Marketing On A Limited Budget With SEO

Operating a small business in today’s economy places you up against stiff competition from big business and corporations. Any small business must have a plan and implement strategies to secure, retain and grow its’ market-share. One major drawback to this is funding and business capital. Generally the big budgets for marketing and advertising are just not there with small to medium sized businesses and startups.

One of the key points of any campaign is repetition, getting your name, brand, and/or product out there and recognizable. Repetition involves making the investment to at times do the same things over and over again to produce strong results. Long growth curves, expensive repetition of expenses to generate a growing business and extended profitability creation are not strong points for a business owner and often difficult if not impossible to commit too and stick with.

Instead, they will need to develop other ways to promote their brand/product/service without spending a huge amount of money to achieve it. The most cost effective way with the greatest impact and reach to achieve this is through search engine optimization or SEO for short.

Keep in mind that anyone can build a Website, but a Website does not generate traffic and build an audience just because it is on the web. Optimized content that appeals to a certain audience and is actively targeted to reach them is key.

There are several key factors why SEO is important for any small business on the web.

It will enable the growing businesses owner to reach out to their target market. Lets face it, yellow page advertising is expensive and ask yourself these two questions.

When was the last time you used the yellow pages instead of a search engine?

Do you even know where in your home or business the yellow pages are kept?

No matter how great your Website might be, it’s worthless if no one ever sees it! SEO, if done effectively, aids and enables you to increase the amount of visitors that frequent your Website, which may increase business and ultimately profits into your business.

SEO is also vital in that it creates opportunity to transform those visitors into customers. This is done through implementation of a spread of different systems beginning with content and ease of usability usually ending up in profit.

Additionally, SEO will help you build your reputation and creates brand recognition by enabling your site name and links to be put in front of countless potential customers via search engine results. When you take the time to properly optimize your Internet site it will increase your overall user experience and customer loyalty if the transaction is handled properly. Similarly, it helps your visitors find the information that they are looking for quickly and effectively.

Appearing in as many relevant search results on hopefully the first page enables any business to put their name and brand in front of people in places and markets never before available on the worldwide scale that the Internet has created. With E-commerce sales consistently posting positive gains and consistently taking market-share away from brick and mortar based businesses, what business shouldn’t have some sort of web presence?

More often than not, the results far outweigh the expenditure and cost effectiveness vs the cost effectiveness of traditional print marketing cannot even compare. Take the time to prioritize SEO and optimize your Website correctly. The visitors as well as the profit will soon follow.

Furthermore, with SEO you will have the power to influence and at times control your competitors. This is because a well optimized web site will bring more visitors to your Internet site which in turn grows your brand awareness and hopefully increases market-share.

In the end, SEO is certainly essential to small businesses simply because it will help them lower their across-the-board risk. This is due to the fact that our market reach is worldwide, lowering the impact of decreased demand in any one area or region. This is actually one of the more unique and often neglected advantages to SEO.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is your total package for E-commerce consulting and market-share domination. Whether you are just establishing your web presence, are in need of design and consulting or are ready for some new strategies to expand your market-share and dominate your competition, we work with any company any size. Schedule your free consultation today and let us show you how we can help.

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Posted in Best Practices, Ecommerce Optimization, Search Tactics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

How To Optimize An Ecommerce Product Detail Page

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Ecommerce, the final frontier! The Internet is growing at an annual rate of over 20%. There are over 1 billion users on the Internet and that number is expected to double in less than 10 years and eCommerce sales are expected to double in less than 7 years.

Today marks the 25th anniversay of the first .com registration. The anniversary coincides with research by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) that found that the internet economy drives more than $1.5 trillion (£990bn) in global annual economic activity. Do you sell your products online? Do you want a piece of that trillion dollar pie?

The key to successful eCommerce starts with the product detail page, optimization, picture file size and presentation and usability. With the rise of social media and Web 2.0 came the social bookmarking, fan pages, add this and the most important of all – user reviews. Below, I have outlined my process for optimizing eCommerce product detail pages. It is simple, yet a time proven tactic that brings solid success everytime I’ve used it.

  • Product Title – Have the product name / service first, then your brand name, Air Jordans | Nike
  • Product Name – Always use hi tags for the product name
  • Product Description – Whenever you can, always try to standardize the description with at least the product / service name and category name. The more detailed information you can provide, instructions, how to’s, the higher the conversion rate from viewers to buyers.
  • Product Image – Always name the image with the full product name. Never resize the image using html code, resize it with your editing software and repost. Always include image size in the html and make good use of alt tags. Use a picture size that serves the product well, 250px by 250px is a good size if only using one. Best practice is the more pictures the better, but utilize smaller sized images on the product page.
  • Product Image Detail – Always make the product image clickable opening a larger image.
    Amazon and ebay suggest no smaller than 1000px for the detail image.
  • Store your images on a cookieless subdomain or content delivery network for faster loading and parallel downloads.
  • Bread Crumb Nav – Include a Bread Crumb Nav on all product pages showing ever level to the product.
  • Social Bookmarking – Always include social bookmarking and promoting buttons or an add this bar to enable users to promote and bookmark your products.
  • RSS Feed – give users the opportunity to subscribe to your product rss feed.
  • Site Navigation – Ensure site navigation is clear, concise and consistent.
  • FAQ or Help pages – Ensure the process to get assistance or access the FAQ is simple and obvious on every page.
  • Policies and Returns – Ensure all policies and return procedures are clear, concise and fair.
  • Price / Value – Carefully consider your pricing v.s. the competition. If you cannot compete on the price, ensure that you offer superior service, detail pages and easily accessible shipping options.
  • User Product Reviews – Positive reviews are probably the single biggest call to action for any product. Todays’ shopper is 5 times more likely to purchase a product that displays user reviews than products that do not display reviews.

Advantage Ecommerce Solutions is a full service Design, SEO, Marketing and Ecommerce Consulting company. Would you like to expand your market, increase sales and grow your ROI? Contact Advantage Ecommerce Solutions for a free site analysis and review to help take you to your next level of success.

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Posted in Ecommerce Optimization, How To | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Using Keywords – Important SEO HTML Basics

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Year in and year out we see adjustments in search engine requirements and new scripting techniques. The later part of 2009 brought many quiet changes in SEO and some major announcements as well. Being good at something starts with being ‘Brilliant At The Basics”. HTML and how a page is coded should follow some basic standard guidelines to ensure search engine readiness and optimization. Most if not all of these should be rock solid before a site is launched. They seem simple but without them, you face search engine uncertainty. Google announced earlier in 2009 that it no longer reads the meta keywords. Don’t write them off though, they are now more important than ever.

Follow these basic SEO coding standards and utilize your keywords to ensure proper search engine placement.

Title Tag – No more than 70 characters

Recommended Title Tag Syntax Keyword < Category | Website Title

Meta Description - No more than 155 characters

Common Canonical Homepage Issue -
Great – http://www.mysite.com/
Unacceptable – http://www.mysite.com
http://mysite.com/
http://www.mysite.com/index.html
http://mysite.com/index.html

To condense the four default homepages into one homepage, use 301 redirects to correct for erroneous incoming links and make all internal links point to your domain using the syntax ‘http://www.mysite.com/’. Always include trailing “/” on folders.

H1,H2,H3 -
<h1>Most Important</h1>
<h2>Second Most Important</h2>
<h3>Third Most Important</h3>

Bold, Strong – <b>Keyword</b>

Image – <img src=”keyword.jpg” alt=””keyword”/>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”334″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword””>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Hyperlink – <a linkindex=”335″ href=”http://www.mysite.com/webpage.html” title=””keyword”>(No Followed) rel=”nofollow”>Keyword in Anchor Text</a>

Page File Size- No more than 150 kilobytes (Before Images, and other Attachments)

Amount of links – No more than 100 unique links per page

As you can see, keywords are still very important. Its best to use what would be your meta keywords for each page as your outline or frame of reference from which to write. I try to keep a list of my targeted keywords on my desk as I write pages and posts. then as you layout the coding for your page, your keywords will remain consistent. So while Google may not read your meta keywords, blatantly ignoring the inherent advantages may be a fatal mistake. Did I miss anything obvious?

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How To Calculate ROI On A Pay Per Click Campaign

We are often asked ‘how do I calculate Return on Investment(ROI) on a Pay Per Click(PPC) campaign?’ Or ‘how do I calculate whether I should invest in a PPC campaign or services?’

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Assuming you know some statistics about your site, I will explain using the following example:

Lets say your budget affords you to be able to allocate $2000. per month to Pay Per Click advertising. After bidding, your average cost per click is 35 cents. Assume you generated enough clicks to use your entire budget. $2000 divided by 35 cents is 5714 clicks to your site.

Historically 5% of your site visitors converts to a sales lead (sale, lead generation, goal attainment, etc..). 5% of 5714 is 286 sales leads generated. You also know from your own historical data that your average sale is $72.00. 286 sales at $32.00 each is $9152.00 in sales generated by your PPC campaign that month, minus the $2000. initial investment and you have a Return On Investment of $7152. for the month.

In general, most PPC Services will give you an even higher ROI because we focus on your campaign while you do what you need to do – run your business. Lets say that instead of a 5% conversion rate, the PPC Service generates 8.5% conversion. Starting with the same 5714 clicks, 8.5% is 486 conversions @ $32.00 avg sale equalling $15552 in PPC sales for the month or a ROI of $13552. That is an additional $6400. by using the PPC Service.

There are plenty of companies out there that will try to charge you that kind of money for this service, but reputable ones do not on that size of an initial budget.

To request a FREE website consultation & analysis, contact AES. Be sure to ask about our January Blog Specials.

Please leave comments, we welcome your thoughts and ideas.

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