So, what does the acronym stand for and how can it help a Magento website?

A is for Attention or Awareness: The first part of the sales process is to attract the customer and to make them aware of your products or services. By optimising your Magento websites pages individually with product specific keywords, your products and services will appear in a wider range of search engine results ensuring that relevant prospects can find your website. When the prospect clicks through to your website, it is vital that your website makes a good first impression. Make sure that your Magento website loads quickly, presents a professional image and is easy to use. Most visitors to a website have a question in mind or a product that they are looking for, make it clear what you’re offering and tell them how they can get it quickly and easily!

I is for Interest: Once you’ve got their attention, you want to make sure that you gain their interest by demonstrating and focusing on the advantages & benefits of choosing your products or services over those of your competitors. Ways that you can gain interest are by highlighting special pricing, showing linked products and recommending relevant products. Anything you can do to make the process easier and to assist the customer will allow you to keep their interest for longer.

D is for Desire or Decision: By providing as much information as possible about the products and services you provide, showing reviews from other customers that have purchased the product and found it useful, or by creating a sense of urgency by showing an offer valid until date, you can help to convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.

A is for Action: The most important part of the whole process is getting your customers to take action and to purchase your products or services. Having a well laid out Magento website with lots of product information and cross selling are great for getting customers to this point, now you need to make sure they can easily locate the shopping cart (add a link to every page!) and once they have, give them the choice between registering and guest checkout and make the payment process as simple as possible (why not even cut the whole thing down to a single page?!).

For more information about Magento web design by Impact Web Solutions visit http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call 0116 2758456.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

Speaking in a language that is relevant to your visitors is also important. Don’t complicate things by being overly technical unless your target customers are going to understand. Keeping things short and to the point while providing the information your visitors require is the most effective way to keep their attention. The tone of the website should be friendly and conversational.

Design – The design of your website can play a key part in the success of your online store.

Having a well designed website provides a professional image to your visitors. Keeping the website uncluttered and having ‘white space’ allows your visitors to easily find what they are looking for and to focus on your products and information. Keeping backgrounds plain and light make it easier for your customers to read the content of your pages.

Navigation – Navigation is a very important part of your websites design. Clear navigation lets your customers easily find the product or information they are looking for and lets them navigate back to that page from other parts of your website. Navigation should be present on all pages, pages without navigation are called orphaned pages, the only way back from these pages is to click the back button on the browser, this looks unprofessional and may cause visitors to leave your site.

Functionality – The Magento Commerce platform allows store owners to add a lot of functionality that will assist customers in purchasing items from the website, and store information for future visits.

Some great features to include in Magento websites are wish lists, send to a friend, product comparisons, reviews, recently viewed items and recommended products – these features allow customers to purchase items quickly and easily, and also gives you the opportunity to cross sell.

Search – Search boxes allow you to quickly check whether the item you’re looking for is actually on the website saving your visitors time. Magento websites also feature a predictive search box that finds items matching words as you type, often giving similar item suggestions.

Product narrowing and sorting – Sometimes you just don’t have the time to sit and look through lots of products to see if they have the right size, colour, etc. Product narrowing lets your visitors select certain options to locate the products available saving them time.

Product sorting also allows the customers to view the products by price, name or other variables.

Images – When customers visit your website, they aren’t physically able to see the items like they could in a bricks and mortar shop, so having plenty of good quality, clear photos will help them to decide whether the item is what they are looking for. Magento includes a zoom feature on images so your customers can really check out every little deatil of the product!

Product Information – As with images, a good product description is vital for helping your customers to make a decision on whether to purchase the product or not. Including as much information as possible such as measurements, colours, material, etc will also keep your customers happy by providing them with the correct item for their needs.

Product information is also helpful for search engine rankings as the product specific keywords will allow your website to appear in a wider range of search results.

Clear pricing and availability – Hidden charges can be the difference between a purchase and an abandoned basket. For example, I visited a website earlier today to purchase some tickets, the price was great. Then I went to pay and there was an additional £1 booking fee… oh well, not going to break the bank I thought and continued. Your postage will cost £7.50, and how about some insurance for an extra £2? Finally, the payment screen.. but wait, what’s this, a £3.50 charge to pay by credit card?! So my tickets are now £14 more than the original cost! Not such a great price after all!

Make sure that your charges are clearly displayed including any delivery costs, insurance and admin costs.

Another sure fire way to annoy your customers is to send them through the checkout procedure only to have to contact them later to tell them the item is out of stock. Make sure it’s clear whether items are available. Magento lets you to set stock levels so your customers will be unable to place orders for items that are out of stock.

Checkout – Another thing that causes shopping cart abandonment is not offering your customers the choice of checking out as a guest. Making it compulsory for customers to sign up for an account can put a lot of people off of purchasing from an online store as it increases the time it takes to place an order, and also means they have to store their personal details on the website.

Long drawn out checkouts also lose customers, make sure that there are as few stages to your checkout as possible to keep things quick and easy.

Email confirmations – So the customer has made a purchase, don’t forget to send a confirmation email to say the order has been received and that someone is dealing with it. Magento allows you to set up auto responders, it also lets you send out notifications to inform your customers that certain parts of their order have been completed, e.g. the order has been dispatched.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design

As Magento Website Developers, Impact Web Solutions are active promoters of social networking and social commerce. A couple of weeks ago on a social networking site, I saw this question being asked, “What is social commerce?”

It appears from the responses to this question that there are varying opinions about the meaning of this term, and also that many people still aren’t all that sure what it is.

Wikipedia explains it like this “Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services. More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions”.

My response to the question “What is social commerce?” is “My definition of social commerce is really user led marketing. Not only is social commerce about being able to share experiences and preferences on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, but it’s also about onsite features such as buyer reviews and recommend a friend. People are more likely to buy a product if someone they know has recommended it, or if it has good reviews, this gives them an idea of what to expect rather than buying blind. Happy customers become the best promoters for a business and that’s what social commerce is all about”.

Magento commerce websites include many features that make them perfect for social commerce, these features include customer ratings/reviews and user referrals via the email to a friend form.

Magento commerce websites also allow you to integrate your wordpress blog, this is great because you can add your blogs RSS feed to social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook so that new blogs automatically post to those sites, keeping your fans and followers up to date with all of your latest news and offers.

There are also Magento commerce extensions that allow you to connect your Magento store to Facebook. These include an extension that allows you to display your products on your fanpage, and allows your fans to buy your products DIRECTLY from Facebook!

I have seen it said a few times that ecommerce is dead and social commerce is the future, so can your business really afford not to evolve to include social commerce? Magento websites are the most robust ecommerce websites available, and as specialist Magento website developers we know exactly how to build a website that will grow your business. If you would like further information about Magento web design by Impact Web Solutions you can either visit http://www.studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php or call us on 0116 2758456.

Finally, I saw this great quote used to explain Social Commerce, “Helping people buy where they connect and connect where they buy!”, a motto that all Magento web developers should adopt!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Development UK

Image copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Many people I have spoken to have asked the question “how can social networking help my business?”

They have set up an account on the main social networking sites and have posted regular adverts about their products and services but still their efforts have rewarded them with a big fat fail whale!

So where are they going wrong? Well, the clue is in the title ‘Social Networking’.

Let’s break it down and get some definitions:

Social – An informal social gathering

Networking – Interacting with other people to exchange information and develop contacts

Now let’s put it all together ‘An informal social gathering, interacting with other people to exchange information and develop contacts’.

Makes things a little clearer doesn’t it?

I want you to imagine that you are at a networking event at a local hotel. The event is in a big room filled with people you have never met, all from different businesses and they are all mingling, discussing everything from that extrovert ladies shiny red shoes to the state of the economy and you pull out your megaphone and stand in the middle of the room shouting “I have a shop, come and buy my products, I repeat, I have a shop, come and buy my products” – how long do you think it would be before the rest of the people in the room got annoyed and you were asked to leave?

And that is exactly how social networking sites are! We don’t want to hear about your company manufacturing match boxes while we’re trying to talk about Mikey Way and Torchwood!

We want you to join in with our conversations, throw new subjects into the mix and then we won’t mind if every now and then you tell us how great your company is. And since we’ve built up this relationship, I will probably ask about your company or what it is that you do, and when I need your products or services you will automatically spring to mind.

Sure, the major brands don’t need to chat about anything other than their products and services but even they spend time talking with their followers about the weather, barbeques and their biscuits of choice!

As a rule you should spend about 20% of your twitter time talking about your business and the other 80% of the time ‘social networking’.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

harges should be clearly shown on your ecommerce website. The majority of internet users shop around for the best price before committing to purchase so hidden charges such as tax and shipping costs that haven’t been factored in can cause shopping cart abandonment – something that all ecommerce store owners want to avoid! Avoid abandonment by clearly displaying these costs either on the shopping cart BEFORE you get to the payment screen or by including them on the product page and increase those conversion rates!

ptimisation, be seen in all the right places! Having a fabulous ecommerce website with all the bells and whistles is great but it is no good if people can’t find it! Optimisation such as including product and service names in page titles, keyword rich descriptions, an xml sitemap, Googlebase feeds, etc can all help to ensure your website is visible on the major search engines.

agento websites – giving you that little extra! All ecommerce websites designed and built by Impact Web Solutions are created using Magento. Magento is a feature rich ecommerce platform with more than 3,500 extensions allowing us to create fully bespoke websites tailored to your company’s individual needs. Having a website built in Magento allows you to present a robust shopping experience to your customers, encouraging cross-selling, social shopping and the all-important conversion to sale.

enu’s – leading the way! Having clear navigation on your website allows not only human visitors but also search engines to quickly find their way around your website to locate the information or products they are searching for. Many people base their navigation on the 3 click rule meaning that the information your visitors are searching for should never be more than 3 clicks from the homepage, although this is a good rule to work by it doesn’t necessarily have to be a maximum of 3 as long as there is a clear hierarchy that visitors can use to find the items again.

nquiries. Contact details on your website are a must! Whether you choose to include your address, phone number, email address or even social networking profiles, visitors should be able to contact you. Another way for visitors to contact you is to include a contact form on the website. Whichever you choose, responding quickly is important, within 8 hours if possible – good communication helps to build positive relationships with your customers and encourages brand loyalty.

eferrals – check it out! Happy customers may choose to tell others about your website, so including features such as recommend a friend and the ability to share links on social networking sites are helpful.

heckout – All work & no pay makes your website a sad store! The payment process on your ecommerce website should be as simple as possible to use. Providing the option of ‘Guest checkout’ can lessen the chances of shopping cart abandonment, as can single page checkouts which allow shoppers to shorten the payment process and make their payments quickly.

asy peasy! Make your ecommerce store easy to use, easy to navigate and easy to buy from! If everything is quick and simple, your sales such flourish!

For more info about Impact Web Solutions Ecommerce visit http://studio2online.co.uk/e-commerce.php

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Ecommerce Web Design Leicester

I have seen many websites that contain great content, yet basic mistakes are stopping them from ranking well in searchengines. Although these tips won’t necessarily catapult your website to the top of the search engines, these 6 quick tweaks can only have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

1. Exchanging your Flash animation for JQuery or similar Javascript solution. Flash animation content cannot be read by search engines, whereas the Javascript solution allows the search engines to find the information within the html source making it more seo friendly.
2. Exchanging image based menu’s for text based menu’s. Search engines cannot read the content of images so having a menu made up of images removes this crucial piece of information from your pages. If you decide that your navigation MUST be made up of images, it is important to remember to include image tags so that search engines can understand the content of the image. Changing your menu’s to be text based will allow you to include important keywords within the pages of your website as well as linking those keywords to relevant pages within your website.
3. Exchanging image based content for text based content. One thing that occurs often, especially within self-built template websites, is that the text is added to the website in image form often to allow for pretty backgrounds or text effects. I have seen perfectly written copy that is keyword rich added to a website in this way, so the text has no effect on the search engine rankings at all because… search engines cannot see it! Make sure that your website copy is added to the pages in text format.
4. Exchange your keyword tag for keyword rich copy. Most search engines are either no longer using the keyword tag or only giving it minimal relevance, so ensuring that the content of your website and the important title tag are keyword rich are a must. Instead of concentrating on search engines, choose a couple of keywords to include per page and then write the content around these words while concentrating on your human visitors.
5. Exchanging your duplicate content for fresh content. Ok, so this can be a bit tricky when creating content for example with an ecommerce websites where information can apply to multiple products and can also be included in product categories. This is definitely an area where your search engine optimisation company can help you out by including things like no follow links and canonical url tags. This is also where detailed product descriptions can allow you to include keywords linked to that specific product and to create unique page content.
6. Exchanging your automatically generated urls for correctly formatted urls. Some CMS & blog software can automatically create page titles but often these titles are formatted badly including random codes filled with question marks and irrelevant mumbo jumbo that will not allow search engines to link the title to the content of the page. Including correctly formatted urls that include important keywords and product names, hyphenated rather than underscore separated (Google doesn’t see underscores which can cause it to read your title as one big messy word!) will allow search engines to associate the words in your page title with the content of your page.

There are many different search engine techniques that can be applied to your website but by making these basic changes it will have a positive impact on your websites rankings and start to provide visible web results.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

“Feeling v disillusioned with Twitter! Can anyone persuade me that it will actually help my business?!”

Now anyone that has spent more than two minutes on Twitter will know that it is not always the most intellectual of content; with everything from a page of Tweets from a cat standing on a keyboard to the insanity that is planetjedward! Although these pages may be amusing, you can’t help but to see why this business owner was feeling more than a little disillusioned.

Well, in response to the plea for someone to persuade them that Twitter will actually help their business, here are a few reasons why Twitter may actually be beneficial:

• Social networking sites attract millions of visitors on a daily basis, from all over the world.
• Having a Twitter account for your business allows you to expose your brand to a wider audience and to make your business more accessible to both new and existing customers.
• More people are looking to social networking sites for recommendations when they need to purchase a product. People regularly tweet for help to find services such as printers and hotels, these tweets are usually retweeted by lots of kind people who very quickly find someone that can help. A couple of days ago I saw one lady say that Twitter had pretty much arranged her whole wedding and that she would be tweeting throughout the day with updates for anyone that couldn’t attend the wedding!
• Each individual page on Twitter has its own SEO page rank, much the same as your website has. Pages with higher ranks give more authority to the website links they share.
• Google and Bing both confirmed that they receive a ‘firehose’ of Tweets with active ‘follow’ links, which do effect the search engine placements of regular websites.

And a few tips to build your Twitter following:

• Many businesses make the mistake of just following companies and people they know; although this is a great place to start it is unlikely to bring new business to your company. Following various ‘real’ people and interacting with them on a regular basis allows you to build new relationships. People buy from people, so building up relationships will increases the likelihood that when they require your product they will come to you first.
• Friday is a great time to find awesome people to follow. In the ‘search box’ to the right hand side, enter #ff or #followfriday and this will show a list of people recommending people they interact with that others should follow. These people are more likely to interact allowing you to build strong online relationships.
• Now for one of the less sensible but still important (in some cases) tips! Animal lovers on Twitter often recommend other animal lovers with tags like #meowmonday or #woofwednesday. Is your business animal friendly? Look them up!
• If someone shares something helpful or amusing, be it a tweet or link to a useful article – pass it on! Hover over the tweet and in the bottom right corner you will see retweet, click this to share with your followers.
• If someone follows you, visit their profile. Do they interact with others, post regularly, etc? If so, follow them back. Following your followers back encourages others to follow you.
• One thing to be wary of is that Twitter does have a lot of Spam ‘bots’, these are accounts that usually post automated tweets which will be of no value to you at all. The unfortunate thing is that bots are becoming more intelligent and it is often hard to tell them apart from the real people. One way to check is to Tweet them and thank them for following you & initiate a conversation, the chances are that a real person will respond and a bot won’t, this also allows you to interact with your new follower.
• A lot of people don’t like companies who are there just to sell and often class these people as spammers. By all means link to your website, share regular updates about what your business is doing but don’t make your business the only focus of your page. Talk to people about different subjects, share articles that interest you, tweet photo’s, write and share blogs, etc. Useful and funny tweets are often retweeted increasing your visibility, and people who interact with their Twitter friends are more likely to be added to their follow Friday lists which will also attract new followers.

Twitter can be beneficial to many businesses but social networking is similar to seo in that it is not an overnight thing (unless you are a celebrity or have an existing well known brand). Investing time into your social networking strategy should be an important part of your marketing plan – and the best part about this form of marketing? It’s free so you have absolutely nothing to lose!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

Three of the best ways you can do this online are through search engine promotion, social networking and with the use of email marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimisation

The goal of a search engine optimisation campaign is to make your website as search engine friendly as possible so that search engines recognise your website as being the best match for your keywords when they are typed into the search bar. By optimising your keywords, search engine promotion aims to give you greater visibility on the web.

With over 85% of the search engine market, Google is the most important search engine in terms of rankings.  Search engine promotion is not just about rankings though (although 36% of online shoppers do associate search engine placement with company prominence) but also about making sure people can find your website under a variety of relevant keywords to increase your traffic and in turn increase your enquiries, sales and profit.

As search engines crawl and rank various different pages on each website they visit, it is important that search engine optimisation is completed throughout the website. By optimising each page of the website individually, you can ensure that your website ranks well within various search results – this is especially helpful if you provide a broad spectrum of products and services.

A large majority of users won’t enter a website through the homepage, so each page should be treated and optimised as though it is the homepage. Important things to include are:

• Navigation – Don’t leave your visitors stranded once they’ve found your website! The rule is that you should never be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage, although this is a good rule to follow the most important thing is to make sure your navigation is clear and easy to follow no matter how many clicks away you are. Having clear navigation also help with search engine promotion as it allows robots to gather additional links from your website and crawl them.
• Content – Make sure that each page is content rich. Yes, pages are ranked individually but where they are ranked will be based on the content of each individual page. Having good product or service descriptions containing relevant keywords partnered with search engine promotion strategies provided by your search engine optimisation specialists will help to push those pages further up the rankings.
• Tags – Individual page tags are important from a search engine point of view. Page tags should reflect the page contents rather than being generic i.e. Company name or Contact, Product, etc.
• Don’t leave your customers or search engines in any doubt about what your product is – make sure it is reflected in the title tag, page description, image tags and product descriptions. Don’t keyword stuff your page, but make sure important information such as product names, colours, sizes and common alternative names are included.

Search Engines are changing the way they rank websites with an increasing emphasis on providing good quality content. Off-site links are still valuable but are beginning to have much less overall impact on how a website ranks. Good quality links are as important as good quality content.

Social Networking

Social Networking is fast becoming an important part of most companies’ marketing plans. Social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook attract vast amounts of visitors on a daily basis, so they are the perfect place to make sure your business is seen.

Companies with social networking profiles can keep their customers and fans up to date with all the latest news and offers whilst also making their company or brand more accessible. Satisfied customers can ‘share’ your information and offers as well as their own experiences with their friends – an important part of the growing trend for social ecommerce.

If your target market is other businesses rather than consumers, there are social networking sites such as Linkedin and ecademy that allow you to link with other businesses whilst promoting your company and selected products or services.

The majority of social networking websites are free to join and create business pages on. Some social networks such as Facebook allow you to place a paid advert on the website.

Although social networking content is offsite, some search engines such as Google and Bing have started to include social networking content when ranking websites so this may have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Email Marketing

As I mentioned in Ecommerce & SEO: Your People, email marketing is a great way to keep your brand and products fresh in the mind of potential clients.

Offering a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ box on your website allows people who are already interested in your products or services to sign up for regular updates from your company.

Sending a regular newsletter allows you to keep subscribers up to date with the latest product launches and company news as well as allowing you to pass on useful tips and information. With email marketing campaigns you can also set up landing pages providing further information, and a good email marketing system should allow you to monitor the success of your campaigns.

Email marketing is also perfect for sending promotions and special offers to your subscribers keeping them up to date with all your best offers and encouraging brand loyalty and regular purchasing.

Newsletters can also be added to your website providing a new source of keyword rich information which integrates perfectly with a search engine promotion campaign.

Email marketing can be a steady source of enquiries and sales for your business.

Email marketing provides almost instant feedback, allowing you to monitor bounced email addresses and remove them from future mailings, view who opened your emails and what they did with them and see who has clicked on your links so you can see exactly what your customers are interested in and send better targeted emails in the future.

To read Parts 1 – 4 of the discussion visit the links below:

Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play
Ecommerce & SEO: Knowing your market
Ecommerce & SEO: Your People
Ecommerce & SEO: Technical Requirements and Scalability

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Promotion Midlands

If your main focus is to handle administration more effectively, having an online store built with a system such as Magento will allow you to manage your data and orders more effectively through the backend. Your admin login will display your individual dashboard showing information such as sales by day, week, month, year or 2 years; along with popular search terms and amounts of recent orders. The easy to use menus also allow you to generate reports about sales, product information such as low stock and best sellers, and shopping cart information including abandoned carts – perfect for creating management reports!

If your focus is better order management, the orders page allows you to easily view full order details as well as issue invoices, place orders on hold or cancel them completely by clicking on a single button. When the order is ready to go, a single click allows you to mark the order as shipped and the system issues a notification by email keeping your customer informed every step of the way, allowing you to provide a high standard of customer service.

If you have a large product base, you may require integration with an accounts system such as Sage or QuickBooks which will allow you to synchronise your stock/costs with your website.

Knowing what you want the website to do for you before you begin to build the online store means that your ecommerce developers can build the functionality into your store saving you time and money.

If you do not have a great deal of technical knowledge but want to be able to manage your ecommerce updates in-house this means you will need to make sure that your website is built in a CMS system which will allow you to add and edit information on the website using a WYSIWYG editor. CMS systems allow you to update images and text as often as you need to without having to pay an agency to make the changes for you.

Another very important aspect to consider is the hosting of your website. Very often people will search for the cheapest website hosting available which doesn’t always mean the most reliable or the best for your requirements.

Ecommerce websites can require a lot more space than a regular website (just think of all those product images and data!). You also need to consider the bandwidth allowance for your hosting package; larger online stores can attract large amounts of visitors and whether they buy or not they eat away at your bandwidth. When your bandwidth allowance has all been used up, the website won’t display until the limit resets – not great if your customers can’t get in to your shop to buy!

Hosting can also affect your search engine rankings. Last year Google started using site speed as a new signal in determining website rankings, and although fewer than 1% of search queries are affected, it is still a good idea to make sure your website loads quickly. Page load speed isn’t just important to search engines but also to your customers, remember – you only have 8 seconds to make an impression and the longer your page takes to load the more likely it is that the impression will be a bad one!

You may want to consider dedicated hosting to increase your site speed, this may cost you a little more but ultimately you would have a much larger disk space (allowing you to add vast quantities of data to your website ) as well as providing a potentially unlimited bandwidth.

Another important thing to consider is the payment gateway on your ecommerce website.

If you choose to include an on site payment gateway where customers enter their payment details directly on your website, you would require an SSL certificate to protect those details and avoid identity theft. Many browsers now include a pop up alert indicating that a website isn’t secured if there isn’t an active SSL which puts most users off of placing an order.

Including a pop out payment gateway on your ecommerce website such as Sage Pay means that you no longer require an SSL certificate as the pop out is already secured. Although an SSL is no longer required to protect payment details, you may still want to protect the other information entered such as name and address details.

Your ecommerce web designer will be able to recommend the best kind of payment gateway for your needs.

Finally, scalability is an important factor to discuss with your ecommerce developer. Important things to consider regarding scalability are:

• How far will your ecommerce website be able to accommodate your growing business? If your orders dramatically increase, will your website be able to cope with this easily?
• How easy is it for your ecommerce store to be able to grow? Can new functionality be added easily or will this require a large amount of work to allow for store development?

Although many businesses start out with a small ecommerce website, they can find that a little as a year down the line they require a more complex ecommerce store to handle the needs of their growing business. Investing in a more feature rich ecommerce website at the beginning can save time and money for your business in the long term – after all, your ecommerce store should bring you a good return on your investment, and once the sales start to flood in the store should pay for itself.

To read Parts 1, 2 & 3 of the discussion visit the links below:

Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play
Ecommerce & SEO: Knowing your market
Ecommerce & SEO: Your People

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Ecommerce Web Design Leicester

Successful online stores can generate large volumes of traffic and sales, and just the same as your bricks and mortar shop you will need someone to deal with the various stages of the transaction.

Some online stores choose to include a virtual assistant to answer any questions the customer may have before purchasing; if you use virtual assistants it is important that someone is available at the computer at all times in case a chat request comes through to ensure that you deliver a high standard of customer service.

Once the purchase has been made online, someone needs to process the order – to ship the product to the customer, resolve any issues upon receipt, deal with any returns – basically anything you would do for a regular customer entering your shop.

Considering the size of your business and existing client base can give you an idea of who is best to manage your online shop. If you have a small business with a couple of orders a month online, you will easily be able to manage the online shop as well as the running of your bricks and mortar business.

If you have a medium sized business generating regular daily orders, you may need to allocate the management of your ecommerce website to another member of staff.

Large businesses may require several people to concentrate on the management of their online store only.

Not only do you need to consider who will process your orders, many online stores are CMS based (content management system – this allows you to update the website yourself) so you will also need someone that can make regular updates to the site. Your ecommerce web designers should offer training on the system, meaning that changes such as adding new products, making changes to text and even changing images (although some images may be part of your websites template so you may not be able to edit them all) can all be completed in-house.

Regular website updates are critical, not only do they offer your customers something new and give them a reason to keep returning but also, search engines love to see that you are regularly updating your website so they know the information is current.

It is also important to consider who will work with your search engine optimisation company to ensure your campaign is targeting the areas that are most important to you. As your business progresses and the market changes, your keyword focus may also change. You may choose to expand into new locations or related product markets so your campaign will need to grow with your business to include these changes.

As you suggest new focuses to your SEO engineer they will be able to come back to you with suggestions and data for the best possible keywords and phrases to drive traffic to your website.

Your SEO engineer will also be able to provide regular reports showing where your target keywords are currently ranking, this along with regular telephone contact will allow you to monitor any changes and focus on any problem areas to resolve them quickly.

The social media aspect is also important to the promotion of your website. Google and Bing both recently confirmed that content posted on Twitter and Facebook can have an effect on the rankings of regular websites. Building up relationships through social networking sites also opens your business up to a wider audience and helps build better brand awareness.

Writing regular blogs on topics relating to your target market also provides a great opportunity to include your websites keywords. Sharing useful information through social networking websites via your blog can also attract your target market and new followers as many people use the search facility to find posts relating to specific interests.

Finally, online marketing such as email newsletters and promotions emails are a great way of keeping your subscribers up to date. Offering a ‘subscribe to newsletter’ link allows visitors to ‘opt in’ to receiving your updates so you already know that the people receiving the information are interested in your products or services.

Email newsletters can be quite time consuming to put together, often taking around a day to put together and check before sending. Although this can seem like a lot time and you may question the benefits, newsletters keep your subscribers up to date and keep your brand fresh in their minds until they are ready to make a purchase. Email newsletters can be a steady source of new enquiries.

Making sure you have the right people to handle all of the aspects of your online store allows you to decide exactly what you want your website to do and to consider the technical requirements and scalability of your systems and services.

To read Parts 1 & 2 of the discussion visit the links below:

Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play
Ecommerce & SEO: Knowing your market

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Ecommerce Web Design and Search Engine Promotion Leicester