Changes to the existing site. Over 90% of all products on the website needs to have copy re written for it. This is a very time consuming but critical part of selling online. There is also the process of ensuring the stock in the shop mirrors the stock displayed on the website. This would save your team alot of time (and money) if they did not need to worry about applying credits and trying to chase the client for an alternative order. This is all downtime and is an operational cost which you don’t need with such a small team.

There is new functionality on your site which requires a member of your team to create up selling and cross selling relationships with all products. This is a manual process but critical in order to increase average order value (AOV).

Email Marketing. It has taken you over a year to send out one campaign (which still has not gone out yet). Email marketing campaigns should go out at weekly intervals. Time needs to be set aside to create an offer, manage the campaign and reviewing the stats afterwards to measure its effectiveness.

Database Growth. There needs to be initiatives in aggressively growing your customer database. There are many ways to effectively develop draws in your physical stores to prompt physical customers into providing their name and email address with an opt in for email marketing. This is a captive audience you are neglecting. You should be speaking to these people regularly!

Google Adwords. Spending marketing dollars to ensure you are prominent in Google for key terms is critical and has been done by Exceed for you in the past with great results. Someone internally can be trained to manage this for you if you wish for this intellectual property to remain in house. Exceed Online is happy to train a member of your team on how to manage Adwords campaigns to deliver ROI.

Australian Website. There is huge demand for your products in Australia. You don’t need to worry about the  capital costs of building physical stores in Australia, you need a website! The website can be managed from New Zealand with all fulfilment and logistics outsourced. This is a very common business model around the world.

This is just the beginning, but as I see it, the very basics in building the online division if your overall business.

**It’s important to note, this is not a blanket solution for all businesses but my recommendations for a particular business.  I shared this email because it does have concepts which will apply to many online businesses.

Here I outline some basic areas you may want to consider when optimising your website as well as those which professionals are likely to undertake.
One key factor to take note of is that while a large part of the SEO can be carried out as an initial project, a fair bit of the work will be ongoing.

For SEO to work well it needs to be viewed as an ongoing process of continual improvement and refinement, in line with monitoring changes with the search engine indexing and your competitive environment as well as your online store itself.

But the investment you put into SEO is worth the effort. If you manage to push your key products up the search engines to be listed on the first page of results near the top. This can be worth thousands if not more to your company.

Stage 1  – Investigation

Any company that offers SEO as a service should offer an initial investigation process which covers a set of tasks such as:

• Business Scoping
• Website Audit
• Keyword/ Phrase Research
• Competitor Analysis
• Trend Analysis

Stage 2 – Architecture and On Page Alterations

Architecture

One of the first areas you want to look at is your site architecture. You don’t want to go optimising your stores product pages with inbound links and then have the products page address change.  There are ways to avoid losing your links with redirects but it can be complicated so it is better to just get it right from the start.

If your store has been online for some time then tread with caution when it comes to altering your architecture. There have been many examples of where inexperienced web companies dabbling in SEO make changes to a well performing site and then have it drop down in rankings and not return to its previous rankings for some time. When selecting your provider ensure that they specialise in SEO and they have solid case studies to back them up.

There are ways to prevent the loss of URLs with redirects in many cases.

One basic addition to your site is a site map. A site map ensures search engines can find your pages easily and index them. If you use Magento it already creates one for you which is nice and simple!

Theme and Design

This can be an issue for some. Here at Exceed Online we ensure all of our themes are SEO friendly. Loading time, linking and images can all have an effect on your SEO and need to be taken into consideration during the design process..
It is important that the theme is also optimised for load time as this will have an effect on your rankings. The faster your site can load the better. You can use online tools to check the speed of your site. E.g. Page Speed. http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Any good web company should invest time into the following areas:

• Architecture
• Technical Alterations
• Analytics Set Up
• Article and Product Formatting
• On page SEO

Your on page SEO should ideally be carried out when the products or articles are initially entered. This will save you time and hassle later on as it is a page by page process.

You want to ensure your content and product pages utilise the basics for SEO when it comes to copy. Make sure your most important keywords for that article or product are in the title. You generally also want the most important text close to the top of the page. To bring emphasis to phrases within your articles you can use the various header tags using the largest header tags for the most important phrases. CSS can be used so that the header tags do not mess up your pages with headings in the middle of paragraphs.

Search engines love both unique and new content. Try to update your articles on a regular basis as this will help your site rank higher and also give you a chance to be news worthy and publish content around the hot topics of the current time. Unique content is always better than copied or republished content when it comes to the search engine point of view.

Longtail Key Phrases

If you have a basic understanding in this area you will know that you should be targeting long tail key words more than short. Not only is the competition for the shorter phrases high but the searcher has often not drilled down or carried out the research and come to specific products they are researching. The long tail keywords will present the highest chances of conversions and the most value to you in the majority of cases.
There are a number of tools and techniques you can use to workout ideal phrases which we will cover in future articles.

You must be careful not to over optimise your pages by adding your key phrases over and over. The search engines will often spot this and it will not help your page rankings.
Your key phrases should be placed in the first and top most part of your copy and also in the titles where possible.

Images & Flash

If you want to have your images indexed by search engines use ‘alt image’ tags to give an image alternative text. Also give the file name an appropriate and relevant name.

If you really want a well optimised site then it is best to avoid flash altogether. Flash can be a tough one as it inhibits the ability of search engines to index anything within the flash files. If you are going to use it do so sparingly.

Stage 3 – Off Page

Link Building and Social Mentions Strategy

Once you have optimised your content your off page strategies become more important in keeping your results moving forward. The sooner you can begin your off page strategies the better as it takes time in both obtaining valuable links and anchor text as well as time for it to take effect in search engines.

In short, Google rates websites higher the more popular they are. The more websites which link to you the better when it comes to your rankings. Websites that are high authority or importance in Google’s eyes provide much more valuable links than say pages or websites that contain very few in bound links or importance from the search engine point of view.

You will also want to gain both links to your site in general such as to the homepage and also deep links to specific pages, sections or landing pages.

Some basic areas your SEO professional may consider utilising include:

• Social Media
• Upstream / Downstream Suppliers
• Directories
• Content Provision

Where to Gain Links From

There is a plethora of ways to obtain links. We will mention some of the more straight forward techniques.
Both upstream and downstream business’s you are associated with is always a good place to start.
Not only does the authority of the websites linking to you matter, but also the relevance of the content. If the page or website websites which link to you lacks any kind of relevance to the content on your site then the link will be of less benefit than if it did contain related content.

This is also where anchor text comes in to play. When a site links to yours, you also want to try and obtain links that have anchor text which represent a key phrase on a specific page or one of the key phrases for your site in general.

Depending on the industry you are in some will suit you better and there may even be some unique opportunities that present themselves because of your position.

Some other areas to gain links from may include:

• A simple links page of related services in your industry – swap links with others
• Contact related site and offer copy or editorial services
• Forums and online discussion points
• Provide other companies testimonials and references

This is really just the beginning of possible link building strategies. There are many more you can implement. Just how you go about it and the various options we will discuss in future. There are also best practice ways to both approach people and implement these strategies.

Push for Social Mentions

While there is a lot of debate in this area there is much evidence out there that suggests that social media and your mentions on the various media such as Twitter, Facebook and Digg for example, all contribute to SEO results. While the ‘no follow’ rule did once limit if a link contributed or not to search engine rankings, it has now become a grey area with much evidence pointing to social mentions contributing.

Facebook, Twitter and social book marking are a good and relatively easy place to begin. As you become more experienced you can then look at heading down the route of video, forums and other more advanced areas.

What not to do!

Don’t spam your links. All too often websites set up bots or send out a staff member to post comments and forum posts on other sites in a very obvious and spam like manner. Whatever you do, avoid this at all costs. Your posts and comments should always be contributing something constructive.

When it comes to linking to other sites don’t link to spammer or sites that may have a bad reputation as this could impact on your own rankings in search engines.

Magento Specific

For those using Magento you will be happy to know that is it is a relatively search engine friendly system. One of the many advantages of using this rock solid platform is that it is reasonably well setup for SEO out of the box with the latest version.

Magento features powerful SEO control in the admin area of the site, URL rewrites, meta information for your products, a site map that auto generates along with generation of popular search terms.

There are also a number of great extensions to help you further optimise your Magento setup which Exceed Online has solid experience in implementing.

If you are looking at improving your SEO for your Magento store then get in touch with Exceed Online.

In Summary

We will look at each area in more depth and address more advanced techniques in future articles.
The main factor with SEO is not to give up. Results can take time to be noticeable and it can take months for your hard work to start producing results.

Keep track of your efforts so you don’t forget where what you have done and where you have been. Try implement something small every week rather than trying to do it all at once. And remember that the above is an ongoing and cyclical process where your SEO strategy needs to constantly evolve. If you want to achieve great results then hire experienced professionals to implement a sound strategy for your search engine optimisation.

With the vast amount of information and choices we face everyday, a human brain acts as a filter and picks up ONLY the relevant information. In order to sell, one needs to follow a natural reading sequence.

THE SHOPPER:

1. Notices the package
2. Asks “What is it?”
3. Wonders “Why should I care?”
4. Wants to be persuaded
5. Needs proof

By presenting information to match this sequence, a package can sell the product more effectively. Selling online is no exception.

Your website needs to follow a similar reading sequence, one that supplies users with ONLY the information they need, instead of trying to squeeze EVERYTHING onto the homepage and making your users do ALL the work, which will undoubtedly cause them to LEAVE.

All you really have to do is ask yourself this SIMPLE QUESTION:

Does our website look FAT in this dress?

Too many websites are bloated with irrelevant information.

By Marty Neumeier, the author of The Brand Gap

You and I both know it is a bad idea to cram a store shelf with products, but why do we cram our websites with too much information? I guess managing an online shop is still relatively unknown territory for most of us.

Therefore, we often make the mistake of more is better.

QUIZ:
Which of these sites looks easier to use?

There is a general rule of thumb for a web page, have no more than three calls to action. I don’t mean literally three calls to actions, but three levels of calls to action that provide a clear hierarchy.

In order to emphasize a call to action, the idea is NOT to bold and enlarge the text and place on fluorescent background but simply MUTE the elements around it.

QUIZ:
Where is Waldo?

In conclusion, a good design is not a highly decorative web page that doesn’t serve a purpose but a website which provides only the relevant information. Be true to yourself and think what you can take away, not what you can add.

So why do we need to know about vectors and bitmaps? Because once we understand how images display on a monitor, we can really utilize product photography and branding images on the online shop.

Bitmap Graphics

Nearly everything seen on the web is a bitmap. Bitmap graphics are made of pixels. A pixel is a tiny square that contains information about colour. A single image may have thousands of pixels and just like human skin under a microscope; these pixels are only seen when magnified.

Pixels can never change. When saving an image at a certain size, the computer remembers the amount and the placement of the pixels precisely. On the other hand, image size can change. When saving an image at a larger size, more pixels are created to fill the new space. The same goes with saving it at smaller size, pixels are removed to fit in the smaller space.

Think of it like pouring juice into a glass. Only a certain amount of juice would fit into the glass. No more, no less. Extra fluid overflows and it doesn’t stay in the glass. On the other hand, when there is not enough juice, water is added to fill the glass. The juice is diluted, the flavor weakened.

In the same way, the computer must add additional pixels to fill a larger area. When there is no source of information, the computer takes what is currently available in the image. This is why a bitmap graphic looks blurry, sometimes even blocky.

Vector Graphics

Vector graphics are made of points, lines and curves. This mathematical formula allows the computer to remember how the image should be drawn, rather than how it looks.

This is the key difference between vector and bitmap graphics. Due to the mathematical nature, the image can be redrawn at any size, I mean, any size! It can be as big as an airplane, or as little as a grain of rice.

However they also have its drawbacks. Vector images must remain relatively simple in comparison to bitmap images. It is impossible to display photo-realistic images. Therefore vector graphics are ideal for precise artworks, such as logos, which frequently need to be presented in different size and colours.

Now you know the JPGs, next time you can draw with me. Until next time, take care.

Social media is a great way to connect with your current and potential customers in a more personal space. Social media is where many people spend their ‘personal’ time online and let others into their own private lives.

It is most powerful in generating repeat customers and reminding people about your products or services. But not only that, it is great for encouraging interaction between your customers and products or directly with your online store. So how can you leverage social media for eCommerce?

Here I have briefly outlined areas of social media which online stores have successfully utilized:

Facebook – Business to Customer:
Facebook ‘like’ pages (previously fan pages) allow you to stay in touch with those who have connected with your online store. The great thing about a ‘like’ page is that it is reasonably un-intrusive. As you add updates to your page they are added to the individuals activity feed rather than being sent to their inbox. A nice subtle way of staying visible to your core audience who have shown an interest in your store or purchased from you before.

There are also applications like ‘Shop Tab’ on Facebook which allow you to have your store functioning within Facebook. While this may be a novelty for some right now there is great potential for the future in having purchase functionality in the largest online social network. The popularity of this will also likely increase as customers trust in online shopping increases in these new locations. Many of these Facebook store applications have the ability to plug straight into platforms such as Magento.

Facebook – Customer to Customer:
Encouraging interaction on your website or via the typical social media outlets is a great way to bolster relationships with your customers and also their friends. Allowing customers to interact with one another to utilize social media directly inside the shopping process or in parallel is a powerful way to have customers endorse or generally talk about your products.

Some stores have taken advantage of social media to get people talking about their products they have on offer. They allow people to share a product or article online with friends within Facebook for example. You can allow customers to comment and ‘like’ your products, deals and offers resulting in comments directly into their activity feeds giving you a viral form of marketing. This will of course work better for some types of products than others.

Some stores go as far allowing reviews, comments and purchases to feed into the activity stream of the customer on Facebook if they so desire.

Microblogging with Twitter:
Twitter is the other power house of social networking at this present time. Used by less people in comparison to Facebook but you will find those that do use it on a regular basis are often are quite passionate and involved. It is another great outlet to stay in touch with your customers. Rather than straight out plugs for your store I recommend a more quirky and personal approach. The most important factor with Twitter is to try make it personal as much as possible. Don’t just use it to post up links to products as you load them into your store. If it is product based try to enlighten them about the product or offer in some interesting manner and engage them in interesting ways.

Integrating a latest ‘tweets’ box into your store is usually reasonably straight forward and often a good way to gain followers on Twitter.

You can engage and also grow your Twitter followers by using tactics similar to the following suggestions. You could offer unique discount codes only to those following your store on Twitter. You could run competitions exclusive to those on Twitter and actively promote this on your site and to your email database. Some online stores go as far as offering new products to those on Twitter before they are released to the general public.

Social Bookmarking / Social News:
Social bookmarking allows people to save and organize them online as well as share, search and manage them easily. People are able to look through others bookmarks and categories present.

Social bookmarking will work best for products that are new releases or obscure as well as blog posts and other content which is news worthy. If you have a passionate customer database or deal with products people are passionate about your chances for success with bookmarking are much higher. Members of these sites can then rank or vote pages up which helps each other find interesting or valuable links. Popular examples include stumbleupon.com, reddit.com, dig.com and delicious.com. It is relatively simple to add bookmarking potential to online stores.

It is also said that from the search engine point of view, the more bookmarks you have the higher you are going to rank, to a degree. So it has advantages of direct traffic as well as growing your search engine traffic.

Video:
If video is done well this can be a great way to engage potential customers. That doesn’t mean filmed on a broadcast quality camera or you had twenty hours of editing input. It’s about engaging the customer in some interesting or quirky way. Some basic video content may be providing product reviews which many customers will find useful. Uploading these videos to video platforms such as youtube and viemo is relatively straight forward and gives you access to a huge potential viewership.

Product Reviews / Comments / Customer Feedback:
Product reviews and comments help create make your online store a great content source for feedback on the products you stock. This not only helps those on the site already but those searching Google. As an added bonus, as new comments and reviews are added it often helps bring content back to the ‘new’ status from the search engine point of view. This will often result in better rankings.

Forums:
Forums allow your customers and staff to interact with each other while at the same time generating content for your online store. A message board can be a great asset if you manage to pull them off and get them active with contributors. But just remember an empty and inactive message board is often not a good look. Unless you have mastered other social media its best to leave this until you have some solid experience under your belt. Even the most experienced social media experts can have difficulty in growing the participation levels within a message board.

Blogging:
Blogging is a great way to provide content for search engines to index as well as help increase your visitors and customer browsing time. This gives you a larger window of opportunity to convert them into a lead or sale.
Blogging if carried out well can also be a great way to cement your site as one of the authorities within your industry. Blogs are great for communicating your general store news, upcoming products, promotions and also to gain customer feedback.
To grow a regular audience that come back to check out your blog make you schedule regular updates. Use web analytics to determine how often posts should be made to retain regular readers. Blogs can also be a great way to personally connect with your audience.
If you are not blogging yet put it to the top of your list! There are too many benefits you are missing out on.

Other Social Media:
Chat and games are much less talked about areas. For some online stores a chat application can allow a live questions and answers component which is well suited to some industries. They can also be utilized for live support.
Games can be a great way to provide something unique with total engagement with your brand. But the creation of simple online games can often be costly for the benefits you will receive. Unless you have a really good idea then its best not to invest your time here.

By no means go and implement a strategy around every one o the platforms above. It is always best to work out what may work best for your store first, examine the results as you go and refine your approach.

We have touched on each area of social media in brief. Future articles will discuss each component in more detail and give you more ideas, tips and techniques on how to make each one work for your online store or website.

Senior Management support. I touched on this yesterday. If the Senior team support the web channel, facilitating change, acquiring budget and cap ex becomes a simpler hurdle to overcome.

Supply Chain. Many retailers fall down due to Supply Chain support and struggle to manage and maintain a consistent range of products over both online and offline channels. In the physical world, if products are sold out, it is less space on the shelves; however, when selling products online, the issue of charging customers for items not in stock arise. If it takes time to replace or reorder this product life becomes very difficult. Backorders equals cost and degrades margin.

Fulfilment Infrastructure and Processes. Achieving the 3 R’s is point of difference in the online world (getting the Right product, to the Right place, at the Right time). Inventory management is a fundamental killer and one of the single biggest reasons business alignments are not achieved. One of Exceed Online’s clients is the largest Shoe retailer in New Zealand. Two years ago they wanted to go online but could not go transactional because their systems and processes were not ready. Two years later they are still not transactional. Some of the main concerns centred on picking orders. They did not want a “Web Warehouse” and deciding which store (or stores) to fulfil from became too hard. The inventory management system was not adequately equipped for eCommerce but was only part of the problem. The physical processes which support the inventory management system had discipline challenges to overcome.

Luckily, this Shoe retailer owned all the retail outlets, but what happens when you have a Franchise operation where there are individual store owners spread throughout the country for a single brand?? And don’t forget, each store owner wants a piece of the web business. Exceed has seen this model regularly hinder the web channel and makes it nearly impossible to build alignment for two main reasons:

1. If one of the individual store owners takes over the website, they don’t have the ability to carry the entire range of products.
2. If the Head Office takes over the website they don’t have the fulfilment logistics to cope with single item orders.

Both problems can be overcome, but it is more the politics around the Franchise business model which hampers the move forward and is why building alignment in a Franchise business model adds considerable complexity.

Good luck, and you know who to call if you get into trouble.

I often wonder whether a patient would tell a heart surgeon how to undertake their double bypass surgery. Can you imagine saying to your doctor “it is easy, just clear the blockage”. While the Exceed Online teams are not heart surgeons we are specialists in the online industry. Like surgeons our experience has developed over years of experience and training making us understand the steps and time that is needed to achieve a successful online business.

Unfortunately I see successful projects affected by clients choosing to add another role to their bow. This can result in a misunderstanding of the complexities involved in the process including requests for the ‘heart surgeon’ to take shortcuts (that Exceed know will only lead to disaster later down the track); or the expectation that the ‘surgery’ is done in only half the time it actually takes because “it is easy”.

To be honest there isn’t a need for another role to be added to our clients already busy lives. Exceed Online has completed hundreds of successful projects and are more than happy to share their knowledge. By letting the specialists do what they do best, a seamless online business can be launched.

When I say “alignment” I mean, does the online business reflect your offline business. Does the online business offer all the core products/services your physical business offers? For example, Rebel Sports is known for its massive array of apparel and equipment for all sports known to Kiwi’s. However, when you go to the Rebel Sports website it is nothing like a physical retail store. What does this mean to Rebel Sports? People who search for products and are not loyal to a retailer will search in Google for product names and not find Rebel Sports. FYI – over 20,000 people typed in “Nike shoes” into Google in June 2010 and Rebel Sports is nowhere to be seen in Google for this term. No one typed in “Rebel Sports Nike Shoes”.

To achieve alignment, the first critical step is a paradigm shift among Senior Management. Key decision makers must agree the website or the web channel is a key business unit and a heavy contributor to revenue. Revenue not only for the online channel but growth in the offline channel as well. One of the benefits businesses gain from alignment is the crossover business which occurs among both channels (multi channel retailing). For example, when Exceed Online built a new website for BBQ Factory, the retail managers of their physical outlets could not believe how many customers came into the store with printouts of BBQ’s. The Store Manager’s and their staff did less selling because the website was doing it for them.

You can look in the oldest Marketing books and you will find the golden rule of Marketing is to make it easier for your target audience to do business with you. By aligning your website to your physical business, you are bringing your offer to not only Kiwis but to the world. These days it is common business sense to build alignment, those who do not are now being left behind.

If you have other good examples of businesses not properly aligning their physical and web businesses, let me know.

My next article will tackle the key ingredients in building alignment.

On a daily basis the Exceed Project Team listens to the wants of businesses:

• I want to have the background colour of my website changed…
• I want lots of space so that I can ad advertising banners to my website…
• I want a custom greeting message for visitors to my website…
• I want…

What happened to businesses delivering an eCommerce store that met their customer’s needs? Sure a website can be an extension of your personality if you chose it to be but does that actually generate online sales?

The next time you have a ‘want’, take the time to ask yourself – will visitors to my website need this too?

Don’t get me wrong, it is critical for everyone to learn how to manage their products (for eCommerce) and be able to manage pricing, product images, and content around products.  All this information required to sell online is “Online Merchandising” basics.

Troubles arise when clients try to change the design, modify images in precarious places, adjust flash files, try to interpret Google Analytics, manage Adwords, or install extensions.

So, don’t take yourself out of your comfort zone.  Do what you do best (your business) and bring in the eCommerce Specialists and let them do what they do best.  In the long run not only will you save money, you will make more of it!