Archive for October, 2010

Best practice for E-commerce websites

If you own a bricks-and-mortar retail store, a distributorship, or a manufacturing facility, imagine the potential for increased sales if you offered your products to a global marketplace by simply setting up a website with your catalog on it. After installing an ecommerce shopping cart system and the ability to process payments online, some aspiring Internet moguls just sit back and wait for the orders to start flying in. The idea of suddenly having access to hundreds of millions of credit card wielding customers can certainly be intoxicating, but the reality of ecommerce success is that it’s not nearly that easy!
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How to get the best website for your business

Here’s a quick quiz for you? What do you think should be the first step in developing a website for your business?

1. Creating a design?
2. Deciding how the content needs to be integrated and managed?
3. Gathering content from other collateral material?
4. Developing a strategic plan?
5. Choose the most cost-effective hosting plan?

In just about any profession other than website development, your answer would be choice 4. After all, you couldn’t build a house without considering the layout, number of bathrooms, and features of the home. You wouldn’t create a design for a major advertisement and then plan the content and message of the ad. Yet, when it comes to website design, often the design comes first and the strategic plan for the site comes last.

In fact the development process should be:

1. Discover the reason a business needs a website and the expectations of the business.
2. Understand your typical customer and what influences their purchasing decision.
3. Have a clear understanding of how the website fits into the marketing plan.
4. Research to find what customers are searching for in Google, Yahoo in relation to the business (keywords).
5. Carefully plan a site architecture which is best for the demographic, online search trends, and have a site that’s easy for search engines to follow, is designed with the target market in mind, and has clear definitions of conversion goals.
6. Create a design which speaks to the target demographic.
7. Launch the site and begin an internet marketing plan to fulfill realistic expectations.
8. Modify strategic marketing plan as needed in response to real-time data.

I think the reason many web companies  get away with a backwards strategy is because the design portion is fun, is more tangible, and looks impressive. It gives a client the opportunity to suggest colors, logo position, interactive media, position of the navigation system and other elements. The process usually goes smoothly because the developer gets the excitement from the client and the client is impressed by the nice design work. BUT… that’s also why over 99% of all internet businesses FAIL, because there is no quality infrastructure and strategic plan in place. Either the site is poorly marketed, keywords are unfocused, or it doesn’t fit into the overall business marketing plan. In most cases, this is where the business owner begins to think the internet is all hype and will not work for their particular business. They disregard stunning statistics, such at 65% of all Kiwis begin their search for local services on the internet FIRST.
The worst part is that now the internet developing world has realized that cheaper, do-it-yourself systems sell better than a comprehensive plan. So companies sell template websites, and the only one who ends up suffering is your business. Be Smart and Eat Your Vegetables First… Then have Dessert.

Proper planning and website design and development such Page One Consultants provide is the only way to go. Hiring an experienced company to help you is the only way you will truly have an opportunity to dominate your market online.

Related Blogs

Mobile Marketing with smartphones

More and more people are signing up for advanced mobile plans, which means that savvy marketers have a brand new window of opportunity open to them right now. Mobile marketing is cheap and people don’t have ‘banner blindness’ when it comes to their mobile device. Here are ways you can make mobile marketing work for your business.
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The importance of site activity in SEO

Site activity is a new and important part of the Google algorithm used for ranking websites for specific keywords. Only recently has Google made this new aspect of site activity and integral part of their ranking process.
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Seth Godin’s thoughts on the ‘Google Sales Funnel’

Here’s a recent post from Seth Godin’s blog where he talks about the importance of having an efficient sales funnel – in other words a sales process via your website that efficiently converts Google searchers to customers.

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PPC vs SEO

Which is better, short term traffic to your site or building a long-term flow of customers? We know which we advise our clients, but it’s worth having another look at the differences between PPC traffic acquisition and SEO.

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Small business SEO mythbusting

Now and again, we run across an individual business owner who is quick to say that SEO is absolutely worthless. When confronted with such an absolute statement, we like to press for details.

In this article, we’re going to detail some of the stories we’ve heard, which frequently tells more about some of the people in our industry, than it does about the effectiveness of search engine marketing.

PROBLEM #1 – “I rank number one in Google, and yet, I have never earned a cent from my website…”

When I first heard this story, I was very surprised… After all, if your SEO company did good keyword research, there is no reason why you should not be getting traffic and a few sales from a top ranking in Google.

I pressed for more details… I learned that the company who built the website also did the search engine optimization.

It only took a couple of minutes to learn that the website design company optimized this fellows’ website for the name of his company. There was no other optimization performed on that website.

LESSON #1 – It is rather pointless to optimize a website for the name of the company. The only consumers who will be searching for the name of your company are existing customers.

But, if your company is unknown to the general public, then the people who would like to buy your products or services will not be able to find you among your competitors.

If you sell widgets in Auckland, your future customers will be typing “Auckland widgets” into their favorite search engines, trying to find your business. And, if your prospective customers cannot find your business, your business does not exist in their minds.

PROBLEM #2 – “I had a company build a website for my business, but I have never received a single customer for my business, through my website…”

Are you sure?

Asking this question is not meant to offend you, but rather to get more details as to how you track incoming business.

If you are the average off-line business owner who has built a website to promote an off-line business, chances are real good that you probably have never received a single customer from your website.

However, if your website does not request for your prospective customers to let you know how they found out about your business, then chances are that people who did find you through your website would never tell you that.

If more than one person answers the phone at your business, chances are just as good that someone may have mentioned finding you on a website, but no one conveyed that information to you.

In your business, you should have systems in place to track and record where new customers have found your business. To do otherwise is like driving your car in the fast lane during rush-hour traffic with a blindfold over your eyes.

LESSON #2 – If you are not asking your customers how they found your business, you will never know what kind of advertising is producing profits for your business and which advertising is sucking the wind out of your business.

PROBLEM #3 – “I spend a great deal of money on PPC listings (pay-per-click) to get my business in front of search engine users, because after spending tens of thousands of dollars on SEO, I could not rank in the search engines at all…”

What keywords were you trying to rank for in the search engines?

“Travel. I have a travel business based in Auckland that caters to business professionals…”

Have you ever noticed the caliber of companies who rank on page 1 in Google for the keyword: travel?

Those are companies who spend millions of dollars per year to market their businesses online and off-line. Do you have a marketing budget that will allow you to effectively compete with Air NZ, House of Travel or Expedia?

Besides that, where do the majority of your customers work and reside?

“Auckland of course.”

If that is the case, why would you spend your limited marketing budget to target consumers who would never buy from you because they are outside your local marketing area?

“I never really thought about it in that way…”

Most of your competitors are making the same mistakes that you are. That is to your advantage because when you start to market your business in a more realistic and cost-effective manner, then you will be able to compete with your competitors, while spending far less money than your competitors are spending.

LESSON #3 – If you operate a local or regional business, do yourself a favor, and stop trying to compete in the national marketplace.

Final Thoughts…

Listed inside this article are three lessons that could potentially help your off-line business to find new customers and to generate new sales, as a result of your online advertising.

Depending on the average ticket price of purchases in your store or service business, how much could an extra 20, 50 or 100 new customers bring into your business each month? You do the math.

You could spend the next ten years learning what we have learned to maximize the effectiveness of your online advertising. Or you could employ us to work on your behalf to support your local business in your local marketplace.

Related Blogs

SEO copywriting is a special skill

Search engines exist for the sole purpose of providing users with relevant results for their keyword searches. In order to provide search engine users with the results most pertinent to their searches, the major search properties send out spiders to crawl web pages. These spiders evaluate several distinct elements of a web page and then index and rank the web page based on the analysis of these properties.
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Social Media marketing might not be so good afterall

If nothing is certain, one thing is – social media is losing its magic. What once was a new and improved way to keep in touch with your closest loved ones has become just another sales pitch to convince you to sign up to another dreadful business opportunity, newsletter, product, or service. There is no opening or closing – simply raw advertisements that lack sincerity. The people advertising their products don’t care about you or your general interests. They’re too set on the idea that you’re going to sign up and turn them into a success.
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