WSI Internet Marketing Consultants UK

Make your website searchable inside and out

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:16:27 GMT

As an established high street name, your customers need to be in a position where they can easily find your name at the top of search results. For this reason, you need to have an effective search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy in place. Here are some tips to stay ahead of the game:

Brainstorm your brand’s keywords: This is the first thing your team needs to do during SEO, but don’t fall into the trap of considering “brand” terms first. Instead, try to get inside the mind of your average customer – generally speaking the terms and phrases they use are unbranded long-tail terms. These are what shoppers will be typing into search boxes, so should take precedence during the branding process.

Optimise technical aspects of your site: This can easily improve its crawlability, which is usually achieved through page tags, site maps, internal linking, coding practices, media usage and URL structure. In doing this however, bear in mind that search engines do not index all the pages they crawl, and do not crawl all the pages they know about. XML and deep HTML sitemaps provide the best chances to get as many valuable pages indexed as possible.

Take full advantage of Universal Search: This is one of the biggest online marketing tools at your disposal today. In layman’s terms, universal search is a search strategy that goes beyond simple text and produces everything from tagged videos to maps and shopping results. This could be a particularly powerful tool in, for example, the apparel sector, where images and video are often a deciding factor in whether or not a customer purchases.

Keep your search terms fresh and relevant: Search engines determine relevance through propriety algorithms, which as a matter of course are regularly updated without warning or notice. This can happen several times a day, so in the face of these changes, ongoing SEO activity is essential to maintain the success of any campaign.

You can do this by controlling the flow of duplicate content and unimportant pages, which in turn help search engines make fewer incorrect serving decisions. Make sure pages such as privacy policy, shopping cart and login don’t slip through the net, to ensure that these don’t appear in place of a better page.

Make yourself easy to use
So far this article has discussed how to get customers on to your website – now how to convert those visits into sales, and loyal sales at that.

An eye catching website is mandatory, however past research has shown that many online retailers are failing to fulfil their true potential because they are neglecting a whole host of ‘added responsibilities’. Think about it. The online shopping experience revolves around the idea of convenience: efficient customer care, a secure transaction process and, of course, the delivery of the goods or services.

If online retailers shirk on any of these ‘responsibilities’, they are likely to lose the opportunity for repeat business, and, consequentially, market share. 28 per cent of respondents, when asked about what would most likely deter them from returning for repeat business, cited the ‘late delivery’ of their order as the deciding factor; an even higher proportion (33%) revealed that expensive and lengthy returns procedures were likely to burst their online shopping bubble.

Put simply, if you want to profit from the countless options that online shoppers have at their fingertips, you must ensure that your website offers a quick, gratifying and painless visit. Here are three tips for achieving that goal.

No to ‘no results’: Firstly, review your search terms on a daily basis, and never allow a customer to receive a ‘no results available’ message. If you don’t have what they’re looking for in stock, allow for redirects to similar products with a ‘suggestion’ facility.

Being a home from home: Secondly, if you trade in a lot of cross-border traffic, avoid appearing to be too ‘international’ at purchase point, by automatically offering customers the option to pay in the official currency of the country you’re dealing in. Shoppers do not want to have to trawl through scores of payment options during a routine shop.

Timing promotions wisely: Thirdly, encourage impulse purchase by stocking up on your urgent messaging, for instance (“Today only! Hurry, last chance!”) If you stress the fact that a fantastic offer is only available for a limited period of time, then the customer is much more likely to succumb to pressure and rack up an additional purchase. Run your sales for a shorter period of time (three as opposed to five) and longer in terms of hours – all day instead of for five hours, enabling more consumers to take advantage; one-day sales have a far better chance of ‘hitting’ all customer groups than five hour sales. Sales need to be clearly advertised to customers, both before and during the sale itself, enabling that sense of urgency to be maintained.

The bottom line is, multichannel retailers need to keep up the approach they already have, but work smarter, not harder. It is surprising just how many missed sales opportunities can come as a result of a badly designed website or inefficient search engine optimisation, and with a few simple tweaks, online success

Source: Internet Retailing

34% of shoppers prefer to buy online

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:05:42 GMT

When shopping for something which can be bought both online and in store, 34% of UK shoppers would prefer to buy online, with 55% opting for the high street.

While this stat shows that offline retail still holds an important place in customers' minds, 34% is still a sizeable portion of the sample.

These stats are taken from Econsultancy's Habits and Motivations of Consumers report, which looks at e-commerce consumer behaviour in both the UK and US.

Factors influencing online purchases

The survey also looks at the features on websites which make it more likely that consumers will decide to shop online.

Free shipping was the most popular motivation for 82% of UK and 80% of US consumers, and gives etailers that offer this option a clear advantage over competitors.

Plenty of well-known retailers have caught on to the power of free shipping, with the likes of ASOS, John Lewis, Amazon all offering some degree of free shipping, and just as importantly, promoting it heavily throughout the site.

Price guarantees were an influence for 72% of UK and 64% of US shoppers, and suggests that providing promises to match competitors' prices and even listing them on site can be a useful tactic for online retailers.

Offering alternative payment methods makes sense for etailers, as it allows them to capture as many customers as possible, appealing to those that may be concerned about card fraud or who simply don't have a credit or debit card.

60% of UK consumers and 48% of those from the US said that alternatives such as PayPal would make it more likely that they would shop online.

Availability of product ratings was a factor for 59% of UK shoppers, as was the availability of user-generated or consumer product reviews (57%).

Online chat was less of an influence on purchases, with just 15% of UK and 22% of US respondents saying it would make them more likely to purchase online.

This is not surprising, since online chat is not widely available, especially in the UK. However, if it helps 15% to 22% of consumers to complete their purchase, then it is a worthwhile tool for online retailers.

We also asked consumers how often they encountered various problems when attempting to make purchases online.

The most common problems uncovered by the survey were slow-loading pages and being unable to have specific questions answered (which is where online chat can be useful). These were frequent issues for 13% of respondents, and somewhat frequent for 31%.

Other common problems included inadequate site search functions, with 34% finding this a problem either frequently or somewhat frequently, and insufficient information (41%)

Online purchasing

Respondents were asked how much their most recent online purchase cost. Nearly half (46%) of surveyed consumers spent between £0-£100, with the largest proportions (29%) being between £25- £100.

37% of respondents spent between £100-£500 which may well account for a large amount of electrical or computer purchases.

Other highlights from the report

The continued importance of targeted and relevant email marketing came through in consumers' responses. 50% said that irrelevant information devalued emails they received. while 50% said that emails weren’t valuable because there was “no special advantage” to receiving them.

36% replied that receiving an email had prompted them to make a purchase online, whilst around a quarter (27%) reported that an email was the cause of an offline purchase.

The younger the audience, the more mistrust there is towards advertising, though the majority of consumers appreciate receiving advertising messages when it is directly beneficial to them, such as receiving a discount on a product or service (57%).

Source: Econsultancy

Being an Effective Marketer, Both Online and Offline

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:48:32 GMT

The term “marketing” gets used a lot and, sometimes, it’s used rather loosely in search and social media circles.

“Not all, but a lot of the search industry tends to be kind of search geeks who are trying to figure out what marketing is,” says Bill Leake of Apogee Results, formerly Apogee Search.

To make a long-term difference in customers, he believes effective marketing is key. Factors such as determining what the customer wants to do, how you can make it happen, and how you can transfer business objectives into strategies that can be implemented, are all instrumental aspects of marketing. He goes on to say that search is just one area of marketing that is important, but it works best when used with the other aspects.

Some people focus heavily on search, since it is easily measured. Other challenges of marketing could result from all the departments in companies and, particularly, within marketing itself. Due to the lack of communication these departments create, many opportunities are missed.

As online marketing increases in awareness, there is also the danger of neglecting offline channels. Online marketing is very valuable for businesses involved largely in the consumer space and B2B. On the other hand, online isn’t as valuable when reaching enterprise level companies and government agencies. Essentially, Leake says businesses need to market wherever their customers are, whether it be online, offline, or both.

Source: WebProNews

Why SEO Fundamentals Still Matter

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 07:45:19 GMT

Since SEO is constantly changing, how can SEOs determine the most important areas of focus? As Matt Bailey of SiteLogic Marketing tells WebProNews, the foundation has to be strong in order to be built upon. For this reason, he believes the fundamentals are critical to SEO success.

Content is just one of the fundamental areas of SEO. Not only is the content itself important, but the structure of the content is also important. Bailey says content needs to be scalable, readable, and allow users to understand the content on the rest of the page by simply looking at the headline. This is significant because numerous studies show that the majority of people scan content instead of reading it.

There have been many recent debates pertaining to long content versus short content. People often say they tried blogging, Facebook, or Twitter and found that they didn’t work. However, Bailey believes users need to examine their efforts to see if they are utilizing them correctly.

“The what is going to change daily. The why will never change,” he says.

He goes on to say that if you have a purpose, the “what” doesn’t matter and can always be applied.

Marketers also struggle with the challenge of creating content for both users and search engines. Bailey says the key to this dilemma is in the analytics. For example, it is very possible to have the right ranking with the wrong page. As a result, marketers need to look at their analytics to see which metrics work. He tells WPN that marketers can celebrate when they determine what is profitable, not when they rank high.

Although there will be many more changes for SEO, the job of driving people to a destination will always be constant.

Are you focusing on getting the fundamentals right or are you distracted by the “shiny, new object syndrome”?

Source: WebProNews

Small businesses up web marketing spending

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:48:44 GMT

Small businesses in the UK and US increased their spending on online marketing in the second quarter of 2010, according to a new report.

Figures from WebVisible show that US expenditure in particular shot up by 159 per cent compared with the same period last year.

In the UK, Yahoo! saw the biggest increase in web marketing spending by small firms, while both Bing and Google registered declines.

The cost-per-click (CPC) metric rose by 5.4 per cent on Google and 3.7 per cent on Bing, while click-through rates increased for the former and dropped for the latter.

On average, UK CPCs represented one-sixth of the equivalent US figure during the second quarter.

"Over the past year, conversion activity increased on almost all website actions - filling out an online form, watching a video, bookmarking a page or printing driving directions," noted WebVisible chief executive Kirsten Mangers.

Last month, research by Econsultancy and Guava found that six in ten UK firms are looking to increase spending on search engine optimisation over the next year, with 52 per cent set to invest more in paid search.

Source: DirectNews