that word. It means people are leaving our website and for the most part, it can be attributed to a few factors. The great news is that we can always improve our ecommerce stores to keep improving the customer experience of shopping from our websites.
These tips are actually on the PayPal site and can help you a great deal. A great tip in order to actually implement these tips on to your website is print this post and make it a check list. You don’t have to do all this at once but even implementing some of these tips can really help conversion rates.
1. Show stock availability on product pages and show which countries you ship to. Disable the cart button for out-of stock or back orders. Xanadu Gaming Store is a good example.
2. Show tax and shipping charges pre-checkout to prevent “sticker shock” – the number one reason for cart abandonment.
3. Don’t require login, but instead allow guest check out. Make account creation optional after the purchase is complete, and explain the benefits of registration (faster checkout next time, order tracking, special discounts, etc).
4. Use SSL (secure socket layer) certificates, and make sure you renew them when they expire. SSL certificates protect credit card numbers and personal data, preventing identity theft. Customers do look for them.
Let’s face it, many internet retailers tend to hide, much of the time not intentional, one of the most important factors of what will ultimately make the decision towards purchasing something from their website for buyers: SHIPPING and RETURN/EXCHANGE policies.
Besides price and reputation from your ecommerce store, for the past 15 years buyers are only getting smarter about how to shop online and what to look for. Many have had at least one experience of shopping through a website that never made their policies understood which later became a problem for them. Being not being able to return a specific product or not knowing what the shipping cost will be until they just decide to abandon their shopping cart.
As the landscape of the internet changes very rapidly, your competitors are most likely following the trends and trying to be everywhere in order to get ahead of everyone else. While you may be focusing on marketing/advertising in one channel, your competitor may already be doing the same in other channels.
While it’s understandable that as an ecommerce merchant, if you’re a small to medium size company you have to decide where to allocate funds, there are channels and strategies you need to be implementing.
True eCommerce success online will come from dominating your niche if you want to be the biggest company in your niche, right? The way to dominate your niche is by being everywhere where you have a voice and can make a presence. These days, the best way to do that in eCommerce is through a few ways.
As an online retailer, there is no number that bothers us the most than shopping cart abandonment percentage rates! Am I right? We know we got the customers interest but there is something that just made them think twice or just plainly abandon the purchase.
There is a way to get that customer back to our website, though. That is the good news. Have you heard of remarketing? With technology online advancing, remarketing is the newest growing fad for online marketers because not we’re not just going after new visitors; we’re going after old ones. Remarketing is also known as retargeting in the industry and I personally believe you should allocate some of your advertising dollars into this advertising method.
In a past post, we talked about easy ways to improve your websites pagerank. Now, let’s talk about what pagerank is and why it matters.
Let’s look at the definition of PageRank (according to wikipedia:)
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinkedset of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).
To explain it in easier terms to understand, Pagerank is a tool that Google lets users see how much authority a website has with the search engine. It is based on a scale from 0-10. 0 being the weakest and 10 being the strongest websites on the internet with the most authority.
What are some websites with the highest pagerank on the internet?
Social media has been the new kid on the block that every marketer from small to large businesses has been focusing on. We can’t keep saying social media is new as for the past 2/3 years, many companies, again, ranging from small to large companies are shifting advertising dollars towards social media advertising.
The internet and technology is moving so fast, it is hard to keep up with new trends and what’s hot. Yesterday Myspace was heaven for marketers, today it is Facebook and Twitter. The landscape of online marketing are changing faster than ever and as an ecommerce or online business, it is important to stay up on these trends to ensure success. If your competitors are marketing/advertising in these spaces, you should to. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT.
According to an eMarketer article, A May 2010 survey from staffing firm The Creative Group found that 65% of US marketing executives considered it at least somewhat challenging to keep up.
While it’s understandable that as an ecommerce merchant, if you’re a small to medium size company you have to decide where to allocate funds, there are channels and strategies you need to be implementing.
