Monthly Archives: October 2011

5 Ways to Maintain or Grow Revenue Even During a Recession

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Are you sick of hearing about the recession? Do you wish you could beat the odds and grow your revenue while others struggle to stay in business? Good news — you can! It’s an “adapt or die” market, but if you adapt you can still thrive.

Here are five things you can do to increase your revenue despite a slow economy.

  1. Increase or improve your social media engagement. — Word of mouth is always important, but especially during a recession. People have less money to spend. That makes trusted recommendations more important. Social media gives you a direct line to customers and those they trust. Try new social media tools or spend more time in your existing networks. Don’t just broadcast. Talk to people. Get to know customers and colleagues. The more they trust you, the more likely they’ll spread the word.
  2. Put more focus on SEO. — Search engine optimization can help you maintain visibility with a targeted audience — people searching for businesses like yours. If you can’t afford expensive marketing campaigns to find new customers, focusing on SEO can be a cost effective way to help prospects find you instead.
  3. Diversify your income streams. — The Web makes it easy to create new income streams. Launch an affiliate program to build a commission-based sales force. Launch an email newsletter and accept advertisements. Or sell downloadable products (like software) to sell unlimited copies without the costs of physical manufacturing.
  4. Broaden your horizons. – Businesses can sometimes ride out a bad economic swing by changing geographic targets. If the economy is suffering where you are, target clients or customers in another part of the country (or around the world). If you can’t broaden your geographic reach, target new customer groups. For example, if you sell educational products to teachers, target parents as well.
  5. Increase authority and lead generation with freebies. — Offer free product samples, online tools, e-books, reports, white papers, apps, or anything relevant to your business. Freebies are lead-generating machines and natural linkbait (helping your SEO efforts). And people love to spread the word about the great freebies they find. Give them a reason to spread the word about you.

Do you have other marketing tips for growing revenue during a recession? How is your business faring? Help other readers out by sharing your tips and stories in the comments below.

Get Your Products Listed in Google with a Crawling Path

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sitemap-wikipedia

One of the first hurdles you have to clear when you’re running an online shopping cart is getting your products listed in the Google index.

However, many shopping carts aren’t designed with SEO in mind. This is especially tiresome if you have lots products, or a complicated department structure.

The optimal solution is, of course, to use an SEO-friendly shopping cart. But what if that’s not an option? There is a workaround to get your products indexed quickly: You need to set up a crawling path.

What is a crawling path?
It’s a sitemap which functions as an aid for search engines and spiders to understand and navigate your site more thoroughly.

To make the best use of this, we need to take a step back and look at how search engines decide what to crawl, and how frequently they decide to crawl them.

Search engines give priority crawling to authoritative, trusted pages with lots of inbound links. For most sites, this is usually the homepage – so it gets crawled and updated most frequently.

SIMPLE TEST: You can try changing small bits of text on your homepage, then see how long it takes Google to show the change.

Use a really unique 4-5 word phrase and test it a few times to get a idea of how long it typically takes.

Search Engine Crawl Behaviour:

After the homepage, search engines will crawl the link hubs and/or the pages with the strongest links.

If they find new links, they will “queue” those pages to be crawled next. The closer pages are to the homepage or link hubs, the more frequently they will be crawled.

Knowing this, you can set up crawling paths to “guide” the search engines as they find new products, updated products, or know which products are more important.

Any new, updated, or important products should always have a link on your homepage. 

You can and should mix or rotate these links every few weeks.

For performance reasons, we recommend using a static include file instead of unnecessary database calls–but that’s up to you and your IT staff to work out.

Dedicated Sitemap for Products (or Departments)
The next step is setting up a crawling path or dedicated sitemap just for products or departments.

We recommend calling it “<brand name> product sitemap” or something similarly intuitive.

While not necessary, it’s worth adding an editorial photo and 3-5 sentences of text, just to make it look okay if an actual user stumbles across the page. (This was Steve Jobs’ artisanal design philosophy – it doesn’t matter if nobody’s ever going to see it, make it look good.)

Next, you’ll want to add links to your top 10-20 departments or categories. Put them under an H2 or H3 heading and list and link to the department pages using the best anchor text and optimal URL. Don’t add unnecessary words or parameters to the URLs.

Next, you’ll want to have another H2 or H3 heading for the products and list your top products. They can be your best selling, most profitable, most searched for products, or a mix of those products. Again, you want to use the best anchor text and URL when linking to these products.

One of Google’s recommendations is to not have more than 100 links on a page. While you can have more and search engines will crawl them, this is one case where you should follow the recommendation fairly closely.

Another thing I recommend is removing as many other external navigational links as possible, especially in the sidebar, header and footer areas. In a perfect world, the only other link would be in the masthead and go back to the homepage.

If you have a lot of products or departments, you can have more than one crawling path, although I recommend not having more than five or six.

Once this crawling path or dedicated ecommerce sitemap is set up, you should make it easy for the search engines to find it. Add it to the main content section of the homepage.

Additionally, consider adding it to the footer of every page.

Finally, if you have the time, create an XML sitemap version of the ecommerce sitemap crawling path, add it to your robots.txt file, and submit it along with your normal XML sitemap to webmaster central.

In Summary:

  • Use a unique four or five word phrase to test how often your home page is crawled
  • Put links to your most important departments and products on the homepage
  • Create a dedicated sitemap/crawling path with links to the most important departments and products
  • Keep the number of non-product links on the page to a minimum
  • Create an XML version of the crawling path page

Using Heatmaps to Optimize Your eCommerce Website

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My grandfather owned a furniture store and used to sit behind the counter and observe how his customers interacted with his products. When an item in a great location got overlooked he would quickly swap out that item with something that got more eyeballs. Similarly, if he had a very high-margin item that he wanted people to notice, he would typically place that product next to a “hot” product that got a lot of attention.

Fast forward to 2011 – In the world of real-time analytics our goal is to be able to apply the same type of logic to our product pages as my grandfather would so easily do for his retail store.

Aside from actual user testing and tracking – the best (and cheapest) solution you can use for this type of behavior analytics are website heatmaps. There are a few types of heatmaps you can use to optimize your product pages – but in this blog we will highlight three.

1. Click Heatmaps

Click heatmaps show you exactly what visitors are clicking on.

Homepage:

Ecommerce website homepage

Homepage with click heatmap:

E-commerce website homepage

Practical use #1:

Images for specific product types

Click heatmap for specific product types

The above example features three images on a website. Clearly, the picture in the middle is getting the bulk of visitor attention while the picture on the right is hardly noticed. Using real-time click heatmaps allow a site owner to notice the clicks and to swap the picture on the right with a different one to see if clicks and interest are improved.

Practical Use #2:

Click heatmap for element

The above example shows an object on a page that is clearly receiving visitor clicks. If you look closely at the copy in the green circle, it says, “ Call for details”. This object is NOT a button – but visitors mistake it for one. Click heatmaps expose objects that visitors presume are links that often are not. Turning this object into a link would increase conversion and improve user experience.

2. Scroll Heatmaps

We all know that a website has a fold. What we often overlook is that a website has MANY folds. Scroll heatmaps expose how far down a page users are actually scrolling to.

Example:

Scroll heatmap for e-commerce website homepage

Practical Use:

Scroll heatmap for ecommerce website homepage bottom

The example above shows the submit button to join a mailing list on furnitureesuperstore is placed where only 56% of people actually see it. If that button were moved up 1 inch, you would get 21% more eyeballs on it.

3. Mouse Movement Heatmaps

Tracks the mouse pointer to generate an eye tracking heatmap. This heatmaps shows users what parts of the page users are actually paying attention to.

Example:

Mouse movement heatmap for ecommerce website homepage

Practical Use:

Mouse movement heatmap for ecommerce website homepage zoomed

The example above illustrates a website whose visitor attention is largely focused on the left bar of the screen – the call to action however, is right justified. If the site owner were to justify the text on the left side of the image, closer to the navigation bar, many more people would pay attention to the announcement.

To wrap things up, driving traffic to your site is difficult enough as it is. Heatmaps and analytics allow site owners to professionally optimize their site to convert more leads while cost effectively testing new products or ideas.

This post was written by CEO of SeeVolution, Edo Cohen. SeeVolution’s tool provides heatmaps and simplified analytics that allow site owners to monitor activity and click paths in real-time – leading to increased conversion and optimization.