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

Another way you can give your rankings a boost for a keyword or keyphrase is by including something called anchor text. Basically, anchor text is linking your important keywords and phrases to relevant pages or websites, for example:

Often you will see websites including links such as ‘For information about Search Engine Optimisation click here’, this provides little value to the website.

A better way of adding a link to the information would be ‘Impact Web Solutions provide Search Engine Optimisation Services’, this allows you to link your important keywords to relevant pages within your website and also allows search engines to link the keywords to that page, giving the page an all important boost.

Search engines give high relevance to anchor text because the anchor text is usually specific to the content of the page it is pointing to.

Anchor text is usually limited to 60 characters or less, although it is possible to include anchor text more than once within the same sentence, either with the links pointing to the same address or with different links – for example Search Engine Specialists Impact Web Solutions, which can include links for Search Engine Specialists and Impact Web Solutions so it would display as Search Engine Specialists Impact Web Solutions and link to the two relevant pages.

Anchor text is a great way to give your website a boost for your chosen keywords!

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Search Engine Optimisation Midlands

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

The most beneficial blogs are the ones that are either on a subdomain of your website or in a folder under the main domain of your website as visits to these types of blogs count as hits to your website.

Blogs allow you to add regular content to your website, giving you the opportunity to add lots of information about your products, services or brand, and to fill that content with lots of juicy keywords. The majority of your website content will most likely be information about the services or products you provide which is unlikely to receive large amounts of incoming links. Blogs allow you to add articles and information which are unlikely to be included in the regular content of your website, encouraging links that you may not otherwise have received.

Blogs are the easiest way to add regular content to your website. Search engines love to see regular updates, not only can you include keywords in your blog posts you can also show the search engines that your website information is current.

Fresh content on your website encourages regular visits by both readers and search engines, something that is particularly important to your website. Websites with less frequent updates to their content will be visited less by search engines and this may have a negative impact on your search rankings as search engines will constantly be including new data for other, regularly updated websites.

Some people see the measure of a successful search engine optimisation campaign as receiving lots of traffic through the website, but that is not necessarily the case. Attracting quality traffic is the most important thing; blogs are perfect for this because the readers will be searching for the topics you are discussing in your blog. Attracting visitors with an interest in your products or services will encourage repeat visits and, possibly even new enquiries and sales.

Blogs can be categorised in to sections which can include your top keywords as categories. Categorising blog posts makes it easier for search engines to understand your content and make it easier for them to associate your articles with the keywords you want to increase rankings for. Tags work in much the same way, for each blog post, you can add ‘tag’ words or phrases that summarise the post contents, again allowing you to link your relevant keywords to blog posts.

Blog articles are indexed individually by both regular search engines and blog search engines so it is especially important to add your keywords. Well written blog posts that include keywords can rank as highly in search engine results as regular website content.

One of the great things about blogs is that you can add ‘share’ links to the post which encourage your visitors to submit your posts to bookmarking sites such as Digg. Once a link has been shared, other members on the site can vote for posts they like, increasing visibility and traffic. Some of these websites also include incoming links for your website. Blog’s are also good for search engine optimisation because useful or funny blogs are often shared via social networking sites, some of which now have an effect on the rankings of regular websites.

Some blogs also allow for ‘trackbacks’, this allows people who find your blog post useful to continue your discussion and instead of quoting you in their post, they can include a link to your whole post. Trackbacks from websites with good page ranks can also increase the popularity of your web page.

Having a blog that includes an RSS feed is helpful both to your visitors and directories. An RSS feed lets visitors subscribe to your blog via websites such as Google Reader, allowing them to view your latest updates as they are posted. RSS feeds also display your blog post in plain text which is especially useful for search engines because RSS feeds are formatted so that it is easier for computers (and search engines) to understand.

Enabling comments on your blog allows visitors to converse with you and leave their opinions about the subjects you have covered. Allowing, and responding to comments, encourages regular visits and helps to build communities around your blog. Blog comments are also very often a great new source of inspiration for future blog subjects.

Although the effect of blogs on search engine rankings cannot be guaranteed, well written blogs that include relevant information and attract regular traffic can help your website when teamed with search engine optimisation techniques provided by your seo specialists.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
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

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

Some things to consider when defining your target market are:

• What is your target area? Are you targeting local, regional, countrywide or global?
• Are you targeting businesses or consumers? If targeting businesses are they small, medium or large? If targeting consumers is it important to target families, couples or even the single market?
• Are you targeting the budget or premium market? Are you looking to sell lots of lower priced items or a few higher priced items?
• Who is most likely to purchase your products or services? Are they gender specific, for certain age groups or are they targeted to a certain activity, lifestyle or hobby?

Identifying your ecommerce stores target market at an early stage means that you can attract the right customers and not waste resources by targeting the wrong people. Targeting the right market allows you to achieve a higher return on investment.

Understanding your target market allows you to find the best and most relevant keywords for your website from the very beginning and gives you the perfect opportunity to ensure your website content is rich in these keywords. Knowing your market means you can search by location, price and specific interests and find the keywords that are most likely to drive traffic to your website.

Customers with a set budget may include words such as ‘cheap’ in their search terms, whereas people searching for more expensive products may include words like ‘luxury’ or ‘designer’. Using the correct keywords is important for successful conversion rates as targeting the wrong keywords is unlikely to attract suitable customers.

Knowing your target market is not just important when choosing keywords for search engine promotion but also when considering the design, layout and functionality of your website.

If your target is a younger market, you may want your website to be more eye catching with more activities and things to do. If you are targeting an older market, something cleaner and easy to navigate may be preferred. If your target is businesses then a professional look and feel are best.

From a technical point of view, this also allows you to decide the types of functionality you want to include. Websites targeting businesses may want to include features like having to register for an account to view prices or even special loyalty based prices for certain customers.

Consumer focused ecommerce websites may want to include features like ‘send to a friend’ so that visitors can share product recommendations and increase traffic through word of mouth; or shareable wish lists that allow visitors to save items for future reference or share on occasions like birthdays or Christmas.

Knowing your target market is important to the creation of your ecommerce website, but this is also the perfect time to identify your competitors and check out their online store to get a feel for how they target the market. I’m not suggesting you copy their website by any means, but knowing your competitors and understanding how they work will allow you to identify things that could work for you as well as things you wouldn’t want to include.

Having a list of websites you like (whether relevant to your target market or not) along with information about your target market gives your developer a better understanding of what you want to achieve with your website and allows them to suggest options to enhance your online store further.

Read Part 1 of the discussion at Ecommerce & SEO: The important part you play.

Please feel free to contact us with your comments via Twitter @impactwebsolns or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions Ltd
Search Engine Optimisation & Ecommerce Web Design Midlands

This week I will be discussing ‘You’ and the important part you play in the creation of your ecommerce website and it’s promotion. Over the coming weeks I will be covering ‘Your Market’, ‘Your People’, ‘Technical Requirements and Scalability’ and ‘Your Marketing’.

So let’s begin with….

You

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer developed a hypothesis called ‘Implementation Intention’ which is the idea of planning goals in advance; adding as much detail as possible (how, when and where as well as solutions to any problems you may encounter) for greater success. Implementation Intention is something that very much applies to the creation of an online store.

Making the decision to create an ecommerce website is not something you should just pass over to your website designer, after all – no one knows your business as well as you, so you are perfectly placed to add input into how your store should function.

Before contacting an ecommerce specialist, spend some time putting together a list of things you want your website to do and include.

Things you may want to consider:

• How do you want the online shop to look and feel? E.g. clean and minimal or vibrant and young.
• What do you want your customers to be able to do on your website? E.g. Add items to wishlists, recommend products to a friend, leave client reviews for purchases.
• What do you want the website to do for you? E.g. Is your main focus to increase your turnover or are you looking for a better way of processing your orders and handling administration?
• How do you want your ecommerce website to interact with existing websites? E.g. Link from an information or sister website to the online store, link to an information site.
• How important is it for you to be able to update the website yourself? Is the system easy to use and will you receive training on how to update your website or would you prefer to pay the designer to complete updates for you?
• Do you have product information and images available to provide to your web designer to speed up the product import process?
• When do you expect your ecommerce store to launch? What are your timeframes for individual sections of the website to be completed i.e. designs, products added to the website, testing.
• What will your role be in the creation of your online store? How much time will you need to invest in getting the site up and running?
• Will your website be built in an SEO friendly way? Is this included in the build costs or are there additional costs? How does this work link to a full search engine optimisation campaign once the website has launched?
• Where do you want your web designer to be based? Local companies will be more accessible.

Once you have decided what you want for your online store, your developer will be able to work with you and advise you of the best ways to not only achieve the things you have requested but recommend other options to enhance your store and achieve your overall goals.

By highlighting any problems you are looking to solve at this early stage, you can work with your ecommerce specialist to find the best possible solution. From experience, you are the best person to say how your business works and what you want your website to do; your ecommerce specialist is the best person to tell you how this can be achieved from a technical point of view (if you aren’t technical ask them to explain in a jargon free way!).

Please feel free to contact us with your comments via Twitter @impactwebsolns or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Ecommerce Web Design Midlands

In fact, 81% of all Internet users enter a website via a search engine. Search engines follow any link they can find and add lots of pages from the same website to the search results, making the chances of landing on the homepage just as likely as landing on any other page on the website!

So think of your online store as a bricks and mortar store. You want as many people as possible to enter your shop, so you open every single entrance – doors, windows and since it’s Christmas even the chimney! Now think about which departments in the shop these entrances are closest too and make a sign for each one e.g. ‘Enter here for Search Engine Optimisation‘, ‘Ecommerce web design this way!’.
Obviously you don’t want these signs to be massive, so little and often is the key. Make sure the signs are relevant, I don’t want to enter through the entrance marked ‘Search Engine Optimisation Midlands’ to find ‘Ecommerce Midlands’, that means I need to go searching for the right entrance and that will mean I’m unhappy by the time I get there!

This is exactly how your search engine optimisation should be, a handful of content relevant keywords per page giving you greater product placement in a wider range of search engine results, and a better chance of being found for all of your products.

As long as the keywords are relevant to your products and services it should be easy to add them into the content of the website. Product descriptions are a must in an ecommerce store as the customers are unable to physically touch and see the products, so base their decisions purely on the information provided, and a high quality of data also increases conversion rates. For a successful online store, products don’t always have to be the cheapest but they should be the best value! Even if your competitors are selling the exact same product you should still convince them that yours is the best! One important way to convey better value is with a professional looking website.

Websites that have been created in free site builders or created in WYSIWYG editors such as Frontpage often find it hard to compete with websites that have been custom built by a professional web designer – remember ‘Beauty is in the eye of the mouseholder’ and the visual aspect of a store is a must for most serious shoppers who want to deal with a professional organisation rather than someone who is going to take their money and ‘do a runner’.

Another way of conveying your market value is with good search engine rankings for the products and services you offer. 36% of online shoppers associate search engine placement with company prominence, something that you would expect from a reliable company, providing great value and service!

Intelligent keywords are crucial for attracting customers to your online store, which is why we get to know your business before we provide suggestions for the keywords that would be of most benefit to you. If you would like to discuss how a search engine promotion campaign could help to increase sales for your ecommerce website, call us on 0116 2758456.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Ecommerce & Search Engine Optimisation Midlands