eCommerce Simplicity
Everything online usability, marketing, and measurement
Google Analytics and their comical take on checkout abandonment
At Trinity, we are HUGE proponents of testing and optimizing the checkout process to maximize sales and minimize friction within an eCommerce transaction.
Recently, Google Analytics (Trinity is a certified partner) published a video that provides a comical take on this aspect of online retail.
Worth 3 minutes of your time for sure. Enjoy!
Rethinking Category Page eCommerce Presentations
As eCommerce platforms have evolved over the last 10 years, one thing has stayed fairly constant – the presentation grid used within category and sub-category pages. As a definition for “grid based”, I am referring to the type of product presentation that shows numerous products for a given category, provided in a table format.
These tables vary by retailer in terms of default numbers. Some retailers may have 4 products across and 6 rows vertically before a user has the opportunity to scroll to the next page. Other retailers might have a much more deeper product showing on the page – for example the retailer may present 10 rows of products.
Interestingly enough, in all of my years of working in this sector, I have never seen available research relating to tests within this site aspect. Many of the leading platform providers offer standard default numbers with their category grids, and their clients are likely not pressing hard enough to alter the status quo within their systems.
Limiting cognitive processing within eCommerce
Site usability often relates to human cognitive processing and how this guides user behavior. This question of “what type of merchandising grid size works best” is in direct correlation to this theory.
What we want to know is are users scrolling down the page to fully absorb the offerings for which the retailer is presenting and at what number do they most likely take “browsing” actions.
At Trinity we have recently conducted site tests that changed the number of products presented within a key site aspect in the transactional funnel. Within this test we found that a substantial increase (20%+) in conversion happened when we reduced the number of offerings that were being presented to the user.
What we did within the test is reduce the cognitive overload within the page and assist the user in digesting information. Ultimately this increased the ratio of users who took the desired action and created sales growth.
So where do you begin if you are looking to drive optimization within this site element? First, conduct some user tests that are highly focused on tasks that are realted to finding products on category and sub-category pages.
Observe how users progress through your products. Are they scrolling below the fold? Are they progressing forward to the next page of products? Understand what percentage of your test executed these two site actions.
Ask verbal questions to the respondents after and during the test. Ask questions that focus on the location of products and how easy it was to identify items during the test scenarios. Often the verbal responses that you receive can uncover unthought “nuggets” that are correlated to cognitive overload.
You see your website daily and these respondents may be seeing it for the first time. This new set of eyes is invaluable in understanding how new visitors interact with site elements.
Now you have some primary research relating to your site which is going to help your decision making. The next step is to evaluate your current abilities within your eCommerce system and if you have the ability to change the default grid attributes (the number of rows and columns of products).
Executing this type of experiment within a split test could be difficult depending on the flexibility of your code base. A more realistic approach would be to try an alternative layout on a week per week basis to assess the difference. When considering the KPI’s that are going to be used to identify success, consider the following:
Number of carts started
Number of product page views
Progression ratio of category to sub-category pages
Average dollar value per visit
These four metrics can provide the intelligence and data to see if an alternative default layout for your category page works better for your customers and makes their site experience easier.
Try testing your default merchandising grids and see how the numbers impact performance within your eCommerce store. To learn more about Trinity Insight and our eCommerce optimization services, please contact us online.
Competitive Intelligence and SEO
For search engine marketers, it’s very easy to get engulfed in our day to day tasks to improve our search rankings. Many factors come into play when performing SEO including: varied on-page optimization practices, editorial outreach, and social media creation and curation. However, the most effective search marketers understand that while it is extremely important to constantly monitor their own actions, they must also carefully monitor the competition to identify “ranking cues” for a given marketplace.
The purpose of this article is to dive into exactly how we can go about getting a “leg-up” on the competition by beating them at their own game. For the purposes of this article, we will assume the role of a prominent eCommerce company which retails electronics. We’ll call this company “Standard Electronics.”
So, as the sole internal SEO guru, you finally sit down at your computer to start the competitive research process. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is identify who your competitors are. You may already have quite a bit of this information from your initial SEO Plan (if you have one), but you’re going to want to do some more research as well.
The first and most obvious way is to search for your keywords on a search engine (preferably Google). Your top competitors are going to be on the first and second SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given keyword and may differ for certain keywords. For example, as Standard Electronics, your competitors may be different for “Televisions” than for “Laptops.” While you may have many more direct and indirect competitors, the competitors on the first two (or three) SERPS are going to be more invested in SEO than competitors lower on the totem.
You will probably want to do this every time you target new keywords or once per quarter (or half) depending on your type of business. Once you’ve identified your competitors, you’re going to leverage web-based tools to use in order to do research and analysis. There are many tools out there, so it is to your advantage to do good research into the specifics.
Here are the types of tools that you’re going to want to use:
A tool for backlink mining
Crucial for identifying link targets. SEOMoz has a great tool called Open Site Explorer. This is limited for free users.
A tool for automating rank checking
These are not an exact science, but they will certainly save you time on checking for multiple keywords.
A tool for keyword research
Google’s tool or wordtracker both work well for naming conventions
A tool for analyzing on-page SEO
Most for a fee, but these tools will help you in crafting metadata
In order to get further insight into the data, you should export each of the tools results into an excel document. How you format the document is up to you, but it is effective to utilize the tab based layout in Excel for segmenting by keyphrase or by competitor. When sorting and analyzing link data, you will want to pay close attention to link anchor text. This will help gain insight into what keywords your competitors are optimizing for and targeting. You will also want to sort by authority and relevance, basically the pagerank and site age factors.
After sorting, you will want to then analyze the data to make some sense of it and get a better picture of your competitor’s link profiles. What types of sites are linking to your competitor? Are they all forums or directories, or are they receiving links from blogs and news sites? Are the sites of high authority and relevance? Maybe your competitor has a lot of links from its distributors, or is highly involved in forums or social media. Do they have a lot of no-follow links or are the links all passing link juice? Do they have a great company blog which they link to pages deep within their site? How about their metadata? Are the title tags and meta-descriptions well written and properly applied? These are some of the many questions that you want to ask yourself when looking over competitor data.
The final step is to act on the findings. Do you see your client obtaining links from writing great original content? If so, then take a similar strategy. You may want to consider starting a company blog. Is there a large community based around your products? You may want to consider starting a support forum where people can interact and you can establish your company as a thought leader and community supporter. Maybe it’s time to determine some new keywords that your competition is targeting. Or maybe it’s time to update all of your on-page SEO. If you see your competitor is doing well with social media, you may strongly want to consider this as a new area of focus to incorporate into your SEO (you’ll probably want to do this anyway).
Competitive research is part science and part art. There are many important steps that you simply cannot ignore, but creativity highly comes into play when interpreting raw data. It is always good to involve other members of your team where possible. Maybe your marketing or sales department has some information on competitors you may have missed in your research. Maybe they have relationships where you can obtain links that are highly valued that your competitor may not have. This is an ongoing process that should be evaluated and kept current. By integrating competitive intelligence into your SEO gameplan, preferably on a quarterly basis, your business will be stronger positioned within the highly competitive organic search market.
eCommerce Geographic Targeting – Use location to drive conversion
As your eCommerce business reaches scale and your physical store operations reach levels of greater than 50 locations, the need to integrate geographical targeting solutions becomes more important to maximizing your multi-channel retail sales.
You can probably decipher what these solutions achieve, but, in a nutshell, geographic targeting allows a website to render dynamic content that is tailored to the web location of a user.
Ultimately the focus of geo-targeting solutions is to create more macro conversions for the business. A macro conversion does not always take place on the website, but rather, may take place within physical store locations and communications with the brand that convert within varied channels.
Over the last 8 years, during the period of true multi-channel retail, we have learned that when customers engage with your brand in multiple channels, their overall value rises dramatically. This is not a new concept.
But building brand loyalty in an age in which consumers are flooded with product and value messaging becomes more and more challenging, but by using geo-targeting, your company can help accelerate transactional progress in creating more location messages within your retail enterprise.
So when can you use geo-targeting?
Are you a multi-channel retailer with hundreds of locations…or just 20? Do you have a product mix that factors into situations for which seasonality affects demand? Do you have a merchandising strategy that takes into location for promotional calendars? All of these questions need to be answered when properly structuring a geographic targeting plan online.
How can a retailer or web business use geo targeting to drive both on-site and in-store conversion?
Use Case #1 Show your physical stores
This is a no-brainer and a project that senior management will likely embrace whole heartedly. This is essentially the dynamic insertion of physical store locations into website templates based upon the geographic location of the user.
Forward thinking retailers put mechanisms in place to render the “3 closest stores” to users, complete with pictures and door to door directions. This is done by integrating solutions that reference user IP addresses to back end databases that match to user zip codes.
Automatically the solution references business rules and current physical locations to decide what to render within a website template. In situations for which a user may not be living close to a store, the system renders “default” creative.
By showing the closest stores, either within a homepage only or global template module, the user now has a clear idea of the closest locations for which he or her can transact with the brand directly, without having to notice or utilize the store locator button or link.
Use Case #2 Create more relevant spotlight promotions
I have talked about this opportunity within this blog in previous posts and I am still surprised that the retail sector seems to be lagging behind other eCommerce sectors with this tactic. Weather and physical location can be great cues to drive more relevant promotions within the first three seconds of a user visit.
Think of these possible scenarios and retailers:
The Home Depot: Do you want to show the same homepage to Florida users versus users in Maine in February?
NFLShop.com: Why would the business not tailor homepage spotlight products to a local team (ex. Jerseys, hats, shirts etc to a hometown team)?
StubHub: Spotlight the local events happening on the homepage that correlate to a physical location
Use Case #3 Use geo-targeting to show your shipping value proposition
Shipping is a key factor when consumers make up their mind of if they want to purchase or not. Large retailers have complex business rules and are limited to certain states for free shipping or even free overnight shipping (which customers love!). Why not be proactive with this messaging to customer segments. Geo targeting can help immensely.
The location of your distribution centers and the corresponding ship rates may lead to having certain states having 3-5 day free shipping versus 1-2 day. This is a BIG difference in the mind of the consumer and if you are not conveying this messaging throughout the user experience then your store is missing a key opportunity.
In this user case, Geo-targeting solutions will again take assessment of the user IP address, map that address to the database of zip codes, and ultimately decipher what type of shipping option, free or otherwise, that corresponds to the user’s location. Embracing this tactic will allow your eCommerce store to be proactive to a key question in the user’s mind and help take shipping out of the equation as a potential roadblock to conversion.
Take a step back and think about your business. Do you have customer scenarios that would be positively impacted by the integration of geographically tailored content or promotions?
Ecommerce businesses are frequently mired in the order management and “blocking and tackling” functions of service and fulfillment. As your store looks to create an innovative gameplan for your 2011 roadmap, take a step back and think about how geo-targeting can enhance your user experience. Doing so can produce great gains, both in the online and physical channel alike.
If you would like more information about Trinity Insight’s eCommerce geo-targeting consulting, please contact us online.
Video Games and eCommerce
I must admit, I’m a bit of a kid at heart as it relates to playing video games. Being a child who grew up in the 80′s, I was immersed with Nintendo and Sega and fascinated by spending hours trying complete Super Mario 3 or Ninja Gaiden.
We get older and with age comes 
responsibilites. Time becomes scarce. I have less time to play video games but try to bust out the XBOX once a week for a little R&R. My interests these days lie in sports games and within a new sports game release I observed the intersection of eCommerce integrated within the online gaming experience.
When playing FIFA 10 (a killer soccer game) within the menu of the game there is the ability to go to the FIFA store. When there, users have the ability to use stored payment options to purchase additional gaming components among other things. It makes a ton of sense to personalize the store based upon user preferences and with the millions of consumers who use video games daily, this can be an interesting channel to watch in the years to come.
Lets say I am a Liverpool fan. For those in the U.S., Liverpool is a popular football (not soccer in Europe) team that has a devoted following in the Premier league of England. When configuring the game upon my first play, I select Liverpool as my favorite team. Imagine the possibilities and potential revenue share potential that can take place.
Within the store, I could be presented with Liverpool apparel, memorabilia, ticket offers, and other items that passionate fans love to buy. Essentially, it could operate as an affiliate marketing relationship, but instead of the publisher getting paid by the retailer, the video game company, in this case Electronic Arts, would get paid a revenue share from the retailer or wholesaler that ships the item.
This becomes simplistic because payment info (Credit card data) is already stored within most user accounts. Online gaming has led to users purchasing subscriptions etc online and most users have their info stored. This leads to an easier transaction and higher conversion rates.
Video games and eCommerce is an emerging channel and one that should be watched. Take a minute and think about your assortment and target demographic. Maybe this opportunity is closer than you think.
Google Optimizer & Analytics Enhancements
So last week, Trinity Insight was visiting Google at their Mountanview headquarters for the yearly summit that takes place with authorized partners within the analytics and optimizer products.
Always a great time full of learning, including progressive discussions into how businesses can maximize their web properties through conversion optimization.
While there, we got a glimpse of some of the new developments with these products. Recently announced at this week’s eMetrics conference are enhancements to both Website Optimizer and Google Analytics that further close the gap between Google’s offerings and other paid solutions.
These new developments make these solutions even more useful to marketers and technology teams across the globe.
First lets discuss website optimizer. For those who are not familiar with website optimizer, it is Google’s free tool that allows webmaster to conduct both multivariate and AB Testing in efforts to improve conversion rates. Two primary enhancements were announced.
An API for website optimizer
One of Website Optimizer’s previous limitations was the difficulty that sometimes arose in tagging creative and text within content mangement systems. Users, after monitoring and completing tests, had to re-tag pages and jump through seemingly un-necessary hoops in order to conduct follow up testing.
Google identified this as an issue and created an API for the Optimizer product. This will allow tests to be conducted without having to add the JavaScript snippets for each test that is conducted. This is a great development within the area of conversion optimization and should help businesses in embracing the culture and mindset of testing.
Right now only two CMS platforms have completed the integration. One is Crown Peak and the other is Motivity. I am sure that Google is already in discussions with other shopping cart and CMS vendors, and I believe that the open source community is developing ways to integrate leading tools like eCommerce platform provider Magento and content management systems like Joomla.
Still many technical issues to figure out, but the premise of non-tagging based testing is an exciting development within the eBusiness marketplace.
Over Time Charting
Not as big a development as the API, but this enhancement is something that will help marketers in assessing test trends over a period of time. Previously, reporting data within the Optimizer back-end was limited to an aggregate of data.
With this enhancement, you can see how the conversion rate fluctuates over a unique date period. This functionality seems great for media sites, where users return daily, to assess how new design approaches are embraced on subsequent visits.
Google Analytics, not to to be undone by it’s sister product, also enhanced their product. Let’s look at the biggest enhancement.
Google Analytics Intelligence
A great stride in the product allows web analysts to be essentially alerted by their analytics system when certain key metrics fall or rise above key thresholds. This type of functionality is going to be great in helping users identify problems with the site or marketing efforts before the problem becomes a crisis.
Some interesting things you can do within this is to define your alert sensativity. This allows a marketer to be able to structure their exact notification preferences for the metrics that matter to them and get their notifcations in a manner that will impact business decisions.
That’s what these tools are all about: Getting the right data in order to make proper business decisions. Sometimes I think that message gets lost in the clutter and complexity of site optimization. These tools will not optimize the site themeselves, but rather provide the insights and datapoints to empower someone to do so.
Great to see these enhancements and these new functionality sets make the Google products even more of a player when a business is looking for a onine testing and web analytics platform.
If you want to speak to Trinity Insight about web analytics consulting and how it can impact your marketing and site efforts, please contact us!
The eCommerce metrics you must track
Web Analytics can be an amazing technology, but also a highly under-utilized one. Complex deployments and integrations frequently leave business users befuddled. Without dedicated staff to analyze, analytics packages more often than not collect dust.
This brief is focused on outlining the 7 most important web metrics to monitor within your eCommerce business and what to look for as it relates to your website’s performance.
Bounce rate
First on our list is the most important metric you will encounter: bounce rate. Think of bounce rate as a first impression. The definition of bounce rate is the percentage of users that leave your website after only viewing the initial page that was presented.
Bounce rate is so vital because it provides details into how you initially message your value proposition to the customer or prospect. It provides a cue to also help you identify performance issues with your site that may be causing the inflation the metric.
Bounce rates vary by industry, but eCommerce businesses should focus on getting the metric below 30%. Especially important within paid search campaigns, bounce rate will provide valuable cues into which product assortments and promotions at the category and sub-category levels of your taxonomy are doing well. This knowledge can be leveraged across the business in other categories and implemented via multi-variate testing deployments.
Email Capture Ratio
The next metric you want to track is your email capture ratio. As an online business, you probably sell some type of tangible product or service in which you monitor orders or completed information forms. Most businesses monitor their standard conversion rate, but few businesses frequently monitor their email capture rate and take a proactive approach to increasing.
With eCommerce conversion rates yet to eclipse an average of 3%, 97% of users who come to your store are leaving without buying something. Just because they are leaving however does not mean they are not interested in communicating on some level with your business. By gaining an intial step of trust through the capture of an email address, you are not only increasing the size of your house list for future marketing but you are also building a relationship with your customer and can win their business by providing them solutions to their lives.
Strive for a 7-10% email capture rate and place the sign up tool prominent in the header. Too many businesses bury their sign up tool and do not leverage rich applications that can use browser technologies such as ajax to expand a capture field over standard text in an overlay fashion.
Number of non-branded organic keywords
Make sure you look at number of monthly non-branded organic search keywords. When monitoring SEO performance, you need to first strip out the branded terms that correlate with your business. Thats traffic that you would have received without effective SEO. Then look to the number of remaining keywords that were utilized to make up the balance of the remaining natural search visits.
Why is this important? Because SEO is driven from the long tail. Sure, core SEO terms are nice but you need to capture the 4 and 5 word queries that make up the majority of Google queries each day. Long tail placements are acheived through proper site architecture and quality targeted content. Simply put, the more terms that people are using to find you, the better your site is doing in content development. Aim for a 5% to 10% increase each month within non-branded search keywords as you structure your SEO campaigns.
Shopping Cart to Checkout “Step 1″ Progression Rate
Our next metric directly correlates to the transactional process. Make sure you monitor your direct progression percentage from the shopping cart to checkout step 1. See how many of your users are bailing for price shopping and/or they see a promo code box on your site and they are going hunting for one. This type of behavior dramatically impacts your conversion rate and overall profits and steps should be taken to measure and reduce.
Consider adding the promo box at the end of the transaction for non-affiliate sessions in order to reduce leakage. Use a cookie from an affiliate or potentially a URL to trigger two versions of the cart page. By incorporating checkout abandonment tools that re-market via email, and aggressive banners both internally and externally to try and re-capture the lost transaction, eCommerce businesses can pull prospects back in the sales funnel.
Browser and Resolution Percentages
Dont forget about looking at Browser/Resolution percentages (types and sizes) when scaling your eCommerce business. Lace face it, when you sell online you are in the “looks professional…is professional” world and goo design can make even the smallest retailer seem large. If your build your site and it breaks in Safari (Mac’s browser), or the navigation breaks on Firefox 3.5 on a PC, you essentially shoot yourself in the foot.
Look at the varied browsers and resolutions that are being used to view your website. Conduct full cross-browser testing, on varied platforms, to fully notice any potential usability problems that arrive.
Average number of cross/up sells added per visit
If you are an eCommerce business, you already know that intelligent merchandising is a crucial key to success. A primary metric to help you understand performance within online merchandising is that of average cross/up sells added per visit.
This datapoint associates to your cross sell tools that integrate at the product and the cart level and measures the average number of cross-sells added to the cart per visit. The number will provide details into the effectiveness of your product recommendations and if the recommended products are actively engaging and persuading customers.
It is tough to provide a benchmark statistic for this metric since products can vary so greatly in terms of pricepoint. But look at your historical performance and consider automating this component through algorithmic third party solutions.
In conclusion, web analytics is a complicated tool only when you let it be. When mining your data, consider the business need and goal before running the reports. Doing so will help you leverage your analytics in ways you never considered and help drive incremental ROI online.
Looking for more info? Contact us about our ecommerce consulting and web analytics consulting services
The frustrations from 36 different data centers
Being in the SEO space, I must admit that one of the most trying things to deal with is the ever changing order of search results. More so than in years past, on highly competitive terms, we see daily and sometimes hourly fluctuations of the SERP’s and the positioning of businesses within the Google results.
Clients ask why this happens and the short answer is that Google has approximately 36 different data centers that serve as search indexes for their website traffic. Depending on time of day, geo location, and other factors that are not well known, your results for a search query will probably be different than mine. Do a search for “mortgage rates” and you will see a different mix each and every day. This is partially driven from the dynamic nature of the term, the competitive factors relating to the term, as well as the different data centers across the country and the globe.
If you are dying to see your position across all centers, you can do it at SEOChat.com at their multiple data center tool. I recommend not to get to caught up however and just concentrate on the broader metrics instead of one holy grail term.
Conversion optimization through “smart” targeting
So each and every day we evaluate eCommerce websites at Trinity. As part of our initial processes, we discuss with potential clients the opportunities that exist relating to usability, UX, and search. In conducting the conversations, and discussing with retailers the technologies that are being embraced by their organizations, I am extremely surprised that the targeting technologies that are available on the market are not being leveraged by 50mm + online retailers.
What online targeting solutions do is let you tailor a piece of content, messaging, creative, or promotion by a parameter that exists in the users browser. Ok, that seems more complicated than it really is, lets put it within a real life scenario.
Lets say you are HomeDepot.com and the month in our example is February. You obviously have stores across the entire USA and a variety of customers to serve. In this case, a plethora of visitors are going to be coming via the homepage as they do with most large consumer brands.
So lets say you have customers coming from Denver. Your core messaging and promotions should be tailored to cold weather needs. You want to show snowblowers, specials on rock salt, a buyers guide on generators, and other content that would provide value to a user who is coming to the site from a cold weather destination.
On the flip side, say a visitor is coming to the site from Miami. Obviously this user has different needs than the one in Denver. You want to show this user patio furniture, deck maintenance content, and maybe the latest grills for sale. In eCommerce, one size does not fit all and content should be rendered in an intelligent manner.
We will explore this topic in much greater detail within a new screencast and position paper, but the options are limitless as it relates to targeting.
You can target by:
Search term
New versus returning
Clickstream milestones
Geographic IP (the example used above)
All of these scenarios allow an eCommerce business to be proactive in conceptualizing a user experience that is in the best possible position to do two things – ATTRACT, PERSUADE, and CONVERT.
With bounce rates at homepages exceeding 35% for most retailers, its obvious users have fleeting attention. By providing an approach of personalized content, you can capture their interest, and then work to make the sale. Most of the solutions on the market that optimize in this manner are based off of JavaScript and are usually simplistic to implement and test.
Its a matter of being proactive to “beat your control”. Whatever your conversion and bounce was last week, it needs to be exceeded to the positive side this week. This theory of continuous improvement, or stated “Kaizen” by Japanese manufacturing processes, is the best way for your business to take the next step with conversion.
To learn more about conversion optimization and our eCommerce consulting services, contact us when you are ready.
Don’t follow the no follow tag
So last week at the SMX advanced conference, it was revealed by Google engineer Matt Cutts, that the no follow attribute that is leveraged by numerous SEO’s, does not provide the ability to sculpt page rank as it did in the past.
For those who are not familiar with the no follow attribute, it is is a HTML element that was created to combat bog commenting spam back when blogging first gained popularity within the Internet community. In the eyes of Google, the tag was always leveraged as a mechanism to not pass page rank, and the tag was leveraged by search engine optimization agencies in a way to pass higher concentrations of page rank to more important pages within a website.
The no follow attribute did work well in many instances. in e-commerce businesses, it does not make sense to pass page rank to the pages such as privacy policy or shopping cart page. The no follow attribute allowed webmasters to concentrate a higher degree of page rank to the more important merchandising pages, and hence these important pages were able to move up in the search engine rankings.
The no follow tag gained popularity within the SCO community, and Google itself publicly came out and discussed the uses of the tag and how Google would interpret the tag within their search engine algorithm. After Google gave its stamp of approval, the no follow attribute became a tactic leveraged by a plethora of SEOs and agencies across the country.
Things have changed a bit after last week’s SMX advance conference. Matt Cutts on a panel discussed how the usage of no follow will be less effective in disturbing page rank within updated algorithm changes. Because of this, SEO’s across the country are scrambling to remove the no follow tag with concerns that could negatively affect search engine positioning.
If you use no follow tag on a limited basis, on pages such as privacy policy, otherwise known as an “overhead page”, then you likely have nothing to worry about. On the other hand if you have used no follow tags to eliminate navigational sections, and used it to seemingly shape your own flow of page rank in the manner you see fit on your website, then you might want to take your foot off the gas and remove the attribute from internal navigational links.
Sculpting page rank is not necessary if you structure your website properly from the beginning. Establishing an information architecture that has naming conventions that are based on the most advantageous search phrases for your organization, provides you the best possible chance to acquire natural traffic for your target marketplace.
Supporting SEO content within a keyword theme
Within any marketing effort, a certain sub-set of pages will be identified as the “targets” for optimization. These pages are typically the ones with the most content when compared to the rest of the site, are highly focused and keyword rich, and have some sort of stable ranking.
These pages are almost like the “hub” on a bicycle wheel. They are the foundation page that is linked to from other content on a website.
When analyzing your site, it is important to distinguish these key “money” pages and link to them with related content.
Internal linking is extremely powerful and is an under-utilized tactic within interactive marketing and business. See this example in the business cards marketplace, notice the proper “hub and spoke” approach.
If you have a keyword theme that you want to gain more penetration within, you have two tasks. First, you need to write and then write some more. Quality content will help you more than anything else in receiving editorial votes/links.
Second, build links. Build from relevant sources and make sure you are adding value. Dont just buy any link that will point in your direction. Not only are you taking a risk, but you are not providing any contextual value to search crawlers to help their understanding.
XML Sitemaps in eCommerce SEO
One of the most neglected aspects of all on-page search engine optimization is the integration and usage of XML site maps.
An XML site map allows a website to be better represented in the eyes of a search engine, and provides an automated file that resides on a server.
This file tells a search engine which webpages have been updated and outlines the full scope pages that should be included in their index.
Search engines, by nature, are trying to get the most up-to-date view of the web when they crawl the Internet. However, certain pages are not reachable from what’s called the “public” linked web. Pages that are stored in databases or stored behind Web forms etc are sometimes called the invisible web.
The site maps protocol, which was a uniform agreed-upon specification from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, allows webmasters to follow a certain agreed-upon file type to publish their websites within search engines and eliminate the problems that sometimes exist within the “invisible” web.
Search crawlers face two prominent challenges, both of which site maps solve.
One is the ability to get an accurate representation of new webpages, this is sometimes called “freshness”. Because users use search engines to find current events and information that is happening immediately, it is imperative that search engines have an index that includes webpages that were recently updated.
How can a webmaster help search crawlers discover all new and modified URLs of a website in a timely and efficient manner? XML site maps are the way to solve this problem.
The XML file also provides information into when the webpages were last updated, how frequently the page changes, and the relative importance of the page as it relates to other pages in the site.
By using this sitemap protocol that’s agreed upon by the search engines it does not guarantee the inclusion of your pages in an index, but rather, provides them with clues and information to make sure web crawlers do a better job of assessing content on your website.
A great tool to help you in generating XML site maps is a website called XML-site maps.com. This site provides a very low-cost piece of software that allows you to crawl your own website and generate XML file, while providing instructions for you to place this file on your Web server.
Super Easy! To get this piece of software up and running on your site usually is a process that takes 10 minutes.
If you are looking to maximize SEO performance and do not have an XML sitemap, now is the time to create one. Look for a video soon from Trinity discussing this topic in much greater detail.
It can’t be stressed enough how important how important a site map is in the ability for product pages to get the right amount of penetration within organic search.
Speed and its role in the user experience
Even with the increase of bandwith that is made available with new cable and internet providers, I still frequently experience high load times for eCommerce businesses and Content Management Systems. You would think that the extra bandwith would start a downward trend in terms of load times, but it seems to not be the case.
The reasoning? Design practices and code pushes that are not completely optimized. Most open source systems, such as Magento for eCommerce or Joomla for content management, are preset with numerous elements of Javascript and database calls that are really not necessary. By disabling these components and by properly configuring compression settings on a server, you can get through the initial performance hurdles of these awesome applications.
Lets not forget how important speed is within the conversion equation. Between site search, checkout, product page design, promotions & mechandising – SPEED can be overlooked in site improvement efforts.
Sometimes all it takes is a great tool to assist an IT team in isolating improvement areas and driving metric increases from speed.
Here’s the best free one so far. Its called Pingdom, and literally provides a visual chart, almost like a poor mans GANTT Chart, of all the page elements and the time to load. This tool will show you the total number of URL calls that your page will make, the size of each call, the total number of objects and the breakdown of those objects.
No tool that I have ever seen, at least for free, provides this great information. Definitely worth 5 min of your time for a review…
Dropping the ball with cross browser testing
Today I felt like I was in 2000. As I navigated the web looking for a solution to a current need, I came across a website that was just technically unable to do what I wanted it to do.
Even though I was a member, and had previously interacted with the site many times before including conducting transactions, I was LOCKED out of the ability to use the site all because of the browser I was using.
This experience used to happen all the time in the history of the web, but now it happens rarely. I was assessing the video media at IStockphoto, a business that offers imagery and video for license.
In this case, I was browsing Istockphoto through Safari, a well known browser that is provided with all new Macs out of the box. Safari is third in the browser wars (maybe even 4th with the advent Chrome) but still is a distinct and sustainable player.
When finding the video I wanted to buy, I tried logging in numerous times with ID info that I knew was correct at Istockphoto. Nothing happened each time and there was no type of error messaging whatsoever. What a great user experience.
This just reiterates the need for your business to conduct cross-browser testing in the development and designing of new web properties. This need becomes even more paramount, as companies use client side scripts to manipulate and render content.
When crafting your next design, insist that your designers test all HTML versus the following browsers:
Internet Explorer (last 4 versions)
Firefox (last 4 versions)
Google Chrome (Current version)
Safari (Last 3 versions)
Following this practice will ensure that your site is not losing visitors from basic performance issues relating to functionality, it could drive your conversion rate upward if you have existing problems.
Audio Indexing and its affect on the SEO landscape
So if you haven’t heard the news, Google has presented within Google Labs the new technology of crawling and indexing audio. Referenced as “Indexing Audio” by Google, this is a major development in the maturation of search engine optimization and provides a great opportunity for companies to distribute video content for added inclusion of search results.
Similar to text indexing, I imagine Google has created an audio detector algorithm that decodes speech and ultimately will decipher the text of the audio, to isolate what it is being verbally conveyed.
Within YouTube currently, the site’s indexing technology relies on user-populated tags, titles, and description text to appropriately serve a video to match a search query. Audio Indexing is a major advancement because now long-tail mentions of phrases within the video will match Google.com searches – ultimately leading to even more of an impact within Universal Search results.
Interesting development. Reiterates the need to incorporate video production and syndication within your online marketing strategies.
The killer app has arrived…
So not sure if you have tried it yet, but I must say that the new Netflix technology that allows the integration of a user playlist/movie queue with your Xbox live, for live home streaming, is one of the best recent achievements that I can think of within the Internet business world.
Seriously, how cool is this? At work I can go through Netflix’s offerings for “Instant” choices and coordinate content to be rendered through my Xbox Live account (which in most times is already owned) and streamed at my leisure. The content comes through crystal clear and there are a plethora of HD titles to choose from.
Netflix does two things here to really stand out. One, they offer a HUGE selection of movies and TV shows for people to choose from. Doing that, and doing it at no cost, was a great way to help the consumer in an economic downturn, and will ultimately build increased loyalty from their customers.
Also they made it EASY. So easy. This is something that a non-techie person can do fairly easily. Like the 40 something Mom with the 10 year old son who already has an Xbox live account.
Kudos to Netflix for their great application. What a great and innovatove partnership with Microsoft. Going back and seeing season 1 and season 2 of The Office is going to be a good time…
Quick fixes within product pages
Later in January, Trinity will be attending the Internet Retailer web design conference that is taking place in Miami. The focus of the show is to present varied opinions and examples to how a user interface can be presented within an online retail environment.
As part of the show, I am providing free consultations for paid attendees of their online store. As part of this process, I always look at the layout of product detail pages, and I am never suprised at the low hanging fruit that many online retailers have as it relates to this portion of their user experience.
Here are some quick tidbits of what you can identify as problems in your product pages, as well as some potential solutions.
Problem #1. Price below the fold
A biggie! Users come into your store primarily from long tail searches, especially if you have an extensive number of pages within search engine indexes. In these cases, most long tail traffic first lands on a product detail page.
Because of the limited attention span of a web “browser”, who is looking for price details primarily, by not showing the price immediately you are potentially losing visitors who bail immediately.
Solution: Bring the price above the fold and next to the product description. Make sure that the user sees the picture, short description, price, and add to cart button…all above the fold.
Problem #2. Location of cross sell items
Some online retailers see as high as 15% of total revenues from cross sell additions, some as low as 1%. The difference? It comes down to relevancy and location. If you are an established online store, consider implementing a dynamic solution that provides cross-sells based on clickstream and product data.
Solution: Be sure to test the presentation of the cross sells at varied locations within the product page, to gauge the difference in add to carts, total $ value per visitor, and total cross sell additions. You can always use multivariate testing tools to help in running your tests.
Problem #3. No reviews
Users crave real people perspectives. With new free solutions on the markeplace such as Power Reviews, there is no reason why any eCommerce store should not have the ability to capture, moderate, and present reviews. It may be a little work added to the management of your store content, but ultimately it will benefit your business in terms of engagement and conversion…assuming of course that you will get glowing reviews of good service!
Solution: Check out power reviews to see their latest offering and services models. Integrating reviews will be a great decision, trust me on that.
Going back in time…with the Google Time Machine
So I just stumbled upon this in my online marketing reads for the day. Here’s an interesting tool that allows you to compare Google results of 2001 to results of today.
As it relates to SEO, not really much insight that is derived from the tool. Potentially, a user can identify sites that were #1 then and #1 now to really get a glimpse of true authority sites. But my thinking is that situations such as that are going to be few and far between.
Anyways, Google time machine is worth checking out….for fun at least.
SEO Network examples
So I have gotten some feedback from people asking for examples of SEO networks created in social “sharing” type sites. I have included some examples for you to observe, all targeting themes in the wedding related category.
Check out some of these site to see how you can leverage the “authority” of these social media sites to your domain for SEO purposes by creating great content and other forms of media.
Notice these pages target a seasonal theme (“fall weddings”) for maximum relevancy. Start creating these types of sites for your market niche. Use Squidoo, Google Knol, HubPages, Google Notebook, and Zimbio to get started!
Creating a “network” of content within your SEO campaign
Retailers frequently tell us that the most frustrating aspect of SEO is the lack of control on outcomes. A business can follow all of the golden rules that are set out by best practices and engines alike but still receive random fluctuations within high value keyword targets.
The reasoning of these fluctuations are algorithm “shifts” that correlate to your current inbound links. When changes are conducted within Google’s engineering team, and the ramifications of those changes gets absorbed across different Google datacenters, your rankings will seem completely unreliable as multiple times a day they may change. It is not uncommon to see as a domain fluctuate within 2-4 SERP’s (Search Engine Rank Position) in one given day.
To some extent, this is inevitable. To expect a ranking to stay in a specific spot, especially within a high competition category, is foolish, and complacency will usually result in a loss in rankings.
To reduce this risk, your online marketing unit must stay proactive in link building and continue to build links to your domain from relevant topical content.
This last sentence is the one you want to remember from this post. Links from relevant topical content is what Google likes and rewards webmasters on!
By having websites that are tightly knit on topical areas, it is easier for the search giant to provide a more relevant experience to what the visitor is looking for, as they can more easily present content within inter-related websites.
So you know you need topical links, but you also know that just buying them is not a good practice. Where do you begin?
A great place to start is within the social media marketplace and by constructing a network of independent “social sharing” sites that interlink to each other and your domain.
Lets take for example you are trying to rank numerous products within the Baby products category. Your goal is to rank on a plethora of terms that include the phrase “baby” as well as many standalone terms that are going to be very competitive such as “stroller”.
After conducting your keyword research, you should have a targeted list of about 30-45 primary phrases that are on the short list of SEO targets. At this point you start creating webpages within social sharing sites, on the topics for which you are targeting.
What is a social sharing site? It is a new type of web property that is driven from user generated content. Sites like Squidoo.com, Hub Pages, and others that allow users to visit and create media rich webpages embedded with html content, video, rss feeds, and other tools.
As long as these pages are of high quality, and can be utilized as a trusted source of information for Google, these pages will provide value in outbound links. Here is an example of a example page that is targeting the PediPaws product.
http://www.squidoo.com/pedi-paws-trims-pets-nails
Notice the video, content and integrated posts from external sources. Also notice the one or two outbound links with targeted anchor text? These links were strategically included and provide great value to the targeted domain.
These links will also increase outbound value (i.e. pagerank) over time, as age and future content updates will help dramatically.
By creating a network of these types of sites, within a certain keyword theme, and interlinking these sites together, a business will have a powerful asset for search engine optimization. These links will improve over time and leverage the authority of the core domain for which the page was published.
Of course this is going to take alot of fresh content, re-purposing content would be a waste of time. By executing this strategy, your online marketing metrics, in terms of incremental visits, will go up within the category.
Learn more about this tactic and Trinity’s SEO Services at our website.
Yahoo and Index Tools
For those who are not aware, Yahoo! recently purchased a company called Index Tools. Index Tools was a not well known, but very viable provider, or web analytic and bid management solutions. The acquisition though has been extremely quiet as the businesses have not issued any type of release that outlines next steps in terms of a public rollout.
Being that web analytics consulting is one of our most prominent offerings within Trinity, this is a decision that we are anxiously awaiting. Index Tools is a great platform and provides some key differences versus Google Analytics.
First, I love the drag and drop interface for customizing reports. This is a intuitive time saver. Second, unlike google analytics, you can apply filters dynamically within the report you are viewing (similar to Omniture) and do not have to set them up at a central location.
Next, their overlay tool is superior to GA. You can actually take a section of a webpage that you want to assess and drill down into the datapoints within that section. Also, there are many more metrics to segment by within the overlay data.
Lastly, Index Tools allows for the integration of multiple segments at once. And again, similar to the segmentation features, this is all done in a drag and drop interface.
Hopefully, Yahoo releases this product for free. If so, Google Analytics is going to be playing catch up immediately. More realistic in my mind though, is a scenario in which you have to meet a certain spend level within Yahoo search marketing to get it for free and if not, a user would pay a monthly or annual fee.
If you havent checked out Index Tools, I highly recommend it.
Some free/low cost web tracking services that are a must-see!
So I am a big fan of Google Analytics and Trinity Insight is an authorized Google Analytics Authorized Consultant (GAAC in analytics circles). Besides offering a great solution at no-cost, Google Analytics made web analytics easy and this was a driver in getting both awareness and usage across mainstream U.S. businesses for web analytics.
The key behind GA is the simplified user interface and speed for which reports render. The system is built in flash, and is a great example of a new technology driving better insights within Internet Marketing.
Well it seems that Google’s efforts, as well as the macro-trends that associate with analytics usage, have led to a run of competitors in the free or low cost analytics/web information space. After taking a closer look at some of these offerings, I thought it would be helpful for our readers to get awareness into what I see as the winners. Most of these companies are using new technologies like flex and ajax to make these apps more slick and fast.
Here are the top three finishers…
Bronze Medal:
Clicky is a analytics tool that is built within AJAX and unlike Google Analytics, the web data is presented in real time. This is a great way to help protect versus site outages, versus seeing it 8 hours later with GA.
Clicky also provides much more detailed metrics relating to user behavior as it happens. The system shows what visitors are in your site, from what country, and how they found you, but in an individual presentation. This type of information is similar to what a business can extract within certain live chat offerings.
The report offerings are much less sophisticated than Google Analytics, but for a CEO type, the offering is easier to navigate with the simplistic links at the top of a browser. Last but certainly not least is the fact that the API vault is open with Clicky and companies can create their own cool applications with this data.
Silver Medal:
If you are in Search then this is something you should check out. One of the hardest things to do within SEO is properly evaluate current positioning across multiple keyword themes and be able to FORECAST where a theme is headed.
Similar to the stock market, where trend analysis using moving averages is vital to assessments, Enquisite offers toolsets to gain moving averages within SEO targets. You can export your search data and do this is in Excel, but hey who really has the time for that?
Also cool within Enquisite is the PPC Assurance offering that allows paid search advertisers to assess fraud and other errors within PPC. Any experienced paid search marketer will tell you that if you go to a search engine with a legitimate complaint about click fraud or mis-calculations, and can back it up with data, then you have a great shot at getting a refund on those clicks. Use this software to do this for you.
Gold Medal Winner:
Very innovative. Essentially Crazy Egg provides free heat map type tools to understand click distribution for usability questions.
Varied heat maps exist in the analytics space. GA’s “overlay” leaves some things to be desired and Omniture’s plug-in based model that integrates with Site Catalyst has not always been the most effective as well.
Crazy Egg provides a solution to run in parallel with either Omniture or Google Analytics. Offering a free and paid versions, Crazy Egg provides click data in overlay, list, heatmap, and confetti (?) form.
Ok, I’m with you that the sword election of confetti might be a weird choice by the Crazy Egg management team, but you need to see how this interactive application works! Essentially all clicks show up on the analyzed page in the way of colors, and these colors map to an incoming traffic parameter (ex. Direct or Google). This can be clicked on or off by an analyst.
This provides great insight into how varied channels are performing as it relates to individual page click tendencies. This type of information is critical for your landing page tests in PPC and Email.
Hope everyone is having a great summer. Football season is right around the corner!
Copycats abound in the search business
Is it me or is that it seems Yahoo and MSN just sit back and watch Google’s application development and marketing and then essentially put out their own offering of the product/service in an attempt to get users to use their offering. Instead of being innovative towards their webmaster tools and products, the “other” two search engines just seem to take a back seat, unwilling to invest the capital and embrace the risk that is associated.
First it was Yahoo’s purchase of Index Tools, a good mid-market analytics application. Index Tools could potentially be more robust that the current Urchin platform that is used by Google Analytics, because of the already established bid management tools. Rumor has it however that Yahoo is not going to go down the same route as Google did by making the software free. This I feel is a tremendous mistake.
If the goal for Yahoo is to either gain more data on advertisers, or educate advertisers into site & marketing performance so that they spend more, then the focus should be mass integration (i.e. getting as many users as possible). To get businesses to integrate the Yahoo analytical tags on their site, Yahoo has to position their data as an alternative to Google, but they can not lose fact of the fact that Google Analytics is and always be free, and even a low cost paid alternative will likely have very slow adoption.
Microsoft on the other hand is trying to get a slice of the market for which Google’s webmaster tools owns. For those who may not know what webmaster tools is, in a nutshell it helps websites understand the way a web crawler sees them. Webmaster Tools allow a user to see crawl rates, broken links, create sitemaps, and gain visibility to the overall “health” of the website.
Because Google likes clean code, and has put out so much information to the SEO community about the importance of the indicators in the toolset, it has to be a vital part of site maintenance and management.
Microsoft’s alternative is much less robust and has a ways to go to catch up with Google’s offering. It seems the real goal of the effort is to attempt and get businesses to provide their Geo-location data so MSN Live can provide the type of local search results that Google provides today. If I was Google, I wouldn’t be too concerned about this latest challenger as well.
Open Source Ecommerce Systems – Why staying in house for technology makes sense
In the last 6 months, I have been closely paying attention to the development and maturation of Magento Commerce – the latest and by far greatest open source eCommerce solution. After implementing it on a few development domains here at Trinity, I quickly realized that this solution is head and shoulders above OS Commerce – the long standing king of open source eCommerce platforms.
Even in a standard installation, with no customization from a technology perspective, I was blown away at the level of functionality that is provided. Here are some snapshots of what this software can provide.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
- Free Shipping Option
- Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
- Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
- Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
- Search Engine Friendly URL’s
- URL Rewrites
- Recently Viewed Products
- Recently Compared Items
- New Items Promotional Tool
- Up-sells in Shopping Cart
- Cross-sells on product pages
- Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
- Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
- RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
Wow. I know many enterprise level platforms that do not have this type of functionality. Most impressive to me was the ajax based cart page that allows a user to progress through a transaction without having a page load as well as the guided navigation functionality that is allowed to be customized through the back end by aligning attributes to the taxonomy.
What is a bit of a challenge at this stage is finding developers for the software. Being that is so new to the marketplace, you have to hunt to find someone with experience.
I highly recommend loading the software on a domain and having some fun with the customization capabilities. If you want to see it in action, and view the homepage UI with an integrated multivariate testing solution (google optimizer), check out Skateboarding Direct
Human Psychology and Consistent Naming Conventions
Its amazing how everyday occurances that happen within interactions in the physical world, can accurately reflect concepts that mimick it in a digital one. Take for example the concept of providing clear and consistent naming conventions, better described as providing clear visual cues for users to complete tasks and follow a path.
So every day, or almost every day, a person arrives at our office looking for the county courthouse that resides in the same building. And typically, we let the person know that they missed the sign for the courthouse and it was located on the first floor.
Now this physical sign is very visible. Its just missed by 1 out of every 35 people or so. But it proves the point that instructions and persuasion has to be clear and VISIBLE. Make sure to clearly tell your users the pathways to the tasks that they are trying to achieve.