Tag Archives: Google +

Opening up Your Ecommerce Site with Social Media

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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.

Duplicate Content on eCommerce Websites

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Whether due to negligence or corner-cutting, duplicate content hurts your SEO. Let’s talk about the different ways in which it happens, and how to deal with each of them.

There are three kinds of content that need addressing: Editorial content, Product content and Internal content.

1. Duplicate Editorial Content

Blog posts, articles, FAQ pages, customer service content, and even boilerplate content like privacy policy and TOS pages – anything that’s non-product, non-shopping.

It’s important that this content exists only on your website. It’s okay to occasionally reprint and republish content from websites (with proper permission), but this should be a minimum – only when absolutely necessary – and ideally less 10% of all your content.

Google wants to serve search results that link to original unique content, not 10 versions of the same content.

If you have content that you want on your website but it already exists elsewhere, don’t just copy it. Rewrite it, update it, improve it, give it a new editorial view. Add your own value to the mix.

If you absolutely have to reuse content that exists elsewhere, and you can’t change it, block it from the search engines using robots.txt or the noindex meta tag.

2. Duplicate Product Content

If you are getting a product feed from a distributor, getting product specifications from a vendor, or just selling the same products as everyone else, there is a good chance that you have duplicate product pages.

SIMPLE CHECK: Select six to seven words from some of your products (don’t choose a set of words with punctuation or special characters). Put the words in quotes and perform a search on Google. If you get back any results other than your website, this is probably considered duplicate content by the search engines.

If a significant percentage of your content is duplicate, you’re probably not going to rank for those products.

Start with your most important products first, and rewrite the descriptions to be unique. For products where it isn’t cost effective to rewrite the content, use a noindex meta tag, customers will still be able to purchase the item, it just won’t show up in the search engine index.

3. Duplicate Internal Content

Duplicate internal content can be one of the easiest ways site owners shoot themselves in the foot. Maybe it’s the CMS or shopping platform, but having the same product/information on more than one URL is a recipe for trouble. Another big source for this type of problem is the marketing or advertising departments adding tracking parameters to URLs. For example search engines have problems when they see URLs like this:

example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=twittercamp564
example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=facebookmothersday
example.com/prod-name/?utm_source=rssfeed

If all three of those URLs return the same product page Google will have to guess which one is correct. You can use the canonical tag or webmaster central to tell Google the correct URL and which parameters to ignore, but really this is a workaround and not recommended.

The less you leave up to a search engine to “figure out” or “guess” the more certain you will be of the end result. If you have to use parameters, try using the hashtag implementation

example.com/prod-name/#utm_source=rssfeed

It’s not perfect, but it reduces the “guessing” that the search engine has to do.

In Summary:

  • Make sure your site has little to no duplicate editorial content. Rewrite, revise, update or block any existing duplicate content.
  • Check your product pages and descriptions for duplication, starting with the most important products, rewrite and eliminate duplication.
  • Be on the lookout for duplicate URLs created by your CMS, shopping cart software, or internal business divisions. If the information is mission critical, use hashtags.

Image credit: Shutterstock/Mast3r

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

5 Things Businesses Need From Google Plus

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Google has yet to release its highly anticipated business profiles for the Google Plus social network (beyond basic test accounts such as the Ford Motor Company). What they’ll include in a public release remains to be seen. But if Google wants to know what businesses want and need in those new profiles or pages, we have a few suggestions for them.

1. Social Analytics & Ad Targeting

Business owners want to see real results for the time and money they put into social media. They need to know what works (and what doesn’t) when reaching their customers. With Google’s already-popular Analytics service, integration would be a great step, giving them Web analytics and social analytics all from one familiar platform. Businesses could segment members of their network by demographics to see what genders, age groups, and other groups interact with their brand in different ways – mentions, comments, and +1s for example.

As this social and demographic data is collected, it would also be great to see Google Plus leverage that information in ad targeting for business users. These ads could be run through their existing Adwords platform or a fresh and more social ad format solely for the G+ network. Brands using Google Plus could advertise on the network, with ads automatically appearing on profiles of users similar to those following the brand. This way, ads wouldn’t be limited to existing followers of a business, but could also reach users with the same interests, in the same local markets, or fitting the same demographic profiles.

2. Vanity URLs

Businesses care about branding, and that makes vanity URLs a must. In other words, let’s see http://plus.google.com/YourCompany instead of  something like http://plus.google.com/7634289694283927349. Vanity URLs let companies highlight their brand names when promoting their social profiles, making the profiles themselves more marketable.

3. More Robust Direct Messaging

There’s a direct email option in Google Plus, but for businesses to use that, members of their network must have email enabled for their own accounts. You can also directly send a post to a single person. That poses other risks due to the “reshare” feature of Google Plus. To minimize the risk of private communications being forwarded to others’ networks, employees with access to a company’s Google Plus account would have to remember to choose the “lock this post” option for every private post.

Google can do better – from better archives of private conversation streams (similar to an inbox) to a simple “let this person contact me privately” link. In the latter, a customer could click that link when requesting private support or information from a business, and the company could then bypass their default email settings to contact them via email.

4. Ecommerce Integration

If companies can make money on Google Plus directly, they have more incentive to stay. This could even involve Google Plus integration with popular payment processors like Google Checkout and Paypal. Or Google Plus could involve itself in the daily deals phenomenon, letting companies post their own deals and coupons, highlighting them in a special G+ feed.

5. Opt-In Circle Subscriptions And/Or Auto-Grouping

While it makes perfect sense for the circles of personal Google Plus users to be private, business users should have the option to make some circles public. This would allow followers to “subscribe” to certain messages from the company in lieu of signing up for an email list. Companies also wouldn’t have to manually add followers to these marketing-oriented circles (which would be ethically questionable versus opt-ins).

Another approach to help businesses cut back on manual segmentation in circles is to enable auto-grouping. When a brand adds users to its network, Google could automatically identify similarities with network members in different circles, suggesting groupings for new users who are added. This auto-grouping or suggestion feature could work alongside circle subscriptions on the user side.

In addition to grouping users brands add to their networks, Google could suggest additional circles for followers who subscribe to receive certain types of updates. To combat privacy concerns, users could have a privacy setting enabling or disabling companies from adding them to other circles beyond what they’ve opted into. For example, this might let them subscribe to receive special offers without being added to circles broadcasting company news.

These are some of the things we’d love to see included in Google Plus business profiles. What about you? Would these ideas benefit your business? Do you have other business profile suggestions for Google? If so, tell us about them in the comments below!

How Businesses Can Leverage Google Plus (Even Without Business Profiles)

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You’ve probably heard about Google Plus. Yes. It’s another social media tool vying for your attention. It combines services from Google’s existing toolset with a clean and clever social networking platform. It covers photo sharing, blogging, chatting, video, aggregation, and cool new privacy controls through “Circles.”

There’s a catch though. You aren’t allowed to set up a Google Plus profile for your business yet.

Why you can’t set up a Google+ Business Profile

Google wants all users to be real people. That means you can’t set up a profile for your brand name. If you create one, Google will remove it. However, Google is working on a new feature for business pages. They should be available later this year.

3 Ways to Leverage Google Plus While You Wait

3 Ways to Leverage Google+ While You Wait

You don’t have to wait for Google Plus business profiles (or break the rules) to make the most of the network. There are ways you can connect, drive traffic, and build visibility right now.

  1. Add +1 buttons to your website. When readers use the +1 button to share your content, it will display in their +1 list in their profile. Recent changes to the +1 button now lets visitors share your content directly in their Google Plus stream. The Snippets function lets you customize how your title, image, and description will appear there. Visitors can also see if someone they know shared your content when they visit a page with the +1 button on it with new inline annotations.
  2. Have employees set up profiles. Using Google Plus internally can familiarize employees with the platform before business profiles are available.
    • Set up Circles in your own account (the G+ tool for sorting members of your network). Share company news, announcements, or other messages only with relevant employees based on the Circles they’re in.
    • Use the Hangouts feature for video conferences or virtual meetings for up to ten employees.
    • Share business-related images — from event photos to infographics. They can show up on the “photos from your circles” page for anyone following you.
  3. Follow industry news. Sparks let you follow industry news or what others blog about in your niche. You follow a topic rather than a person. Your own blog posts or news might even appear in others’ Sparks listings without you doing anything special. If your content can be indexed by Google and is well-optimized, it can display there automatically.

You need an invitation to get started with Google Plus, so ask your friends and colleagues for one. Already there? How are you leveraging Google Plus for business without going afoul of the rules?

Share your tips in the comments below!

ECommerce Websites & Recommendations for Dealing With Google Panda

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About Google Panda 

As a search engine, Google aims to provide the best quality results in response to its users’ queries. Panda was an update to Google’s search results ranking algorithm.

When the algorithm changed (think of it as having a different “person” doing the ranking, with a different “personality” and different “preferences”), it was inevitable that some sites’ PageRank suffered collateral damage. (Check out the epic hit that HubPages took. Ouch!)

How do you avoid (or repair) that sort of damage? Let’s address the issues you might face, and what you can do to correct them.

1. DUPLICATE CONTENT: Panda hates it, so get rid of it.

Many retailers simply copy and paste data feeds from their suppliers or vendors into their database or CMS, and leave it at that.

Here’s the problem: If Google detects that large portions of your website are duplicated across the web, it will most likely think of your site as a “copycat” site rather than a source of good, original content. This will hurt your rankings.

Ultra high-profile websites might get away with this, but it’s a losing game for the mediuM and little fish.

2. “Let’s Rewrite Everything!” is a tad unrealistic. Use the 80/20 approach.

Ideally, you’d rewrite every single product name and description to make them all unique. That’s the “perfect solution”. It’s also highly impractical. You’d almost certainly have better things to do with your time.

Start by focusing on what you consider to be your best products. (You’re measuring that, aren’t you? Sales volume? Profit?) A fun rule of thumb – if you were only allowed to sell two or three products and you had to ditch everything else, what would you pick? Focus on those. Make those products shine.

3. Hire a professional if you have to.

There are many different copywriting services available even for those on a tight budget, including ODesk, TextBroker, MadContent, ELance, and MTurk. (If you don’t have the budget to create unique content for your “best” products, you may have to get a little existential: Is there something wrong with your business model?)

4. In the meantime, cover up with noindex/follow meta tags.

Even if you can afford to have all your content rewritten, it’s going to take some time. What do you do between now and then?

If something isn’t being rewritten, “hide” it using the noindex/follow meta tags. (Google approves of this, which isn’t the case for unethical practices like cloaking.)

By doing this, you avoid accumulating “negative points” in Google’s eyes – which is ultimately better for your overall SEO. A few highly ranked pages will get you far more mileage than many poorly ranked ones.

5. Make your pages unique by adding customer reviews.

The best reviews are usually those submitted by actual customers. A good time to ask for it is a few days after you know the product has been delivered. Otherwise, simply reach out to your customers through email or social media, whichever they’re most receptive to.

How do you get a good response rate? Use incentives! (Free shipping, discount on future orders, a chance to win a gift certificate… be creative. You know your target audience best.) This small outlay will be outweighed by the additional legitimacy it adds to your business. If you have a large email database of existing customers, fans on Facebook, or followers on Twitter, you can use these methods to get customer reviews as well.

It’s worth taking the trouble to use Schema.org review markup in your formatting, so that search engines  give you rich snippet listings.

6. Add reviews directly to product pages, NOT on separate pages.

If you use separate pages for your reviews, you won’t for “<product name>”- instead, you’ll rank for “<product name> reviews”.

If you only have a few reviews, put them on your product page.

If you have lots of reviews, you can have your cake and eat it too. Display the 5 -10 most recent or most helpful reviews on the product page, and create a separate page with all of the archived reviews. That way, you’ll rank for both the product name and the review searches.

Each situation is different, so you’ll have to decide which works best for you depending on how many reviews you have.

7. Kill disused and discontinued pages.

Some retailers grow rather attached to their discontinued products, and “bury” them deep on the website. Some might even think that it benefits them – a larger site with more pages can seem “more impressive”.

Here’s the problem: Each website has a finite number of links, and those links each pass along a little strength to the website they link to. If you take a finite amount of link equity or “link juice” and divide it up among an “infinite” number of pages, you’ll end up with a bunch of pages that aren’t “strong” enough to rank for anything.

So when you have products that you don’t carry anymore and aren’t coming back, remove them. In the meantime, you could set up a 301 redirect to a similar product or category. In the long run, cull them completely. Keep your site elegant, not bloated.

In Summary:

  • Kill The Clones. You want your product titles and descriptions to be unique. If they’re duplicated, start rewriting them, with your best products receiving top priority.
  • Use noindex/follow meta tags to avoid being unnecessarily punished by search engines while you’re cleaning house.
  • Use customer & expert reviews to make your product pages unique. If you’re overwhelmed with reviews (a happy problem), keep the best on the product page and archive the rest on a separate “reviews” page.
  • Remove discontinued or under-sold products. They dilute the value of your site, and consequently, your SEO. Both customers and search engines prefer lean, elegant sites.
If you’re looking for more information about Panda, we recommend reading this post from Google or this Interview with Vanessa Fox.

Image credit: Photospin