WDTalk

Designing your site for e-commerce – begins with keyword research, matching keywords and phrases that most closely match today’s search queries. Why? Because designing a site with keywords or phrases that no one searches for makes conversions very very difficult (lack of traffic). Of course you can still advertise via article, blog and forum posting, or micro-sites, which should provide some very targeted leads, but you lose the viral power of organic search results.

I’ve seen sites that dominate –  SERPS (search engine results pages) for their particular niche, but can’t convert a prospect. Frequently, keyword research reveals that NO ONE is searching for that niche. In simple terms, if you’re getting 6 pageviews/month, it doesn’t matter if you have the best design, intuitive navigation and a kick a** shopping cart, your ROI (return on investment) will suffer.

Taking keywords one step further - selling anything is about the perception of providing value & solutions, and this applies to everything from selling toothpaste to cloud hosting – which leads us to Landing Pages and relevancy, and on to compelling calls-to-action. The words you use cross-site and intra-site need to be relevant to the search query. Getting traffic from a search query that leads to a product or service that’s either in conflict with the search, unreadable (poor theme or contrast), not compelling or out of alignment with the rest of the industry won’t convert well.

My recommendation - absolutely use keyword research tools to match the products and services you want to sell – with the keywords and keyword phrases currently entered into search queries – that will produce sufficient traffic to sustain and grow your business.

What is click fraud? I just did a quick Bing search for click fraud which returned over 40 million results. It’s actually a cybercrime dating back years that occurs with PPC advertising when a spammer or some program or script imitates a real user clicking on an ad for the purpose of generating an actual charge per click, even though they have no interest in the target of that ad’s link.

Have you ever noticed in your PPC advertising campaigns, the same IP address clicking on your ad, spending one or two seconds on your website and then leaving? And coming back again within seconds? If you’re spending $3.00 per click, that adds up quickly.

From SearchEngineWatch.com 19 Dec 2010 - “A recent Click Forensics report showed that fraud for online advertisements rose to 22.3 percent, up from 14.1 percent during the same period last year.” And “With increased marketing spend during the holiday season, it’s more important than ever that online advertisers pay attention to their traffic and ensure that they are protected from fraudulent clicks.”

What’s the Motivation?

One motivator is competitor click fraud.  The motivation of the perpetrator here is to simply obtain higher-placed ad positions for lower bid amounts by depleting the advertising budget of their competitors. Other motivators of click fraud include financial gain, revenge and blackmail.

What can you do to detect and prevent click fraud?

This starts with being proactive – measuring your advertising results, analyzing trends in click volumes with or without accompanying increases in your website’s traffic or sales.

There are also anti-fraud softwares to protect your advertising dollars. A quick check on Google just now for FREE click fraud software returned over 361,000 results.

I just read an interesting article related to website navigation – that started me thinking (Is it smoking in here? LOL).  The core focus of this article addressed exit strategy. What happens when your prospect, just turned client, finishes the checkout process on your ecommerce site? Are they ushered to politely exit your site, or could you fulfill other needs they may have overlooked?

Traditionally, brick and mortar stores – lead shoppers toward the exits as they check out, but I’m seeing more stores move their registers to the interiors of their stores. Why? I think because the more a client lingers, the odds increase they’ll purchase something else. After all, they’re already there! They just said yes to one of your products or services and are in a buying frame of mind. They’ll eventually leave, so there’s no real rush to push them out the door.

Can you relate this exit strategy to your own business?
Websites are no different. Exit strategies affect customer loyalty, cart abandonment, up-sell opportunities and your site’s overall return on investment (ROI).  Step through your purchase steps. Do you funnel your prospects buying experience, or do you offer options similar to Amazon (people who purchased xxx were also interested in yyy products)? Do you offer a customer satisfaction survey? How will you know how well received your site is if you don’t ask?

Minimize abandoned shopping carts
How many times have you been in line at a store and realized you forgot an item? You don’t care, but your wife will beat you if you don’t bring home everything on her list. LOL.  Certainly, there are a percentage of abandoned carts related to prospects wanting to edit or add to their list. Can your prospects break out of your buying funnel to do that?

Is your ‘thank you’ page monetized?
Does your ‘thank you’ page pull your clients back into your site, or does it kick them to the curb? Could it  cross-sell your merchandise or services while their credit card is still out? Or could it offer them opt-in services, like a quarterly newsletter, or related industry tools?

Be creative with your approach to exit strategy
Just like the cash register doesn’t absolutely need to be by the exit door in a brick and mortar company, websites don’t need to be one dimensional. Order receipts needn’t be the end of the line. Best business practices keep clients lingering. If one approach doesn’t work, try another. Every NO brings you closer to a YES. And if you’re like me, I love the word, YES.

Does your brick and mortar store depend on referrals or walk-in traffic to sell your product or service? Online stores allow businesses to reach a wider range of prospects than they could ever imagine reaching on-site. Let’s face it, the majority of prospects today begin their shopping experience doing research online – comparing companies, products, prices – the works.

The Good News
And the good news is that you don’t need a huge server or an $80,000/year IT guy to make an online store work. The majority of eCommerce stores are Mom & Pop shops, selling everything from diet supplements to shoes, and processing their payments through PayPal – on a shared hosting account that probably costs less than $35/month. Compare that to ONE ad (five lines) in a local newspaper that runs 3 days in print and 30 days online – for a whopping $395.00 !!

The Nuts and Bolts of eCommerce
It all starts with a professional website, meaning its design is attractive to the eye, it’s easy to navigate, there are no spelling errors or broken links, and the solution you propose (along with its price) is relevant AND compelling. Beyond that, you’ll need a shopping cart and a payment processor. If you’re collecting credit card information on your site (directly), you’ll also need an SSL certificate, gateway and merchant account AND be PCI compliant. If you use a service like PayPal standard, and are not processing credit card information on your site – meaning your clients are passed off to PayPal’s servers to process the actual order, these don’t apply.

Attracting Visitors
Ok, sales begin with prospects. If no one walks through the door, it’s tough to move inventory. Online, if no one visits your site, the end result is duplicated. Building a site and hoping prospects will flock to your store overnight doesn’t work. Getting them there requires implementing a mix of online and offline marketing. The tried and true stuff still works – word of mouth, referrals, networking & direct sales staff. The new stuff could be Google Adwords, advertisements in forums or social media networks, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), podcasts and so on.

The Importance of Niche Marketing
Let’s start with the prospect as they enter a search query on Google, Bing or Yahoo. If that query is too broad, for example, recipes – the results returned will number in the gazillions, leaving them to find you somewhere among the masses. Aside from the benefit of branding, narrowing your focus on what makes your product or service (in this case – recipes) different is key. If you specialize in cupcake recipes, your competition in search queries for “cupcake recipes” will narrow their search results considerably. Taking this one step further, keying in on specific cupcake recipes, like strawberry cupcake recipes or apricot cupcake recipes, will help define your niche and FINDABILITY. This online marketing principle applies cross industry. Extended keyword PHRASES help narrow and funnel your prospects search to YOU.

Landing pages are those pages on your website where visitors first arrive. If you’re launching an advertising campaign, measuring the results of that campaign are paramount to maximizing your return on investment (ROI). Web analytics are the critical ingredient here. On an ecommerce website, would it be important to know what pages produce higher conversion ratios?

Home Page versus Product Pages
As a rule of thumb, product pages generally deliver higher conversion ratios, as much as seven to one. Usually, the more specific and focused these pages are, the better your results will be. Even absent any analytics, we know, psychologically, that Internet shoppers are more inclined to purchase if the path from their search query to the BUY button is simplified or made easy.

Relevant Content to the Rescue
What I frequently see on home pages are three or four purchase options, with a “read more” below each offer. These link to plans with additional options. More often than not, these plans simply display features and lack content on solutions.

Here’s the catch – the major search engines prioritize relevant content – that is, those pages with rich content rank higher in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).  Very focused product pages may not reflect the highest number of hits to your site, but they will produce higher conversion ratios. And if, at the end of the day, money in your pocket matters, tweaking your product pages might be a good idea.

Tweaking for Success
The key to tweaking a product page is NOT to tweak it to the search engines, rather to your visitor – your prospect. Keyword research helps. What keywords, keyword phrases or extended keyword phrases are being queried currently to find your products (or your competitor’s products)?

Imagine you’re a shopper and have just queried “St. Louis Collocation Services”? Is there a product page on your site with that extended keyword phrase? And does that phrase fit organically within your content – meaning it isn’t repeated 15 times on the page. Most ezine article submission sites recommend no more than 2% keyword saturation – meaning for every 100 words, no specific keyword should show up more than twice in the content.

My Recommendation
Whether your goal is increased sales, lead generation or branding, the basics remain the same. Make it easy to navigate to the BUY button. Include keywords, keyword phrases and extended keyword phrases on your product pages that directly correspond to queries currently being entered on the search engines – that are relevant to your product or service.