10 Best Tips for Ecommerce Website Optimization

This post walks readers through the 10 best tips for ecommerce website optimization. Managing duplicate content, using long-tail keywords, marketing the best selling products and maintaining a certain level of content quality are a few to mention.

When it comes to your ecommerce website, there are several issues that may crop up – mainly duplicate content, poor copy and a huge product list – all of this adversely affecting your site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Then, there are some ecommerce website optimization techniques to help your site perform better in the SERPs.

Though there are no miracles to improve rankings, but focusing on little things would help you considerably. So, let’s have a look how you can shape up your ecommerce website for better performance in the SERPs.

1. Manage Your Duplicate Content

It’s needless to say that any duplicate content will adversely affect your site’s ranking and this is the most common challenge faced by ecommerce site owners. Here are some ways to deal with the problem.

• Always submit your site’s URL to Google
• Canonicalizing links are important
• Referencing of URL is important
• Be wise to syndicate content

If you find that your content is used without your prior consent, make sure that you request Google to remove those contents. This comes under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Dealing strictly with content duplication issues will help your web pages rank better in the SERPs.

2. Content to Meet Certain Quality Standards

When we talk about unique content, it also implies that it must have a certain standard of quality. The primary ecommerce business optimization factors include the layout of web pages, ease of user experience, amount of time spent on your site, bounce rate and site traffic diversity. If you take care of these aspects, Google would offer users with quality search results. Web pages written just to please the search engines will not take your ecommerce site much forward.

You can persuade your visitors to make comments, upload reviews, post images or videos. It has been found that the content uploaded by existing customers often matches with the search query of prospective customers. This helps in driving increased traffic to your website.

3. Use Long-tail Keywords

Spending your marketing dollars for traffic and which doesn’t help in terms of conversions is wastage of money. There is nothing like getting better rankings – be it organically or by paid marketing. Then, you need to understand which keywords will bring customers closer to your products and make them buy from you. For example, instead of using the keyword ‘smartphone’, consider using long-tail keywords such as ‘Samsung Galaxy s5’. Such search terms would help you reach your potential buyers easily than with generic terms.

Always using a keyword tool may result in having search terms similar to your competitors. For better results, you can study your product page analytics to identify the long-tail search terms that are driving visitors to your product page. These are the terms you can include in your product page copy for Google spiders to crawl.

4. Market Your Best Selling Products

It’s not possible to display all your merchandise in the front of your brick and mortar store. You need to know your priorities. Studies show that the bulk of a store’s sales are derived from a small fraction of its products. So, be prudent to market more on your best selling or best performing products instead of promoting every single product. Remember to link your popular product pages from your home page.

5. Explore All Kinds of Content

Both Google’s search and image search play a significant role in optimization. Experts opine that the optimization of ALT tags and title tags is essential and also links pointing to an image must incorporate the relevant keywords. Therefore, it’s important that you rename your image title as ‘Polo neck T-shirt.jpg’ and not ‘Product 10.jpg’. You can also make use of the lately released structured markup for your videos.

6. Stay Updated with the Most Recent AdWords Features

To rank better, it’s important that you stay updated with the up-to-the-minute AdWords features. The new features offer mobile targeting, extensions, retargeting, enhanced site links, and leveraging the Google Merchant tie-in. Be smart to embrace the new features, implement them and make the most of an inexpensive cost-per-click i.e. CPC.

There are many ways to improve your AdWords so that you can customize your program to suit your requirements.

7. Make the Most out of Google Places

Use Google Places if you have a physical store. According to Google, one out of five searches is associated with location. For instance, if you have several stores, it’s important that they are individually listed and incorporate detailed information such as hours of business, live updates, images and also coupons. As per Google Places for Business, 97% customers look for local businesses on the internet.

8. Be Active on Social Platforms

We all know that all brands – big or small – have their Facebook pages. With time, more social sites emerged, such as Google+, Tumbler and Pinterest. This means that users are able to see content, images and posts from their acquaintances and friends incorporated into their search results. Be active on G+ to increase the possibilities of appearing more significantly. This way, a prospective buyer finds your products easily when searching for them.

9. Schema.org

Ecommerce websites are frequently developed from organized data which is then converted to HTML. However, this doesn’t make your site optimized for the search bots. The formal outlines present in schema.org will help Google or any other search engine access your data. Experts say that schema.org helps search engine crawl your web pages and also return structured results for visitors.

10. Use Google Products if that’s Where You Want to Rank

It’s prudent to make use of Google products if that’s where you want your website to rank. Now, you can make the most of Google Merchant Center where website owners can upload product feeds so that users are able to easily know about your products in Google product search.

So, these were some of the tips for eCommerce website optimization. Do you know of others? If so, you can share your knowledge with us and we will add your information to the discussion above.

3 Ways You Can Direct Online Visitors to Your Physical Store

Small business owners who want to give their in-store sales a boost must incorporate digital marketing into every quarter of their marketing plan. This strategy will not only improve engagement with shoppers savvy with the digital medium but also direct them to your physical store to show interest in your products as well as buy them.

 

1. Begin with Search


Though it sounds too obvious, but if potential customers are unable to find your business, you won’t be able to target them and improve your sales.


To attract the attention of potential customers, there are the things that you should do:

• Your business website must integrate the relevant search terms, i.e. keywords or phrases that your consumers are looking for. 
• Ensure that your keywords include the name of your products/services and the location of your store
• Improve your business’s visibility in the SERPS by picking out terms that best describe your products or services. This should be done in a strategic manner.

2. Go Mobile

Mobile marketing is the in-thing now and bridges the distance between mobile devices and stores. Nowadays majority of customers use their mobile devices to look for deals, discounts, read reviews and clip coupons before hitting your store and buy something.

Studies reveal that in the developed countries, 56% of the people use smartphones. You need to ensure that these mobile users are connected with your business and for this you need a responsive website that opens accurately in all devices and screens.

3. Integrate Your Online Marketing with Physical Store Offers

This is important to ensure that your products and inventories offered online are also available in your brick and mortar store. Moreover, your online visitors after a pleasing browsing experience saunter into your physical store to buy from you.

You can employ a number a number of digital marketing tactics to achieve this. Make sure that these tactics are useful, informative and well targeted.

With email marketing, you can target specific audiences in extremely dynamic and visual ways.

To connect with prospective holiday shoppers, you can:

●    Customize emails based on customer buying habits, demographics, and buyer interest within a particular geographical area.
●    Personalized and useful reminders about special deals, coupons and discounted offers
●    Speaking of customers’ cost conscious behavior or habits

The above mentioned tips and ideas would help you know your customers better, engage them online, on their mobile devices and finally lead them to your store this shopping season.

We at SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd. believe in designing websites that are SEO friendly, mobile friendly and complete with useful information and smooth navigation to give visitors a good browsing experience

 

Why Businesses Should Delve into Mobile Marketing in 2015 and Onwards?

Businesses have good reasons to dig into mobile marketing in the future. In this post, we have tried to elucidate how the mobile medium can prove beneficial to businesses.

 Over the years, the concept of marketing has evolved radically; in fact, the ways and possibilities to do marketing have changed. It all started from traditional advertising, marketing using the print and television medium and finally advertising on the web and social networking platforms. The ways in which products or services are being marketed is changing constantly and therefore, it’s prudent to embrace new marketing trends and techniques.

When users started using the internet, it paved the way for businesses to invest in online marketing, which is now termed as digital marketing. At the dawn of 2014 and the beginning of 2015, besides marketing your brand on websites and social media platforms, it’s high time that you consider advertising on mobile devices seriously. That’s because more and more users are using internet-enabled mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. This means that new avenues have already opened to market your brand of products using the mobile media.

Here are the reasons why you should dig into mobile marketing in 2015 and onwards.

Increased Audience Reach

Since users now have more access to mobiles and smartphones, you have more possibility to reach to a wider audience base. This actually is more beneficial than conventional forms of marketing which can be a hit or a miss. In fact, mobile marketing can be more effective than online ads because of the limited use of the web as more users are switching to their handheld devices to shop for products or services.

Ease of Access 

A great many people, especially your targeted audience are using their smartphones to look for information as well as to communicate. The market being flooded with smartphones and other high-end mobile devices has transformed your target audience into on-the-go web users. This implies that people are no longer required to retrieve their steps towards home and access the web on their Desktop PCs. In fact, users can browse websites, look for products on shopping sites or simply search for information on the go – making access to the internet easy. 

Cost-effective 

When it comes to expenditure, mobile marketing won’t cost you as much as traditional advertising. You will be in a win-win situation because the dollars you save on an affordable medium will help you spend more on designing tempting ads, increase the number of ads and even send reminders to your potential customers.

Time Relevant & Location-focused Promotions 

Besides ease of access, effective mobile marketing also gives your brand an opportunity to send time-relevant ads and promotions to your target customers. This way, your prospective customers receive these ads or promotional materials on time on their mobile phones, which help them to take prompt action based on the info provided by the ads – the action can be anything from inquiring about your products or simply buying them from you.

With the advancement of technologies, it’s possible to display advertisements or promotions when a smartphone user is close to your store’s location. For example, if your store has advertised a Christmas special offer on the last 2 days before Christmas, a mobile user who receives this message or ad on his or her device can immediately act on it and saunter into your store for some last minute Christmas shopping!

At SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd., we always try to follow new trends and techniques of marketing to provide our customers with something useful and beneficial. How serious are you about mobile marketing? Share your views and suggestions.

5 Local SEO Myths You Must Forget in 2015 & Face the Facts

SEO techniques and strategies that work for larger brands differ from the ones that work for local businesses that are comparatively smaller. This makes many local players perplexed as to how to reap the maximum benefits out of search engine optimization to give their businesses the deserved boost.

However, there are a lot of myths surrounding local SEO leaving marketers haywire. In this post, these misconceptions are busted and the discussion is followed by corresponding SEO facts or realities.

Myth 1 - Maintaining Google Listing is the One & Only Way to Improve SEO

To be very candid, there is no singular way to improve SEO. In fact, search engine optimization is the incorporation of numerous functions; and meant to be rational and reliable. This fallacy has spread pretty fast because of the staggering power and presence of Google on brands and business on the local level.

Fact 1 – Google Listing Can Help Of course, businesses must maintain Google listing that would be your business profile page and show up on Google maps as well as in local search queries. Alongside, you must also be active on Google+ and make a G+ business page and link it to your website employing the rel=”author” tags to boost visibility in the SERPs. Only listing and doing nothing will not help.

Myth 2 – Social Media Doesn’t Help Much

If you go by this myth even in 2015, it would only damage your company’s SEO, particularly if you are a local player.

Fact 2 – Quality Content from Social Sites Helps in Creating Backlinks

Relevant and quality content from social sites, especially Twitter, would spread to several sites, effectually creating quality backlinks to your website.  You can also use Facebook as a primary referral site to bring traffic to your site.

Post quality and relevant content to be successful on social platforms and also to remain active. The postings and sharing of the contents to relevant groups would decide where your website will rank in the search results pages.

Myth 3 – Links Matter No More, Citations Do

Link building has become obsolete, and if you are overwhelmed by this myth, stop doing so right now!

Fact 3 – Quality of Links Matter

The reality is that both links and citations matter and help in your SEO efforts. However, the most important thing to note here is the quality of links and citations. Your website may have 40 citations and no links at all but rank lower than a website having 12 links and 5 citations if the second site has quality connections.

The success mantra of SEO in 2015 and onwards is quality over quantity.

Myth 4 – User Experience is Inconsequential

This is one myth that is completely deceptive for your local business. At the present juncture, nothing else matters more than user experience. Whether it is responsive web design, content marketing or social sharing, more emphasis is put on what a customer wants first from a responsive site or content posted. What the business is about or what it does becomes secondary.

Fact 4 – Everything Should Be Useful for the End Users & Make Sense

Be it websites, contents, SERP rankings, social platforms, images, or videos - they must prove useful to users and make sense to them. Businesses that design their websites keeping user experience in mind rank better in Google’s search results.

Myth 5 – More G+ Posts & Followers You Have, the Better It is

There is no denying the fact that activities on your professional Google+ profile improve SEO. Then, Google knows to distinguish between best quality posts and poor quality posts to decide rankings.

Fact 5 – Good Number of Quality Posts/Activities in Specific Niches Matter

Success on Google+ depends on building a network of higher +1s and active followers. You can make the real difference in G+ if you post quality content or indulge in meaningful activities in a specific niche. This implies that you need to join communities that are relevant to your clients’ target audience and local area.

So, those local businesses succeed in the end which delivers useful content and pleasing user experiences to their target audiences.

If you want to learn about more SEO Myths, read SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd’s post on “20 Misconceptions You Must Abandon in 2015”.

Top Digital Marketing Trends and Predictions in 2015

Things are changing very fast when it comes to digital marketing (DM). In this post, we have tried to focus on some of the top trends and predictions in 2015 pertaining to DM. 

In the last 5 - 6 years, digital marketing has undergone a considerable change, and has become the most significant medium for making your brand’s presence felt. Just as businesses have become increasingly dependent on communication technologies, digital marketing is rapidly evolving to help them move towards a specific direction, distinguished from their competitors and embracing new practices and rendering some practices out of date. So, what’s imminent in the future when it comes to digital marketing? To get the answers, keep reading this post to learn about the top digital marketing trends and predictions in 2015.

Use of Analytics Tools Will Increase

In 2014, marketers are already using a lot of analytics tools to measure how their customers are interacting with their websites, products or services. This trend will shoot up even more in 2015, and expenditures for this purpose would rise by 60 percent. 

In 2015, these are some of trends that will dominate:

• Marketing info and data will be the most significant aspect in any marketing endeavor. 
• Businesses will use special software to make the best use of the marketing data.
• Customers would be generating loads of data

Content Marketing Will Rule 

Content marketing strategies will hold a significant place in the coming year. This means marketers will do away with traditional means of marketing and switch to creating unique, useful, inspiring and relevant content for their targeted audience. Businesses will be less reliant on age-old techniques; instead their focus would be more on content creation based on user experience.

Bridging the Gap between Offline and Online Experience 

The big step for marketers in 2015 would be bridging the gap between offline and online experience. To combine offline and online experiences, the possible micro-location technologies to be used are iBeacon from Apple. Again, wearable technology will be popular in 2015. Digital marketing will build a new environment for marketers so that they would be able to keep pace with the changing needs of modern day customers.   

Use of Tailored Content 

Today, marketers need to create content that would help users to interact with. This can be good if you churn out content that is relevant to your prospective customers. With tailored content, businesses will be able to lower cost of production, improve sales figures and encourage users to spend more time on their websites, fostering consumer satisfaction. Personalized content would be the in-thing in 2015 resulting in the growth of one-to-one marketing. 

More and More Videos to be Used for Marketing 

In the past few years, more and more videos are being used for marketing. Instead of using loads of content to explain the benefits of your products/services, videos are more effective in explaining to a layman how your products or services work or how they simply your customers’ lives. This is not possible to achieve with bland text or a few images. 

In 2015, brands will be creating ‘Explainer Videos’ effectively and use them to improve user experience.  

Visual Storytelling Will Be Rampant 

Since there is a lot of marketing noise and information overload, marketers would like to use something to make their message stand out from the rest. This can be best done with the help of visual storytelling. In 2015, visual storytelling would be used for:

• Nurturing and engaging consumer communities 
• Conveying your brand’s values and aesthetics 

The increased use of visual storytelling will help you connect with your consumers, inspire emotions and convey a clear brand message to potential customers. 

More Dollars Spent on Online Ads 

In the coming year, expenditure on online ads would increase by 10%. And, when it comes to mobile ads, they are predicted to increase by a whopping 48% in 2015. This trend will continue in 2015 and onwards enabling marketers to target specific audiences. 

Mobile Marketing Will Reign Supreme 

The use of mobile will keep growing in every facet of business – digital and online marketing is no exception. People use smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices all day and for various purposes. This would be great opportunity marketers in 2015 to target these mobile users during different times of the day, i.e. at work, during lunch hours or when someone is resting at home. 

Targeted Ads Would Be More Effective 

People visiting different websites leave loads of useful data on the internet. Again, Facebook and Twitter are valuable storehouses of information about their users. Accessing such data will help marketers to reach out to their niche audience and use targeted ads more effectively than before. 

In 2015, targeted advertising is expected to be twice as effectual as non-targeted ads. One of the studies revealed that retargeted display ad would encourage more people to look for a product. 

We at SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd. believe that digital marketing strategies and tactics must be instantly responsive to the likes and preferences of your targeted customers. This is the key to success.  

How SEO Makes Your Content Superior, Smarter and Better?

A content developer if he is required to write and at the same time has to focus on SEO, there are possibilities of the content becoming weak. When a writer is made to integrate odd, keyword saturated phrases into an otherwise impeccable and engaging content, all of the creative components vanish from a web page copy, article or blog post. Fly by the night SEO professionals waste their time by focusing more on search engines and not users, thus contaminating the web and making content quality fall and also irrelevant.

You now know that overemphasis on search engine optimization produces negative results. Be it outdated SEO practices or how SEO is ruining content – the information relating to both content and SEO is not too rosy. Most of the times, they are not too accurate either.

If you believe that SEO is sullying your content, it implies you are adhering to optimization techniques that have become obsolete and are penalized by Google. If you are managing SEO and content simultaneously, you need to be a good writer as well as have adequate knowledge about search engine optimization.

To balance the score, we are going to talk about how legitimate SEO techniques actually make your content superior and better, and not damage it.

Encourage Keyword Research & Use Apt Words that Visitors Search

As a content creator, it is easy assuming that you know what your target audience wants to know or read. Accordingly, you use words that you think is appropriate for your content. However, through optimization, you actually get to know about the right things and use them in the content to make it more user-friendly.

The keyword research tools that you can use are:

•    Google Keyword Planner
•    Ubersuggest
•    Wordtracker

These tools will actually guide you as to how visitors are using or referring to topics when searching on Google. The search terms suggested by these tools should be used in your content to make it better. This will give you a fair idea of how a normal internet user refers to any topic or subject.

By using the correct search terms in your content that users are typing when looking for information, you are actually improving your content’s visibility to users.

Organizes Your Content

In a book or novel, you will find chapters and gradual development of plot and characters to move the story forward. The same rule holds true for websites. You will find page hierarchy and a natural sequence as to how a visitor navigates through your website. The content churned out for each of the web pages should relate to the product, service or information that a specific page wants to highlight.

Focusing on SEO while writing, you need to:

•    Consider your site architecture, i.e. how one page leads to another
•    Avoid incorporating all information about a specific topic into a single web page just to show that you know so much.

SEO Makes Web Pages Useful for Visitors

Google has made it quite clear that poor, irrelevant and lean content will not score well and consequently the performance of your website will be adversely affected. Now, SEO is all about making your website useful for your visitors. In 2014 and henceforth, your SEO strategies should be aligned with the principles of user oriented marketing and user experience.

For example, if your website focuses on window cleaning devices, your content should put emphasis on information as to how window cleaning can be effortlessly done by homeowners instead of cramming the pages with product specifications. Appropriate product descriptions highlighting its usefulness along with the right keyword usage would also make your site worthy and visible to users.

SEO Helps in Generating New Ideas

Content writers come with the gift of the gab, i.e. they know what to write. However, there is something known as ‘Writer’s block’. This means, how good you are at writing can’t think of interesting ideas to pen down your thoughts. Bring into play SEO insights from analytics to think of unique topics for articles, blogs, whitepapers, e-books or what to include in your next infographic. You can look up:

•    Related searches in Google, Yahoo or Bing
•    Google’s auto correct that inspects the words you type and provides suggestions of alternative keywords and spellings

Churn out Different Flavors of Content

With the recent changes and advancements in SEO, you can actually connect with the right audience using different flavors or forms of content. These contents can be used to help your website rank better in the SERPS and promote your products/services. You can market your content through:

•    In-depth articles
•    Informative and interactive blogs
•    Whitepapers
•    Question-Answers
•    Videos
•    E-books
•    Slides and presentations

SEO doesn’t adversely affect your content if done in the right way; instead it improves. At SBR Technologies Pvt. Ltd , our SEO and content team work in collaboration to make your content richer, better, smarter and visible to your audience and connect with them.

Most Liked WordPress Social Media Plugins

With WP social plugins, users are able to instantly share that they like on your web page – whether it is an entire article or an image on your brand’s social profiles.

Read this post to learn about some of the most popular WP social media plugins.

AddThis

• It helps you promote your post on more than 330 social and bookmarking platforms
• Provides a complete overview of stats of clicks and shares on a daily or weekly basis according to custom settings

AddToAny

• Lets visitors share content on more than 100 social and bookmarking platforms
• Optimized for mobile devices
• Supports custom placement

Social Media Widget

• Options to share on several social channels with multiple icon sizes
• Supports animation effects like scale, fade in, combo, bounce etc.
• Right, left and center alignments are supported

 ShareThis

• An up to date look with 120+ social channel sharing options
• Option to alter icon sizes
• Statistics of social media shares
• Evaluation of social quality of registered site

NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster

•  Republishing of blog posts automatically to Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumbler, Blogger etc.

Digg Digg

• Supports Facebook likes as well as send buttons
• Adds floating social sharing buttons
• Print and email options
• Customization of appearance and location of a social button

Social Login, Social Sharing and Social Commenting

• Customized sharing buttons 
• Supports commenting using social media profiles
• Lets users to login into website with their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ profiles

Social Media Feather

• Stylish, modern and lightweight social buttons helping visitors to share content very fast
• Supports customization of sizes, icons, and rendering a high quality look

WordPress Social media plugins provide several benefits and lets you do anything that you want. What WP plugins have you used and why?

Please feel free to share your views with us.

How to Get the Most out of Your Brand’s Visual Social Content?

You are spending a lot of your time on visual social media content for improving your brand’s presence online. Then, are you able to reap the maximum benefits out of your efforts? Are you using the right colors, fonts and smart effects to make your brand’s visual content on Facebook, Google+ etc. more recognizable? If not, try some of these simple design techniques to add zing to your social media images.

Maintain Consistency in Fonts

Many businesses use text overlays as titles, body copy and sub headings. If you are doing the same, select 2-3 fonts at the most and use these in all your social media visuals.

Keep the Size of Your Logo Uniform

If you are using your brand logo, decide on a minimum size and use it across all the images in your social posts. The logo must not overshadow the design; however it should not be too small to become unnoticeable either.
  
Use Your Brand Color

Have you seen the posts created by famous brands? If yes, then you have noticed that they use their brand colors repetitively in their images, logo, and text. This is where the significance of brand-consistent colors comes into play stirring up emotions relevant to a brand.


Use Filters

Images used in your social posts should have an interesting and engaging look and feel. And, such an impact can only be achieved if you are using signature filters. However, before using them, ensure that which of the filters match with your brand’s design components. One filter can add more impact to certain colors while another brighten up your images.

Pick Out Images that Go with Your Brand Persona, Products/Services

Whether you are using visuals as stand-alone posts or as a background, you need to choose images that go with the persona of your company, products and services.

Opt for Templates

You can foster recognition of your brand using a number of templates. Not only these templates make it simpler for you to create visuals fast but they are also ideal for user engagement.

How would like to get your brand identified on social media using visuals? Please share your thoughts and ideas with us.