Turning Shoppers into Buyers ‘Add To Cart’

Elements within your ecommerce site can be skillfully used as conversion points. This means judiciously thinking about every image, hyperlink, and line of text. Every detail on your site ultimately influences whether your visitors will purchase, or look elsewhere.

The following factors will largely determine your conversion rate, which is among most important metrics for a successful ecommerce site.

7 Factors that Influence Online Shoppers to Click ‘Add To Cart’

1. It’s all about the shopper. All copy, navigation, ads, etc. should be customer-centric to create a positive shopping experience throughout your site. Also, make sure your online voice speaks to your visitors in a way that resonates with them.

2. Shoppers are visual. Successful online retailers think about every visual aspect from their site design including text layout, formatting, and imagery, to convert visitors into buyers. Always consider your brand, present a crisp and professional visual experience to create a comfortable buying environment, encouraging your visitor to purchase.

3. Clear Messaging. You want everything about your site, including your content, navigation structure, offers, product details, and policies to be crystal clear. The click ‘Add to Cart’ should be clearly visible with graphics visually appealing for effectively increase conversion.

4. Shoppers often like what they see first. On traditional retail showroom floors, savvy retailers place their bestsellers front and center as you walk into their stores, since  customers are usually attracted to what they see first. This being the case, your best sellers should always be listed as first choices and featured products.

5. Shoppers  like things they can touch. Putting your product in the hands of your customer to touch and feel is among the oldest retail selling techniques – and it works. Of course your site visitors cannot physically touch what you offer on your site. However, through well written, compelling product descriptions zoom, alternate images, and video, you can effectively stimulate the buying process, giving visitors better visualized ownership of your products.

6. Clear and frequent calls to action. Make sure ads, offers, and product detail pages, all have strong calls to action. Provide visitors with reminders about the action you want them to take along the conversion path. As with traditional brick and mortar retail, you have to ask for the order – selling online is no different.

7. Urgency converts into sales. When running promotions you should always have a clear end date. As a rule, the sooner the offer expiration date, the higher the conversion rate. Think in terms of two-day sales and flash sales for a limited number of hours. There’s no urgency to buy unless you create it.

Apply these seven factors to your ecommerce site to help increase the number of visitors that click the ‘Add to Cart’ button. It doesn’t matter how much targeted traffic you drive to your site, unless they’ve had a great experience, easily found what they want, and can quickly purchase. What are you doing to influence your visitors to purchase from you?

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Keywords and Phrases for Search Engine Optimization

Since we are regularly asked about SEO and how it works, we thought it might help to provide a basic SEO primer for those that are challenged with the task. Keep in mind that the guidelines provided here are general principles to help get you going in the right direction. Successful SEO requires many elements including keywords, Meta tags, content, URLs and links. However, the focus of this blog post will be on the subject of keywords.

Overview of basic keyword elements

• Keywords in Title Tags – The Title tags of your web pages are among the most important elements in optimizing your website since they tell both search engines and potential visitors what your web pages are about. Make sure your Title tags use your most important keywords and total approximately 60 characters in length including spaces.
• Keywords in Meta Tags – Keywords used in Keyword and Description Meta Tags are still of importance and search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing rely on them. Also, Google specifically looks for unique Description Meta Tags on every page of your site.
• Keywords in URLs – Using keywords in your URLs can help with your SEO efforts, for example http://yourdomainname.com/seo-services.html, where “SEO Services” is the keyword phrase you want to rank well for. However, as with any SEO element, the words must also be in the content of your web page.
• Keywords in Headings – Your most important keyword phrase for each page of your site should be used as a heading on the page and within the pages content. For example, your “SEO Services” page should contain a heading on the page of “SEO Services” and the content of the page should also contain these words. If you have another page about “Website Design”, then you should be targeting the words “Website Design” on that page.
• Keywords Upfront – The first sentence of your page content should start off with your most important keyword phrase and this phrase should be tactfully woven though the rest of the web page content without being redundant.
• Keyword Density – Keyword density refers to the percentage of times your keywords or keyword phrase is used on a web page. As a rule, keywords should be woven into your content in a natural manner as you would use in conversation. You should aim for a keyword density of approximately 3 to 7 percent. Once your keyword density goes over 10 percent, your web page may be considered by the search engines as Spam and your page may receive a ranking penalty, or even be removed from the search engines index.

Applying keywords as suggested above will help your website to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. Remember, the search engines do not understand what your web pages are about unless you make it clear to them.

Check back next week to learn about applying Meta tags to your website.

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4 eCommerce Tips to Increase Online Sales

Being successful in the world of ecommerce is dependent upon many disciplines such as merchandising, marketing and design. This being the case, often basic areas of improving conversions for an ecommerce website aren’t fully thought through or applied. The following ecommerce tips will help you to increase your conversion rates for greater sales success and make your customers more likely to return to your site.

1. Keep things simple. Review your site to ensure that your navigation structures and link descriptions are easy to use and understand. The more your visitors have to try to figure things out, the more likely they are to leave and never come back. Also, make sure that important information such as pricing, return policies and your contact information are all clearly visible. The more obvious you make it that you’re there for your customer before and after the sale, the more likely it is that they will trust in buying from you.
2. Think like your potential customers. If a product can fit within multiple categories, place it wherever appropriate. Simply choosing one rigid category placement and expecting your potential customer to work to find the item doesn’t work. They aren’t going to do it. For each product you have on your site, ask yourself where else it would make sense to feature the item. Also, make sure you are maximizing up sell and cross sell opportunities. For example, if you have a page selling shoes offer a link to your belt category as well. You should always be thinking of ways to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to buy more!
3. Consider the impact of your images. Are all of the images on your site clean, crisp and professional looking? If not, you’re losing credibility with your visitors and losing sales. Review all of your images. Do they make the best impression possible? Would you buy a product shown on your site based on the image? Also, add additional images to show multiple product views and options. Take the time to make sure every image on your site is as good as it can be. Nothing can blow an online sale quicker than a poor image.
4. Actively promote your site every day. It isn’t uncommon for many small online businesses to build their website and wait for people to come. This may have worked 15 years ago, but those days are long gone. Now that the web has grown it takes greater thought and effort to drive visitor traffic to your site. Always be on the lookout for quality ways to promote your site. Basics you should be applying include search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing (SMM), pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and email marketing. The bottom line is that you need to actively work at driving traffic to your site every day.

Now take an honest look at your site and bring in others opinions. Review your site to make sure it’s easy to understand and use and that potential customers can easily find related products. Look at every single image and change any that aren’t making the best possible impression and add additional product images as needed. While doing these things (and everything else you have to do every day) make sure you are constantly promoting your site. It doesn’t matter how well you implement the first three steps above if you aren’t driving potential customers to your site to buy.

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Social Media Marketing Success Takes Time

As more businesses turn to social media marketing to grow their brands and increase sales, they’re quickly learning that real results require a significant investment of time. As a rule, those who commit the most time are the most likely to be successful.

According to the Social Media Marketing Industry Report published by Michael Stelzner, data shows that time invested in social media increases with experience. It has been found that new participants of social media spend about 2 hours a week, those that that have been involved for a few months 10 hours a week, and those that have been at it a long time 20 or more hours a week.

The data implies that after gaining experience with social media marketing, it was found to be effective and worth the investment of additional time. It also implies that new entrants into social media underestimated the amount of time required to develop and maintain a successful social media presence when they first started out.

According to the Social Media Marketing Report, experience with social media marketing leads to greater time allocated for development and participation. The report’s findings are as follows:

• 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week
• 39% for 10 or more hours weekly
• 9.6% spend more than 20 hours each week with social media

Couple the above figures with the fact that 72% of Stelzner’s 900 respondents had only been using social media for a few months or less, which reinforces that more experience with the medium leads to greater time allocated.

Hopefully these findings will help businesses to better understand social media as a cost-effective marketing tool, and of the investment of time required to make it a success.

More information on the Social Media Marketing Industry Report
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Google Search Ranking Factors

Depending upon who you talk to, Google has anywhere from 100 to well over 200 factors that they use to rank pages in their search results. To add to the fun and excitement, the days of Google updating their algorithms on a monthly basis or so no longer exists.

In today’s world of search, Google now updates their index and rankings constantly (24 hours a day – AKA Everflux). This being the case, you have to really understand SEO in order to be successful in achieving high organic search results.

The days of simply adding some Meta tags to your website and getting found is history. Not only are those days gone – such practices can even be dangerous if you do not have a solid understanding of what you’re doing.

So here are some examples of positive and negative on-page and off-page factors that affect Google rankings. Keep in mind the details are much more complex than bulleted below. However, this will give you some idea of what expert SEO professionals are up against every day. Without further ado, here’s the basics.

Positive On-Page Google Ranking Factors
(Keep in mind that when the following factors are used incorrectly they can become negative factors.)

• Keyword in URL file name
• Keyword in domain name
• Keyword in Title tag
• Keyword in Meta Description tag
• Keyword in Keyword Meta tag
• Keyword density in page body text
• Keyword font size (strong, bold, italic)
• Keyword proximity (how close keywords are placed together)
• Keyword phrase order
• Keyword prominence (how early used in tags/page content)
• Keyword in alt text
• Keyword in links to other pages of site
• Keyword in links to external pages
• Internal and external links not broken
• Efficient tree-like navigation structure
• Intra-site linking
• Less than 100 links out per page total
• Top level URL extension, i.e., “.com” vs. “.tv”
• Page file size
• Freshness of new pages and content updates
• Frequency of updates
• Page theming
• Keyword stemming, i.e., drove, drive, driven, driver
• Use of synonyms
• Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)
• URL length
• Site size
• Site age
• Age of page vs. age of site

Negative On-Page Google Ranking Factors

• Text in graphic form only
• Over optimization
• Linking to Free For All (FFA) sites and bad neighborhoods
• Redirects via Meta refresh tags
• Copyright violations
• Keyword stuffing
• Keyword dilution
• Inappropriate use of Flash
• Use of frames
• Misuse of robots.txt tag
• Single pixel links
• Invisible text, i.e., white text on white background
• Duplicate content

Positive Off-Page Google Ranking Factors

• PageRank (based on the number and quality of links to your site)
• Total incoming links
• Anchor text (keywords in text links) of inbound links to your site
• Age of inbound links
• Relevant keywords on referring pages
• Page titles of referring pages
• Inbound links from pages of same theme
• Categorization of links from other sites
• Age of site linking to yours (older better)

Negative Off-Page Google Ranking Factors

• Buying links
• Traffic buying
• No incoming links to your site
• Cloaking (presenting one page to search spiders and a different one to your visitors)
• Links from bad neighborhoods/link farms
• Google Terms of Service violations

Remember, the above are just some basic examples of ranking factors that affect how well your site ranks in Google (and other search engines). This being the case, it is recommended that you seriously study SEO before trying to implement it on your own, or you hire a professional. If you think it’s time you hired a professional to do your SEO work give us a call toll free at 877-276-2402. We can help turn the world of search in your favor.

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Social Media Marketing Checklist For 2009

Since the New Year is still young, it isn’t too late to add being more social to your list of New Year’s resolutions. Sure, you may not be able to devote endless hours a day to social media like the major players (or even an hour for that matter). However, even a little effort can pay off in the long-term with increased brand recognition and web site traffic.

The following Social Media Marketing checklist covers a minimum of what you should be doing if you’re serious about growing your online fame or web site traffic with social media.

Your  Social Media Marketing plan for 2009 should include:

• Developing or improving your existing profiles on major social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
• Working at improving the opt-in subscription rates for your RSS feeds, email newsletters, etc. What can you do differently to get people to take action on your valuable info and share it with others?
• Social bookmark your content until you break your mouse. Take advantage of social bookmaking sites such as stumbleupon.com, delicious and reddit.
• Add the creation of more user-generated content on your blogs and web sites. Whether people comment on your blog or leave product reviews on your site – it’s more content that can help you rank higher in the search engines.
• Create video and graphic content. This can include how-to videos for using your products on YouTube or photo galleries of your featured work or products on flickr.
• Use syndicated RSS feeds, whenever and wherever possible on your blogs, web sites, or other social media applications. Get viral.
• Ping! Are you using pinging services such as pingomatic.com to notify important sites such as Google Blog Search and Technorati that you have new content for them to index and share with others?
• Optimize your social media marketing efforts for the search engines. Keep in mind optimizing doesn’t have to be a major event – simply add keyword rich text content your blog posts, YouTube video titles, and tweets on Twitter.

By diligently applying the above checklist to your online marketing efforts, you’re sure to grow your web site traffic – and ultimately your brand over time.

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