For those curious about SEO, and why it is important to an e-commerce firm, I will take a very brief opportunity to explain it.  Many e-commerce sites have a pay per click operating budget of $50,000 per month or greater (most large sites are way above that).  However, the organic listings that we top, are entirely free, month after month, search after search.  In addition, studies show that organic search results are clicked on nearly 9 times more frequently than paid search results.  So if you are paying $1/click to be on the top of the search engines for this keyword phrase, then for every click we get, you would have to spend $9 just to keep up.  And it doesn’t cost us a penny. 

In these economic times, which business model makes more sense? 

Your $50,000 monthly ad spend results in 900% less traffic than we get, and you have a $50,000 hole in your budget that we get to use in other places.  Not to mention all the revenue generated by receiving 900% more traffic than you.  Is it any wonder why organic SEO improvement is ”THE Online Strategy” for 2009?    Give us a call, and let us see what we can do for you.  After all, it is pretty clear that we know search engines.  Just ask Google.

Those interested can read the full text of the interview here.

Initial courses will include “Introduction to Search Engine Optimization”, “On-Page SEO Best Practices”, “Off-Page SEO Best Practices”, ”Blogging for SEO”, and “Expert SEO Practices”.  All courses consist of five classes and will initially be held during evenings at convenient Central Ohio locations.  The courses will focus exclusively on “white-hat” proven best practices, and will teach students all of the powerful tools we typically share at SEO conferences across the country.  Each one week course will initially be offered for $999 and are limited to 12 seats in a class.  Courses will begin in October.  We also are currently booking on-site training across the country which can be held at your business location, up to 20 students for a cost of $10,000 per week plus travel expenses, taking the rate down as low as $500 per person for what we guarantee is outstanding search engine optimization training.   We look forward to offering this new service to help your staff learn the skills of one of the most cost effective and critical aspects of operating your business’ web site.  Please contact us for more details.

Considering the whole thought of a Cyber Monday is long outdated, the next step is to look at whether or not the idea of Cyber Monday even makes sense from a business strategy standpoint. If there is an event created by marketers and the media, ideally it would be a day when you have a captive audience that can fully participate in the events taking place. With Cyber Monday being a day when most people are working, this eliminates millions of potential consumers from even being able to participate in the events. Yet according to a survey done for Shop.org, nearly 82% of online retailers were going to have a Cyber Monday sale taking place online on Monday, December 1, 2008. These promotions include many free shipping deals to encourage people to shop online rather than in person as the shipping costs often cause consumers to buy things in person when the retailer is local and the item is in stock. However, most retailers miss a great opportunity to be innovative in their thinking and capitalize on the unofficial beginning of the holiday shopping season, with Cyber Monday being mistake number one.

So, what should retailers do to promote online spending this holiday season?

1. First, begin with replacing any and all Cyber Monday events with online-only sales that take place on Thanksgiving Day. Maybe someone creative can come up with a catchy promotional name for it like Surf N Turk(ey) Specials or something. Regardless of what it is called, it gives consumers an additional day to shop - without competition from most brick and mortar retail stores that are closed for the holiday. Promoting various specials throughout the day on Thanksgiving day would generate a far greater customer base to reach than on any one day the following week when all retail stores are open and people have limited time available to shop.

People have time on Thanksgiving, whether they are spending time with family, watching football on TV, or eating turkey and stuffing all day long. Many families that gather on Thanksgiving do things like draw names for a gift exchange, or have grandparents asking for gift ideas for the children. There is no better time to present your store to them with a special sale than when people are gathered and discussing potential purchases. E-commerce stores that feature wishlist functionality could incorporate special sales on items in someone’s wishlist for Thanksgiving Day only. Giving consumers an extra reason to shop on Thanksgiving gives retailers an extra day of revenue that historically has been non-existent or under promoted online.

2. Online retailers should offer free shipping during the entire holiday season, but especially on Surf N Turkey Day. There should be no barriers to prevent the visitor from completing the transaction. Many retailers offer free shipping once a certain order total is reached, but I would advise keeping that total as low as possible during the holiday season. It would be better to offer tiered savings than set a minimum order for free shipping, as a 10% off $25, 15% off $50, and 20% off $100 promotion works as a much better incentive to buy more products than simply offering free shipping.

3. Specials for Surf N Turkey Day should be timed to be delivered throughout the day, so people don’t have to wake up at 3 a.m. to do their shopping. Rather, sales could be set up to kick off new products every two hours throughout the day, reaching the largest audience possible that even Black Friday sales fail to do (many people aren’t waking up that early to go shopping and fight the crowds even if you’re giving away really great things for free). Emphasis should be on later in the day on Thanksgiving, such as late afternoon or evening, to avoid the prime Thanksgiving dinner plans that many people enjoy. Promotions should be scheduled all day long, but should lead up to special sales and offerings later in the day. Best Buy is doing something similar this year, with Black Friday promotions available on their website on Thanksgiving Day - however, they aren’t publishing what time these offers are available. Most people won’t have the time or interest to keep checking BestBuy.com on Thanksgiving Day and ultimately won’t end up shopping there at all.

4. Limit promotions on specific items that will ultimately sell out quickly. Instead, focus on what goals you are trying to accomplish. The goal is to build a loyal customer base to sell to in the future, not just to sell am off brand HDTV to someone for $100 under cost. Offers could be tied to these goals, such as 30% off total order on Thanksgiving Day for registering for your mailing list, with a unique coupon code being emailed immediately. Most promotions should be for a certain percentage off an order, to encourage more sales not specifically targeted to one order. Maybe go all out with a free gift of outstanding value with any order over $300 (not a free mousepad, but something someone would actually want and pay for).

5. Promote the heck out of it, for free. Retailers that complain that their Black Friday ads were leaked online are clueless. Actually going out of your way to eliminate buzz and advertising for your company, for free, is one of the dumbest moves any company can make. I would strongly encourage any retailer to “leak” the information about your Surf N Turkey Day sale, and maybe even show some disappointment that it has leaked. But the more people that know about it and talk about it BEFORE the actual sale, the better. And there is no better advertising than free, blog driven advertising. You may not even need to take out an advertisement at all, if what you are offering is good enough to cause chatter in the blogosphere.

6. One final one, for good measure. Make sure your site can handle the spike in traffic. Two years ago, Sears.com ran a Black Friday special on their website which was so heavily visited that many people couldn’t complete checkout. I was one of them, with a shopping cart worth a couple of hundred dollars that was unable to have the transaction complete. I even called their customer service line that was supposed to process the transaction for me, and call me back when they could place the order. Let’s just say I’m still waiting for that phone call, and I haven’t been to their website or their store since. A poor user experience such as this can and will cause more harm than good, and could cost you a customer forever. It is essential to know that your site’s infrastructure can handle any traffic that you send to it.

Overall, we highly recommend WuFoo to anyone building a website of their own, and we’d be happy to incorporate their form tools in any site that we design or build for you.  I don’t know the guys that started this company personally, but I can vouch for what they have done.  Any startup that can make someone’s life easier for a reasonable (or free) cost if going to be successful.   I could pick no better tool to review for our first official KaLor Review than one of my personal favorites.

On the KaLor 5 Star Scale - WuFoo earns:  5 Stars

SEO is not rocket science.  Not at all.  It’s far more difficult.  Not only are the rules of the game changing all the time, but those very rules are also kept as exclusive secrets by the rulemakers themselves (the search engines).  At least in rocket science, you have laws of physics and constants that remain, allowing students to know exactly what needs to happen to ensure success.  There is no such constant in the SEO industry.

It is because of these unknown rules and the relative uncertainty behind the industry iteself that causes people to question the need for a profession SEO expert to be able to produce results.  There are enough novices out there that know enough to be dangerous, while claiming to be SEO experts, that the industry sometimes can get a bad name from people that do not produce expected results.  Also, there is an entire subdivision of the SEO world known as white hat and black hat, with a newer division sort of shading both of these, called grey hat.  White hat is basically following the recommendations that the search engines provide and going with ethical best practices, considered doing things the right way and not trying to game the system.  Black hat SEO uses strategies that have produced positive results in the past, but typically are done by gaming the system in a manner that also runs the risk of getting the site discredited or banned altogether from search engines.  Grey Hat is the strategy that maybe the search engines don’t necessarily want you to do or even agree with, but they aren’t gaming the system or doing things unethically.  An example of this would be paying for an inbound link to your site. Search engines do not want you to do this, because they don’t want people paying for links from sites that provide no value to your site. But paying for an inbound link from another site in your industry that  carries a lot of weight can be a very, very powerful asset for your site.  We never implement black hat practices at KaLor / SEO Columbus, but we will look at some of the grey options when it makes sense and is done the right way.

How can you tell if an SEO provider really knows what they are talking about?  Here are a few sure signs of someone trying to scam you, or at a minimum, take your money without providing you with the results you can be getting. 

1. Guaranteed #1 Rankings on Google  - I can guarantee you number 1 results on Google as well if that is what you are looking for, but the keyword phrase that you will rank #1 for will be a phrase that is never, ever searched by actual Google users.  The goal should be to get in the Top 3 on the first page (there is significant drop in click thru’s for sites ranking below #3) for a commonly searched phrase that will generate significant traffic for you.  For more competitive and general keywords, 1st page placement is generally good as well.  Nobody can guarantee #1 organic placement for a competitive keyword, period.  If they claim to do so, they are targeting those that do not know what they are talking about and are easy targets to take advantage of.
2. “We submit your site to 165 million search engines for free!”  This is another personal favorite of mine, people that claim they will submit your site to an insane amount of search engines on your behalf.  We won’t submit your site to any.  Not one.  And we’ll have better results for you.  Search engines index sites most quickly when it is linked to from other sites, as well as having a sitemap submitted via search tools like Webmaster Central.  And you don’t need to worry about 165 million search engines, since there are about 4 that really matter.  Rather, one that matters, and 3 others that should be considered.
3. They include Meta Keywords as part of their strategy and mention nothing about H1 or Title tags.  Meta Keywords are dead as dinosaurs.  Some respected SEO providers do still use them, but even they acknowledge they are for secondary search engines.  We don’t use them at all, and we do just fine.  They aren’t worth the time it takes to type them, in my opinion.  But having keyword driven and unique title tags, with valuable H1 and H2 tags on the page, will make a very dramatic difference on your site.

These are just three things to look out for.  I’ll try to keep this as a running list as I think of them or come across them.  It’s also editable with comments, so feel free to add your own below.  Maybe I’ll incorporate them into the main list if they are good, and once again… thanks for reading.

In an effort to be the most transparent e-commerce consulting business in the world, we’d like to share some real world examples of some of our recent clients.  We work with a medium-sized retail company that generates just under $100 million / year in online revenue.  They are one of our outstanding retainer based clients (they pay us as if we work directly for them, on a monthly basis) and we’ve been working with them for about a year now.  Being a retainer client, they could choose to terminate their relationship with us at any time (giving a 30 day notice).  We’ve transitioned a great deal of SEO knowledge to their staff and we manage their pay per click budget for them each month, an ad spend initially of around $25k/month. They show no signs of leaving our partnership, and for good reason.

Even though we provide them with the equivalent of 2 full time employees each month, at a consolidated rate of around $100/hour each, they are paying less now than they were before they selected us as their partner.  They have found that they are getting a return on investment of around $9 for every dollar they’ve spent with us.  We have great analytics to show in detail how this has been accomplished, but a large reason for it is that we’ve optimized their site for improved conversion, meaning that a higher frequency of customers are buying than were before.  Also, we’ve worked on improving their search engine optimization efforts and they are now generating nearly 40% more traffic than they were just six months ago. And since our studies have shown that natural/organic search results are clicked approximately 900% more frequently than paid search results, we’ve been able to reduce their monthly ad spend from $25k/month to around $4k/month - all while increasing traffic and conversion rates on their site.  We don’t take a portion of the ad spend like many firms do.  If we did, there would be very little incentive for us or any firm to want to reduce your monthly spend.  Instead, we charge for our time.  And with our time, we find ways to make your e-commerce business run more efficiently.  We expect to continue providing a 9 to 1 ROI ratio, and this number is typical of many of our clients.  Obviously, it depends on your site’s industry and products.  

Regardless of your industry though, we routinely do work that pays for itself very quickly and starts generating additional revenue for the client shortly thereafter.  This is why we often recommend working with contracts that include a base rate plus % of year over year increased in revenue.  We find it extremely exciting to be a true partner in your business, and this is a way that allows us to share in the success we bring to your site.  We are a different kind of IT company.  We love to compete.  After all, that’s what search marketing is - a competition. And we compete to win, regardless of who our competitors are.

Conversion Optimization is the process by which you improve the aspects of your site that cause visitors not to convert while they are on your site.  Whether a conversion in your world is a sale, a newsletter request, or even simply having a visitor navigate to a certain page on your site, the focus needs to be on improving the funnel and making it as easy and user-friendly as possible for the visitor to do what you want them to do.  Conversion rates are tricky to judge, and typically hover around the 4% rate for most retail e-commerce businesses.  We see some rates as high as 8% for a couple of highly targeted and highly optimized sites that we work with.  8% may be a difficult number to aspire to, and your business may not be conducive to a number of 8 or better.  But there are things you can do, some simple enough to do in one day, that can and will improve the conversion rate.  And since web sites no longer are glorified electronic brochures (well, for most people), converting customers is the reason why every web site exists. 

If you think about it, every single web site has a goal of a conversion.  Google wants visitors to submit a search request.  Newspapers want visitors to read their articles and allow ad impressions to be viewed or even clicked.  Other sites yet want people to sign up for their mailing list.  Heck, we want customers to call or email us, and then hire our firm for a multi-million dollar retainer-based e-commerce consulting project. What all of those sites could use is conversion optimization.  There are things that every site can do to improve the path that a visitor takes to go from visitor to converted customer.

One of the things we specialize in at KaLor Technology is conversion optimization.  We use our vast experience and complex analysis to determine where visitors might be dropping off the path, and make recommendations to fix those pitfalls. We take a look at your checkout process and then re-engineer it to make it easier to use and eliminate that as an obstacle for a customer to make a purchase on your site.  We look at content and layout, site analytics and conversion rates, all in an effort to make your site generate more conversions.  We feel strongly about search engine optimization as a means of getting visitors to your web site, but if it is difficult for them to complete a conversion when they are there, then you are wasting your time and money until you first have a well optimized site in terms of conversions.  It is more important to take care of improving the experience for the customers that you already have rather than bringing additional non-converting customers to your site.  This isn’t TV or radio - brand recognition is not the goal for a web site.  A web site is there to get visitors to take action immediately.  This is what many e-commerce directors do incorrectly, and it is something that we do very, very well. 

Contact us today for more information about how we can help you make the most out of every visitor you have on your web site.

1. Optimize your page titles with the keywords that you want to target
   Single-handedly the most important aspect of search engine optimization are page titles.  The page titles are the text that appears in the blue line at the very top of your browser Window.  Use this wisely and do not abuse.  Mis-using the title tag can be worse than not using it at all.  But using it properly will tell search engines what your page is about.  This should contain about 8 words, and should not use stop words such as the, a, an, etc. Do not use the same word more than once, but be sure to use phrases that people would actually type into Google if they were looking to find your company’s site.  Also, page titles must be unique for each page of your site.
2. Have and maintain a site map for your site
   This is not the page that you see on a lot of sites that serves as a table of contents for users, but actually is an XML file that Google uses to index all of the pages on the site.  There is a specific format for creating this file, and gives the site owner a little flexibility in prioritizing and ranking their pages.  This file is never seen by visitors to the website, but is critical to SEO purposes.   
3. Use proper HTML header tags to identify important information
   <H1> and <H2> tags are HTML tags that Google uses to identify what the site owner considers to be critical information on a specific page.  These are header tags that are very important common, but not used nearly enough by many web developers. Successful e-commerce sites use header tags to wrap around product information such as name, product ID numbers, etc. Frequently, this data is prioritized in a manner where the most important content is in an <H1> tag, next most important in an <H2>, then an <H3>.  Typically, there is no need to go lower than an <H3> but sometimes people go all the way to <H6> or so.
4. Optimize for Google
   Some SEO firms guarantee top rankings or offer submission on hundreds or thousands of search engines. Google drives 72% share of our search engine traffic on our sites, similar to the industry average.   Yahoo delivers 11%, Ask.com brings 8%, and MSN/Live drives about 4%.  There is no need to even care about other search engines when these 4 engines drive 95% of all searches.  These large, respectable engines handle their ranking algorithms remarkably similar, rewarding quality, solid content and best practices.  There is no need to worry about anything else, as optimizing a site to rank well in Google will also enable it to rank well for the others, and in the case of a conflict, you have to go with Google since they deliver almost 3 out of every 4 search visitors to a web site.  There are some things you can do as well (creating sitemap.txt file for Yahoo, for example) for other large search engines, but for the most part, worry about ranking for Google and don’t waste time or money on the others.
5. Content is King
   I think I wrote this same thing back in 1998, and I’ll write the same thing in 2018.  Content is, was, and always will be king when it comes to search engines.  After all, a search engine, by definition, is something that helps web visitors find content that they are looking for.  Therefore, providing that will automatically improve your site’s ability to rank well.  On the contrary, it is very difficult to optimize a site that has weak content, and to be honest, deservedly so.  If you have a page that provides valuable content for a visitor, it will be relatively easy to get that site to rank for a keyword the person would use to find that content. 

These are what we consider the 5 no-brainer, ‘you-have-to-do-this’ basic tips that you have to do on your web site.  These are always the first five things we will look for when we do a site analysis for your business, but when working with us we also go much deeper and provide you with a complete recommendation of what needs to happen to rank your site as an industry leader.