First you need to be clear about the goals you have for your site and second, you need to be measuring them. Only then can you see what’s working and what isn’t so you can take action.

What you need to do to get your site on track:

1. Define your business objectives for your website
2. Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data
3. Define your KPIs and measure them month on month
4. Know what to do with the data you gather

Points 1 to 3 ahould be fairly easy but point 4 is where the gold is. If you know what the data is telling you then you know exactly what to do to to get better results. You need this business information to make informed choices otherwise you are just guessing so don’t do it, measure it and know for sure.

Let’s look at these points a little closer:

1  Define your business objectives for your website

This is probably very simple and most likely to be one or more of the following:  more sales, more leads, more visitors, better relationships with prospects/customers, brand building.

2 Define goals and funnels in analytics to gather data

You probably already have Google Analytics installed but if you don’t go do it now. Then set up your goals, analytics has a good help system to show you how to do it but first decide what your goals might be – these are likely to match your business objectives by measuring a successful completion. For example, you might have a goal for a completed sale, a completed lead form, a completed registration for a newsletter or download. Whatever your goals are they should mark something that you want people to do on your site

If there are several steps involved in a successful goal completion then set up the funnels too. If you have 4 steps in your checkout that people have to follow in order to buy something then make each step a stage in your funnel. When data collects here you will see if you have unexpectedly high fallout from steps in your processes. Making changes will allow you to measure before and after so wee if you can make improvements.

3 Define your KPIs and measure them month on month

You can set up custom reporting in analytics to produce a KPI report month on month. KPIs would include your goals but would also include other crucial measures. For example: traffic from organic search, traffic from specific referral sites, number of keyphrases used to find your site, total revenue, number of transactions. The idea of KPIs is that they are measures that should be increasing every month – no excuses (except for seasonality of course but definitely year on year!)

There are other measures you can use that are useful to track that will have thresholds and so won’t increase indefinitely but are worth keeping a close eye on, such as: average transaction value, conversion rate, bounce rate, average time on site, number of pages visited per session.

4 Know what to do with the data you gather

This is the key to making this work and this will make your website make you more money. Having all of this data available is crucial for you to be able to see what is currently working well for your site. Watch out for paralysis by analysis identify some key reports to watch. You need to know exactly where your sales are coming from and where you might have problems with your site that you can take action to fix.

Lets look at a few examples of what you can see now you have all this wonderful data

• See which key phrases are bringing the most traffic (easy)
• Looking at this same report but clicking on the goals tab will show you which convert best
• If you have an ecommerce site, look at the ecommerce tab & see which phrases make the most money
• Look at which landing pages are popular and have the highest/lowest bounce rates – why might they be high?
• You can see which phrases brought traffic to which page & then how well that worked out for you
• See which referral sites bring the best quality traffic, can you get more traffic from them or other sites like them?
• If you run PPC Campaigns look at the same reports for your PPC data – Adwords will show a conversion but analytics will show you the value of that conversion.
• Look at Funnels for you various goals – is the fallout disproportionate at any particule stage in the process
• If you see “problems” make an improvement on your site, make a note of the date then compare your data before and after that date.
• Analytics lets you compare this week with last week, September with June & this quarter with the same quarter last year – any time period you want.
• This is great if you have seasonality as you want to compare with last year, not last month.
• Note that not all data will behave the same way, for instance your bounce rate for direct traffic will be lower (better) than PPC traffic because people know your site & have bookmarked it or know exactly what they are looking for.
• Bounce rates for contact us pages could be high because people find the details they want quickly – that doesn’t mean the page is performing badly.

Get to know your data and your visitor behaviour so you can interpret your data to get the best results.

Strategy use these methods to define goals and measure success so that we can get the best results for our clients. By working together to define goals and set up KPI custom reporting on your analytics this provides transparency for the way we work. If there is anything you want to measure and you are not sure how, we will work with you to set this up.

In addition, we work on results so your success is our success. Find out more about our exclusive 100% Pay-Per-Results SEO Service and our new 100% Results Based CPA SEO.

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Conversion rates will vary for different kinds of traffic that visit your site and that’s to be expected, what you want to learn is what is your best converting source of traffic and how can you get more of it. Track it back to referral sources, if it comes from organic search find out which phrases convert best and focus on improving the rankings for those phrases.  If it comes from PPC which are your money phrases and conventrate on them for SEO.

The following is a list of Conversion Factors that could be affecting your conversion rate. Scan down the list… do any of these factors affect your conversions? Can you take action on any of these points to improve your Conversion Rate?

If you are not sure where to start consider doing some Usability Testing to get feedback from real people using your website to perform tasks designed to test your specific website conversion goals.

Trust Elements:
- Safe Shopping Icons (hacker safe, BBB)
- Free or Local Cost Phone Number visible
- Address visible
- Quality of Design
- Quality Domain Name
- Money Back Guarantee
- Risk Reversal (We’ll pay the return postage costs)
- Accepts all forms of payment
- Nice Logo
- Testimonials
- About Us prominent
- Contact Us prominent
- Privacy Policy
- Order / Postage / Invoice tracking
- Privacy Policy
- We don’t spam you messaging
- Clear and unambiguous optin/out for marketing & 3rd party marketing
- Ability to get offline help at physical locations

Look and Feel:
- Site is easy to navigate
- Easy to grasp what the site does
- Clear Calls to Action on every page
- Links to further information are easy to find
- Great site search returns relevent results
- Checkout / Conversion process is clear
- Forms are forgiving (e.g. taking dashes, spaces for credit card)
- Forms error handling – clear, concise errors & instructions for correcting
- Does not require registration up front
- Fast Page load times. Adverts render last.
- Pages load consistently (high availability)
- Renders in all major browsers
- Accessibility Issues have been addressed
- Pictures are good quality and highly optimised
- Good quality help / FAQ system
- No Broken links or broken images
- Relationship Marketing, encourage 2-way interaction through Facebook, Twitter etc

Product / Selling Proposition:
- Product / Site Exclusivity
- Compelling Product
- Brand Name awareness and reputation
- Good Product Pictures, quality and quantity
- Compelling Offer / Price / Clarity
- Price easy to find
- Add to cart button is inviting and prominent
- Terms and Conditions highly visible
- Path to checkout is unencumbered with no distractions
- Extra charges (postage) are low and easy to find
- Speedie Postage
- Free Postage
- International Shipping
- Good Comparison Matrix (including competitors)
- Independent Product Reviews
- Good Headline
- Good Tagline
- Supporting Copy
- Supporting resources (buying guides, blog, forum)
- Scarcity (limited Quantity or limited time)

Off Page Factors:
- Time of Day
- Day of Week
- Holidays
- Seasonality
- The weather
- Event Timing (product will be regulated, taxed or discontinued)
- Item / site gets significant press coverage (TV appearances, BBC coverage)
- Relevant Advertising
- Type of Advertising (banner vs PPC)
- Visitor profile of site where advertising appears
- Compelling ad copy
- Ad copy matches landing page
- Click Fraud
- Quality and efforts of Affiliates
- Reputation of your Site
- Size of your Organisation
- Newsletter Quality
- Offline advertising
- Presence of offline locations
- Competitor Offerings and Marketing

The original conversion factor list that inspired this post came from: http://paul.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2008/08/15/conversion-factors/ I have taken the liberty of adding to it and amending it for our target audience.

What other factors would you add to this list?

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• Link popularity: To enhance the ranking of your e-commerce website, ensure that it is well linked from other websites. Links are like votes, the more you get the better you will rank but its not just an issue of quantity, quality carries a much greater weight and one good quality link can improve your rankings significantly above hundreds of bad quality links. Whenever possible, solicit links from different websites. In fact, a website with links belonging to a wide variety of different IP addresses is a good example of an effective ecommerce SEO tactic.

• Relevant links: Search engines, especially Google, ranks websites that are linked from relevant websites higher than the ones which are just randomly linked to from other websites. The greater the number of relevant sites linking to your ecommerce site the higher your search engine rankings will be.

• Appropriate anchor text: SEO traffic can be enhanced by ensuring that the anchor text of your website’s external link has the main keywords. For instance, if you want to improve your rank for the keyword ‘burglar alarms,’ ensure that the link that directs the SEO traffic to your website uses the keyword ‘burglar alarms’. Vary your anchor text amongst your main key phrases and so not include any other irrelevant content in the anchor text link.

• PageRank (PR): Getting links to your website from high PageRank sites enhances the credibility and importance of your website and pushes your rankings up. This is because PageRank is passed from one page to another, so a page with 10 links on it will pass one tenth of the link juice to the pages it links to. If you have a link from a site with a high PageRank (PR6 or 7) and you are one of very few links on that page you will receive a lot of juice. This is a good link, actually a great link! If you have a link on a page that is PR1 or PR2 and your site is one of 100 listed then you will receive nothing of value from that. The higher the PageRank of a page the more authority it is considered to have, the more valuable the link and the harder it is to get a link from it. Note that PageRank is not passed through a nofollow link.

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Simplicity rules in the world of e-commerce websites. Customers tend to prefer a website where products are just two to three clicks from the home page. A flatter and well-networked website structure also improves your page rank because page rank from your higher level pages passes more easily to your deeper product pages.

Also, if your website features a variety of brands, create a well-optimized landing page for all the brands. This ensures that customers are informed about different products that are offered under a particular brand.

Try incorporating a product feed to keep customers updated about the latest offerings. You can also use them to boost your SEO traffic by submitting the feed to content aggregators. XML-based product feed is accepted by Google Base as are other formats. Gradually, your website with start to feature in Google Base searches which provides another avenue for good quality traffic. Such product feeds are also ideal for getting increased free back links to your product pages.

Next time we will be looking at Off-page Optimisation tips for ecommerce website owners.

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To name your page files, always use keyword-rich text. For instance, a page file named www.yourecommercesite.com/keyword-phrase.html is more effective than a URL with numeric variables such as www.yourecommercesit.com/?ID=1234567.

Title Tags

For title tags, be precise and concise and never stuff the tags with extra keywords. Avoid including repetitive content in all tags. For instance, if your e-commerce site sells furniture only emphasise your primary terms in your home page title tag. Do not try to list all the different kinds of furniture you sell.

Google only indexes 10 words in your title and the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) only display 64 characters.

Meta Tags

Unique meta tags is a very important component of ecommerce SEO. To develop a search engine-friendly retail website, ensure that the product pages have different titles and descriptions targeting different primary and secondary key phrases. Although it might not instantly improve web results, it will certainly save you from the penalty associated with duplicate content. Also, do not stuff your meta tags with keywords that are not relevant to that specific page.

Meta Tag Description

The meta tag description is often the description that appears on the SERPs so this should be writing to attract your target audience into your website. It should also contain your target phrases but be written in a compelling way. This aspect alone can increase your click through rate.

Next time we will talk about the importance of user friendly features on an ecommerce website.

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Enhance this collection gradually to gain considerable authority in your specific sector and specialism. To command impressive web results, try to be a one-stop resource centre for your buyers.

For sustained results, update your resource centre regularly. This may also include posting customer feedback or other user-generated content such as reviews. This will boost web results, improve customer loyalty and makes the site more sticky.

While adding new pages, remember to incorporate product specific keywords in the title tags, on-page titles and page description. This will enhance your chances of capitalising on the long tail of search which will increase your traffic and conversions – making more money through your website is what its all about at the end of the day.

Next time we will talk about file names and meta tags for ecommerce websites.

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Avoid Duplicate Content

Getting large numbers of products ranking in the search engines is a crucial component of e-commerce SEO. However, do not be tempted to copy the product specifications from the manufacturer’s website – if you do you will run the risk of duplicate content issues. Remember that duplicate content is a big problem on your own site, so if a product comes in 4 different sizes and you have 4 product pages with exactly the same descriptions apart from the one element of size, this will look like duplicate content to the search engines.

To get around this problem, rewrite the product description in an interesting and easy-to-read format. For increased SEO traffic, master the art of writing keyword-rich product descriptions and link your product pages with similar products. This strategy helps you to tap into long-tail keyword searches. You can also utilise blog posts to promote and sell your products.

If you must have repetitive content that appears on every page, place it in an iframe with an invisible border. This ensures that search engines do not penalise you for duplicate content.

Use Keywords or phrases in your Anchor Text

Use appropriate and highly targeted words for anchor text – these are the words that form the text in the hyperlink to another page. For instance, when you connect a product category page to its individual product pages, ensure that the anchor text is not limited to “View” or “click here.” Such vague terms do not help the search engines understand the theme of your website.

Our next blog post will be all about optimising pictures and images for SEO traffic; another important factor for ecommerce website owners.

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Planning your Ecommerce SEO strategy

Effective SEO strategy planning is vital prior to designing an ecommerce website. Unfortunately, many companies overlook the SEO element while designing an ecommerce website. They start thinking about SEO feasibility only after developing a beautiful website. As a result, they can end up with needing a significant site redesign to fulfil the SEO requirements.

Always design your website after planning your ecommerce SEO strategy. This will save you valuable time and money, and help your website reach and maintain those coveted top Google positions. Don’t forget though competition is fierce, and you still need to keep a visually appealing site with first rate functionality to secure those sales conversions! Here are some factors to bear in mind:

Ecommerce SEO tips part 1 – Choose your Ecommerce and shopping cart software wisely

Today, the vast majority of e-commerce websites are designed with open source or low-priced shopping cart programs. Such software can adversely affect a website’s search engine-friendliness if you are not familiar with the functionality you need to make SEO work. Even popular shopping cart software, such as Miva Merchant* and OS Commerce, require third party add-ons to implement SEO-compatible features. Low cost ecommerce solutions, although profitable in the short run, can have an adverse effect on your business in the long run.

While developing an ecommerce website, companies should remember that customers depend on search engines to find products to buy. Hence, to attract increased volumes of SEO traffic, companies need to use search-engine friendly ecommerce software. While choosing software, ensure that it is designed to boost the display of your product pages in the search engine results pages (SERP) when a visitor types in a relevant search query.

Several ecommerce software systems use session IDs (without cookies) in website URLs. This can cause search engines to crawl through an unlimited amount of duplicate content which of course causes them a problem and means your site can’t be indexed properly. To prevent this, use an alternative method that helps connect URLs to Google’s spider, without the requirement for session IDs.

Avoid using long query strings in the URLs of your product pages. The URLs should only include the necessary keywords and should not be populated with unwanted IDs or other characters. If you are not willing to use software to rewrite all URLs, consider minimising the number of variables used in the URL.

UPDATE:
Thanks to Andy from West Florida Components (see comment below) for pointing out the mistake in the article. I’m afraid a draft version of the post was published by mistake before it had been checked fully. We do apologise to all for the error.

*MIVA Merchant 5.0 DOES have built-in SEO features including search engine friendly URL’s.

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How Consumer Search Behaviour Works

Let’s take the example of Jason who wants to buy a lawn mower and consider his search behaviour as an average online consumer. First Jason might search for “lawn mowers” to research the options that are available. “Lawn mowers” is a popular search term and it would be great to hold that number 1 position for that search term but its most likely that Jason is not ready to buy yet, he is just researching. He won’t just look at one website, he will look at at least 2 or three sites and he’s looking to gather information in order to refine his search.

His next search might be to add another word to his search such as “electric lawn mower” or “petrol lawn mower” and he may be looking for reviews at this point. More and more consumers are turning to user-generated content in the form of reviews and recommendations in order to inform their decisions. Jason’s research leads him to favour a particular brand and so his search term becomes “Qualcast electric lawn mower” so that he can consider the different models and which would best suit his needs.

The final stage of Jason’s search is when he has decided exactly which model he wants and this is the most important search because now he is ready to buy. His search term is “Qualcast Suffolk Punch electric lawn mower”, this is a long tail search because it contains more than 3 words and is not a popular search term that is used often – it is gold to the supplier who comes top of the search engines for this term at the point Jason wants to buy.

Think about your own search behaviour, isn’t this fairly typical of what you do yourself?

Steps you can take to optimise for the long tail:

As a site owner, whether you have an ecommerce website or a brochure site you can benefit from your long tail visitors. Your ecommerce sites should have every level of pages optimised including the deep product pages – ensure you have a mix of specific and generic search terms and that your titles and descriptions are unique. On-page descriptions should also be meaty and interesting with lots of relevant information and benefits and of course a competitive price.

At Strategy we research the “money phrases” for your site because this is where you will make most money. We want to get you increased traffic at every level of your site and above all increased conversions – check out our Pay-Per-Results Search Engine Optimisation Services which include usability studies to increase sales.

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Studies of indented listings using heap maps show that where the primary listing is popular the indented listing is more popular, it gets more fixation points and more clicks than the primary listing does. You don’t have to have a number 1 primary listing in order to get an indented listing, you can get this listing at positions 8 & 9, at positions 4 & 5 or positions 23 and 24, it doesn’t make a difference where your primary listing appears. You want the highest possible listing, of course you do but my point is that you don’t have to be number one to achieve an indented listing.

An added bonus is that double listings can also help to increase your ranking positions and push you up the search engines results pages.

How do you get a double listing?
The primary listing is the page on your site that is deemed most relevant to the search phrase and the second listing is the page that is deemed second most important – the key is to find out which is the second best page for that phrase. Double listing’s only show when both pages are ranked on the same SERPs page so – SEO TIP – change your preferences on Google to show 100 results in the SERPs (the default is 10 per page), use the ‘find’ function to locate your website and see if you have a double listing showing. If you do then the second URL is the one you need to work on to strengthen the optimisation for the search phrase you are using.

Use the comments box below to ask any questions about this strategy so we can clarify them.

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