Opening up Your Ecommerce Site with Social Media

Posted on March 20, 2012 by ReferralCandy

Social media and ecommerce make ideal bedfellows. Whilst one is geared towards self-promotion, sharing and discussion, the other is about developing a strong customer-base and driving sales. It’s almost as if they were made for each other.

All ecommerce sites are fundamentally standalone stores of course. So your job, as an owner, is to get as many people coming through the doors as possible. To do this though, you need visibility.

On the high street you can employ a wide range of tactics including:

Billboard advertising
Sandwich boards
Attractive window displays
Local media promotions
Free samples hand outs

The Internet is an entirely different beast though. Whilst the logic is still the same, the tools and techniques are worlds apart. To generate interest, you have to get yourself noticed. This means optimising your site to adhere with search engine practices and getting seen on any platforms that potential customers are using – including social media.

So what do you need to be doing?

First of all, secure profiles on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If your business name has been taken, look for similar alternatives, such as “Store Name UK” or “Store Name Online”. However, it is important that any profile you create is clearly branded, enabling customers to recognise who you are and associate the accounts with your store.

Each of the aforementioned social networks allow users to create customised business pages, so make sure you take the time to create a design that is indicative of your business. This means incorporating clear imagery, colours and your company logo to tie all your properties to one another. Below are examples from the Gap.

Getting (inter)active

A dormant profile is of little or no use, in fact it may even be damaging. So make sure you have a social strategy in place. Who is going to be managing comments, how frequently are you going to update your profiles and what will you say? All of these questions need to be answered before going any further.

Dell was one of the earliest adopters on Twitter and made headlines when it was announced that the company had made $6.5 million in sales solely through the social network. This was way back in 2009 though, and now hundreds of businesses are booming thanks to their effective social strategies.

To be successful, you need to follow a few key golden rules:

Be human – nobody wants to follow an automated robot that endlessly pumps out sales messages
Be responsive – respond to questions, compliments and criticisms in equal measure wherever possible
Be creative – why not use your social profiles to create special promotions, using unique hashtags or requesting ‘likes’?
Be interesting – give people a reason to leave a comment, share your content or visit your store

Once up and running, you can use these social profiles to funnel people towards your site. However, this is where your web pages and pricing need to deliver. After all, it doesn’t matter how many people come through to your store if nobody ever makes a purchase. So make sure your site is ready to deliver on these promises.

Social Site Integration

Assuming that everything is shipshape, you need to find a way of integrating social elements into your site. After all, now you’ve created these properties, it’s important that people can actually track them down. Most ecommerce sites and online businesses now integrate links to their social profiles in the footer, side or even top navigation, making them incredibly easy to find.

This form of cross-promotion makes it easier for visitors to keep up-to-date through their preferred medium. In time, this could lead to them becoming a loyal and valuable customer. The joy of social media (the major networks in particular) is the ease with which information can be shared. Every message you post will be seen by thousands, either directly or by others ‘liking’ or retweeting it. This only serves to help your brand’s visibility grow, making your future marketing activities easier and more effective.

It is important to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to share products and promotions, so include “share this” shortcuts on every page. These needn’t be intrusive or ruin the design of your site; but the more prominent that you can make them, the better your chances of having a product shared.

A number of ecommerce sites currently have this feature, although few are taking full advantage. Take Amazon as a good example. Here we have the product page for the iPad 2 (on the UK site).

The “Like” button is for Amazon customers to share recommendations, whilst the Facebook, Twitter and Email functions are buried on the right-hand side of the screen.

Gap (US site) place their ‘Like’ button alongside the product, above the price and specification even, for greater exposure. However, this has its own limitations, as it only allows Facebook users to share the product – effectively dismissing Twitter, Google+1, Delicious, Digg and the other bookmarking sites.

Finally, clothing store Office (again, UK site) give their share buttons the greatest prominence of any of the brands featured here. Both Twitter and Facebook have their own unique icons underneath the main image, whilst dozens of others are available by clicking the + symbol. As you can see from the figure, this has generated a reasonable number of shares across all platforms.

Nobody is going to claim that a few buttons are going to make or break your site, but as part of a cohesive effort to promote your business on social platforms, they can be hugely effective. Essentially, you should be helping your customers to help you. Their endorsements can be just as effective as your own marketing efforts, so give them the tools to do it without leaving your site.

Playing the Numbers Game

Social marketing really is a numbers game. The more brand ambassadors you can recruit, the more stock you can hope to shift. Your outreach though is almost unlimited. Whilst your ecommerce store may only have 10,000 Twitter followers, 500 of these may choose to retweet a promotion to their followers, who in turn may share it with their friends, and their friends share it with their friends, and…well, you get the idea. A single message can be seen by tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, offering unrivalled exposure with limited input or cost. As your own followers grow, so does your potential exposure, with one effectively feeding the other.

Ultimately though, you need to always remember why you’re doing this in the first place: sales. Whilst customer service, reputation management and online visibility are all extremely important, the bottom line for any business is to get a return on your investment.

Social media is an interactive platform on which you can promote your produce to an expectant audience. As with brick and mortar stores, there are a number of ways in which you can attract attention, with the only major difference being the platform(s) being used. So rather than using in-store staff and promotional teams to engage visitors, you can use Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to do much the same.

SEO for eCommerce Product Pages

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Michael Gray

Previously, we looked at SEO for the eCommerce Category Page. In this article we’re going to be drilling down one step further and looking at SEO for product pages.

The URL

As with all aspects of SEO, getting the URL right is one of the key steps in the process and should not be overlooked or downplayed in importance. URLs should be as short as possible contain no more than 3-5 keywords, use standard word delimiters (such as hyphens), and standard file extensions (although using no extension is even better). Avoid using parameters if at all possible, if you need them for marketing/tracking purposes use the hashtag instead.

Bad URL Example: example.com/prod1234Bad URL Example: example.com/prod.php?id=1234 Bad URL Example: example.com/darkbluewidget Bad URL Example: example.com/darkbluewidget.go Bad URL Example: example.com/buy-cheap-dark-blue-widget-cheap-online-now Bad URL Example: example.com/dark-blue-widget/?utm_source=camp1234

Good URL Example example.com/dark-blue-widget/ Good URL Example example.com/dark-blue-widget/#src=camp1234

Putting products in a sub-directory or sub-folder, is tricky. If the sub-directory or sub-folder changes or gets renamed you have a lot of 301 redirects to deal with, and that can easily turn into a headache. However if you have thousands, tens of thousands or more of products without a sub-directory things can get messy if you’re not diligent. It can be done, it just requires a lot of discipline or things can go wrong very quickly.

Product Titles

Products should have good unique descriptive titles that describe the item, contain good keywords and are keywords customers are likely to be searching for. The more unique your titles are, the better. However, if your products are very similar, for example “3×4 Bath Mat – White”, “3×4 Bath Mat – Navy”, this can sometimes be a challenge. In all but very few cases, the product title should be first followed by a dash, hyphen, colon or other common delimiter and then the store name.

Good Title: Navy 3x4 Bath Mat - Ultimate Bathroom Store

Bad Title: Ultimate Bathroom Store – 3×4 Bath Mat Navy

Generally speaking, search engines weigh the words at the front of the title higher than words at the end. If you notice in the good example, I even moved the color in front of the name of the product. In the bad example, you can see that the color “navy” is the seventh word and will be given very little weight. In most cases the on H1 tag for the product will be the same as the title but not always. In the example above it would actually be optimal to have them be slightly different. HTML Title: Navy 3x4 Bath Mat - Ultimate Bathroom Store H1 3x4 Bath Mat, Navy. While then HTML title will be seen in the search engine listings for the product, it’s primarily for the search engines. The H1 tag which will appear on the page is more for the user and any internal search functionality.

Product Descrptions

Each product should have a unique description. The description, should be unique and different from every other product in your store, but different from every other store selling the same product as well (see preventing duplicate content on your website). Sometimes this can be a challenge if you have a large inventory, or don’t have staff/budget to rewrite product descriptions you get from the vendor/manufacturer. However, keeping the exact same description as hundreds of other merchants is a real obstacle to ranking well for products. One strategy to get around this is to make your page more unique with product reviews. If you go down this route, make sure you use the proper XML Schema Markup for product reviews.

Product Images

Customers like to see big clear pictures of the products they are shopping for. It’s even better if you can get multiple images. However large images contribute to larger file sizes, longer download times, and page speed does have an effect on rankings. So size your images properly, don’t resize a 1000×1000 image down to 250×250 with HTML or CSS. Many sites show smaller images and let you click for a larger view. This gives you the best of both worlds. If you can rename your files to match the product, you will have an advantage over merchants forced to use SKU or inventory based image naming schemes.

Internal Links

Once a customer has entered the sales funnel, you want to keep them on course, and not provide too many links for them to leave. However there are a few ways to add internal links to your benefit. The first is with breadcrumb navigation, this is the tiny text that lets you know where you are in the store hierarchy: Home >; Bath Products >; Bath Mats >; 3x4 Bath Mat, Navy If you make each of the words a link, you help your overall SEO effort by spreading internal keyword link equity. Another strategy is to show related products, add on products, or upsell other products. The best way to do this is to show 2-4 thumbnails for the products towards the bottom part of the page.

Social Media

Social media is a popular topic right now and it definitely is a part of search engine rankings. However, adding half a dozen Facebook like, Tweet this, or other buttons can make your page look busy. Additionally if you use the buttons with active voting counts (ie 17 people liked this on Facebook) you will have a negative effect on your page speed. Each of those active counts will call a different service and add approximately one second per button. If you add six buttons that’s six seconds. Be honest with yourself if your products are that social that you really need that, or can you use plain on site local images.

Takeaways from this post:

Get your URLs right, keep them small, straight forward, uncomplicated, and free from parameters
Use your HTML and H1 product titles wisely, and to your maximum benefit
Make your product descriptions unique not only to yourself but from other merchants
Look at reviews to make your pages unique
Keep images small, while offering consumers the ability to see larger pictures if they want
If possible, use keywords to name your image files
Link internally using breadcrumbs to help your overall SEO effort
Show related or add on products to increase sales, make pages more unique, and add value to the consumer

Image credit: Shutterstock/RA2 Studio

The Advantages of User Comments for Ecommerce Sites

Posted on March 8, 2012 by ReferralCandy

Some consumers require more convincing than others. Whilst a detailed product description and expert review might suffice for some, there will always be those who want more. So why not give it to them?

A commenting system is a great way of developing unique on-page content as well as allowing visitors to share their insights. If they can read independent reviews of an individual item or service, they see how real users perceive products, not just the manufacturer or reseller.

Trust is a huge issue for any online business. Many consumers still have reservations when it comes to buying products from ecommerce stores. Whether this is driven by security fears or concerns over the reliability of the seller, you have to do everything possible to put your customers at ease. One such solution is to provide an area for existing customers to leave comments.

Developing Content and Reaching New Audiences

Thanks to the development of social platforms, your comments needn’t simply be restricted to your website. By using an integrated Facebook sign-up, product reviews can also be posted directly onto the walls of your customers. This can help to improve brand awareness and should also drive further sales, with the buyer providing endorsements for both the item and your business.

You should also look to include social bookmarking widgets to help users to share their recommendations with friends on Twitter and Google+. Working alongside your commenting system, it can open up your store to a whole new audience. It also provides an opportunity for you to promote any other social profiles you have, including Facebook fan pages and YouTube channel.

Of course, this all relies on the reviews being largely positive. If customers are continually leaving messages of disapproval on particular products, then sales could be severely impacted. However, this shouldn’t put you off.

If a product is proving to be unpopular, then it’s better that you are aware of the issues and take action. Continuing to offer stock that attracts criticism is only going to damage your reputation with customers. Again, offering an open forum for impartial comments can help you to identify any such problems, enabling you to investigate further and respond quickly.

Honest, Independent Reviews

Most consumers don’t expect to see hundreds of glowing reviews from anonymous individuals. Instead, they want honest insights into the products and services on offer. For instance, budget products are unlikely to offer the same quality levels as a premium alternative, but most customers will understand this.

Comparing the two directly would provide a false impression. This is why unbiased comments work so well. People that have purchased an item often have similar expectations as those who are likely to make the same investment in the future and so are in the best position to provide frank advice. Therefore, the more reviews you receive, the more shared opinions and insights your pages will have.

Adding Context to Product Pages

As you are probably already aware, on-page content plays an integral part in Search Engine Optimisation. It helps to provide context and can improve the authority of your site too. Consequently, your rankings should improve, resulting in increased traffic. Whilst some site owners may be concerned about comments watering down the keyword density on their pages, this really shouldn’t be an issue.

Remember, search engines are looking for context, not just a single word or term repeated endlessly. Just as with your product description, reviewers will naturally mention its name, features and even related items. This, for search engines at least, is just as important as a blurb full of perfectly placed keywords. Content adds context; therefore, if you were able to increase both on a single page, higher rankings in Google should be your reward.

You will have to be vigilant when it comes to moderation though. Whilst you don’t want to be seen to remove negative comments, you shouldn’t allow links, spam or bad language to infiltrate your pages. This could present you with a number of credibility issues with the search engines and, more importantly, your customers. So ensure that every comment is checked before it is set live on the site.

Whilst this might sound like a lot of extra work, it is an investment that can reap real rewards. Many of the major ecommerce sites are now employing commenting systems as a way of building trust and encouraging users to return in future. Whilst you shouldn’t immediately look to emulate what your competitors are doing, this is certainly one instance where you should give it serious consideration.

No matter how big your business is, or how many products your store offers, opening up your pages to customers is a fantastic way of increasing your conversion rate and site traffic in one fell swoop. As the site owner, you can remain in full control throughout, removing anything that you deem to be inappropriate. Essentially though, you should be looking at it as free content and impartial endorsements on your pages. It really can be a win-win situation, when managed correctly.

SEO for the eCommerce Category Page

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Michael Gray

Retailers running eCommerce stores often under-utilize their category and/or department pages.

In this post we will talk about ways to maximize the contributions these pages can make to your overall SEO strategy.

Get the URL Right

Unless your eCommerce package was designed with SEO in mind, you will often find yourself with inelegant, complicated URLs that look like this:

example.com/dept.asp?dept_id=1234 example.com/dept.php?id=456&sort=price

Search engines have made tremendous strides in recent years in handling “complicated” URLs with parameters tacked onto the end. They have even come up with solution in webmaster central to let you tell them which parameters to ignore, and the rel=canonical to give Google the correct URL.

That’s no excuse for you to get sloppy though. You shouldn’t take search engines for granted, or expect them to do all the work for you. They do occasionally get things wrong, so it’s best not to have to depend on their guesswork/interpretations.

Instead, use simple category URLs like:

example.com/dept/bathroom-faucets/ example.com/kitchen-sinks/ example.com/kitchen-sinks/stainless-steel/

Use keywords instead of numbers. If it means the difference between ranking #2 instead of #4, it’s well worth the extra work. Other factors to consider:

Try to keep it between 3-5 keywords total
Use sub-folders and hierarchy where it makes sense from an information architecture standpoint, don’t do it just to add keywords
Use common characters as word delimiters whenever possible

Editorial Photos and Text

Most product and category pages use small thumbnails as links that lead directly to products.

If you want to increase your rankings, try adding an editorial “beauty shot” and some editorial text. Keep it at around a 100 words – long enough to weave a compelling narrative about your products and/or the lifestyle they promote, but short enough so that your products aren’t too far down down the page. Experiment with photos. Try using visually compelling images with some text mixed into them and see how they affect conversions.

Products and Thumbnails

You want to have editorial control so that you can control the default sorting order of your products, featuring your most important products first. Display a reasonable number of products by default – if you have more than 100 products per category, give consumers the ability to view all of the products at once.

Another nice feature is to give consumers the ability to sort by price, size, or other characteristics. When you add these shopping features you don’t want to create duplicate content with URLs like:

example.com/sinks/?view=all example.com/sinks/?sort=price

When you create this situation you create the potential for search engines to choose the “wrong” ordinal page. If you have to use URLs like that add the meta noindex tag, conditionally to those pages. A better solution is to use hashtags like this:

example.com/sinks/#viewall example.com/sinks/#sortprice

Search engines will not index URLs with the # symbol in them.

Secondly you want to make the thumbnail image a separate link from the name of the product. Both should be links, but create two HTML links, don’t wrap it in one link, it just makes things easier for the search engines to understand. Use the name of the product as the alt tag for maximum SEO value.

Internal Linking

Using breadcrumbs on all the pages in your shopping environment is a good way to increase the value of internal links, as long as you make the words links

Home: Sinks > Kitchen Sinks > Stainless Steel Sinks

However also try to create links in the editorial sections of your site as well. If you have a blog, put links in there too – but keep it natural and organic. Hard-selling blogs are a turnoff, and that’s ultimatately worse for you in the long run.

Page and File Size

Page speed and file size are currently one of the ranking factors in search algorithms. While it’s a second order factor, again it could be the difference between ranking #2 instead of ranking #4. Keep your images as small as possible, create thumbnails don’t resize using HTML, CSS or scripting. Keep JavaScript, Ajax and other scripting elements to a minimum, use asynchronous loading whenever possible, use remote files instead of inline code, and keep any inline code at the bottom of the page. Having hundreds of lines of JavaScript at the top of your pages is never a good idea. Use one remote file for each scripting type (CSS, JavaScript, etc), having multiple JavaScript files creates unnecessary calls and slows your pages down about 1 second for each file.