• Pros and Cons
• Rules(also principles, secrets, tricks or other related words)
• “Top Ten” list (can be any number)
• Checklists
• Question & Answer
• Pain Avoidance

• Introduction of new products or services

• News and press items showing the latest happenings

• Decision to change how you package the content for visitor and search engine engagement

• Website optimization may require page copy or meta changes to implement search engine best practices.

However, when a web development company misconstrues their offering as “search engine optimized”, there is a case for the client to look deeper into it. As a premier web marketing firm, our project estimates typically start with an overall understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the client website. We get daily requests to redesign and revamp websites and this is when our creative team works with the search marketing team to identify issues with search visibility and conversion optimization on the websites. Our solutions are as much about visitor conversion and interaction as they are about design and programming.

A search engine optimized website is different from a search engine compliant website. First, let us understand what makes a website search engine compliant.

• Your website URLs should be short and it should carry keywords– If you have a static website then this is never an issue as you can decide how you will construct a URL. However, if your website is CMS based, the URL structure should be like: http://www.example.com/services/web-design and not http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=basic

• .htaccess redirect – If you’re are looking for changing your static website to a CMS driven site, you should redirect the older URLs to the new ones to preserve the link juice.

• Robots exclusion protocol – Your web design firm should know how to exclude the private pages, login screens, register boxes and user pages from being indexed in search engines.

• A search engine compliant website has provision to add a title element, headings and image alt attributes and title attributes.

• A search engine compliant website should be easily indexed in search engines and should be cached too. The pages should load fast and all the Javascript and CSS code should be in an external file(s).

• You should be able to generate XML sitemaps for all the URLs – this is important for membership type websites where new users are created every day.

A search engine optimized website is a different beast altogether. Search engine optimization is a web marketing service where SEO experts would ensure that your websites rank on the first page in search engines like Google. While, it is not easy to explain the process of SEO in one single blog post, here are some attributes of a search engine-optimized website:

• An optimized website is built on a proper keyword base. A typical website can support 2x to 3x keywords as there are pages. These should be divided into words with primary focus and secondary focus.

• An optimized website is the one which when redesigned doesn’t lose rankings and link juice.

• An optimized website has properly written title and Meta tags which comply with search engines’ standards in terms of character length.

• An optimized website has a hierarchy to every page on it with properly defined main and sub headlines.

• ·An optimized website has keywords in folder names, URL paths, image file names and has title attributes for all HTML elements like DIVs, tables, images, paragraphs, lists and headlines.

·         More important than anything else, an optimized website should rank well and receive traffic from search engines with a minimal bounce rate.

As the saying goes – proof of the pudding lies in its taste. It is true that a website should rank well in search engines to qualify as “optimized”. Contact us if you want us to look at your compliant website and turn it into a ranking superstar. 

If you’re running a business that sells through the web either directly or indirectly, you would definitely look at search engine optimization as a crucial technique to build your website traffic base and for lead generation. Correctly implemented search engine optimization can bring new visitors to your website and if your site is well designed and is conversion oriented, you can convert these visitors into paying customers.

However, as the marketing manager of such a firm, you need to take decision of whether to hire someone to manage the SEO in-house or to hire an SEO firm to work on all the intricacies of search engine optimization. Here are some of the pros and cons of hiring vs. outsourcing your web marketing requirements.

Pros of In-house SEO

The biggest advantage of keeping an important activity like search engine optimization in-house is the focus which it can get. Not to say that an agency would not focus, it may perhaps more than you can get, However, if you get to hire a competent in-house SEO manager, she would only be focusing on your company, a handful of online properties (yours) and your own industry with a bunch of competitors. She will understand the online set up of your industry and would know in and out the main blogs, forums, listservs, news sites and influence makers in your industry.

Your in-house SEO expert would have a smaller basket of keywords, content responsibilities and even competitors that she needs to research. She most probably knows more about the company than an outside firm would know. This would help her get more done in less time and the physical presence in your company premise itself would mean that she can get along with the creative, the server team and the company decision makers to keep the ball rolling.

Cons of In-house SEO

You can’t see the forest for the trees – that is the saying which does rounds within an SEO agency. Anyone who has worked for an agency understands that it can become myopic when you’re focused on one company, one industry, and ten competitors. There is no dearth of very smart people in every industry and your SEO would miss the opportunity to learn from them.

More often than not, in-house SEO is plagued with high turnover too. Your in-house SEO may not see benefit in working on a mundane job every day. Unless, you the marketing manager know SEO and can lead the creative and innovation in SEO, she can leave to work for an SEO agency. This would help her learn more in depth and wide too

Pros of Agency SEO

SEO agencies present themselves with new challenges in different industries almost every day. The best of the SEO agencies solve complex SEO issues and get client websites ranked across a set of industries. This breadth of SEO offering is their primary strength. When these agencies monitor hundreds of Google Analytics accounts, they can see patterns of search engine ranking updates and decipher what works and what not. This collective intelligence coupled with their project management skills makes them a force which churns rankings easily.

When you hire an SEO firm, you tap into their collective intelligence and expertise. With an agency you benefit by having teams rather than individuals. A results-driven SEO company would do much more than just “optimize” your website for web rankings. They understand your industry set up and take corrective actions on your website too so that it can perform better and get a better ROI which beats the industry standard.

While your in-house SEO expert may deliver results, an agency with a successful track record would bring a visible difference to your online presence in a smaller timeframe. They know what works and what doesn’t and hence unlike an in-house SEO focus only on things that get you the best return for your investment.

Cons of Agency SEO

With agencies, you fail to understand who is involved in what work. Yes, you do get the time sheets and the hours on a monthly basis but you do not know if the one with ten years of experience worked on it or was it the new “brilliant chap”. 

Where to Go?

For an enterprise-level agency a dream SEO team comprises of a small in-house marketing staff that has at least one trained SEO on-board and an SEO agency working on their SEO. This offers the best of both worlds as the agency can focus on achieving the SEO excellence and train the in house team. The in-house SEO members can learn from the SEO agency and can report the SEO work to the management, increase the speed of the required SEO implementations and suggestions and communicate with the agencies to find new content and linking opportunities that exist for the company.

About the Client

REO Industry Directory is an online directory of REO agents, brokers, and vendors across the United States. David Tal, the President and founder of REO Industry Directory started this website in 2010 to help REO agents meet asset managers. The REO Industry Directory soon became one of the most advanced networks of Real-Estate-Owned Professionals which helped the asset managers to find REO agents and vendors by city, zip code or street address. It also made premium REO listings available to agents at affordable rates for better online visibility.

Unlike its competitors, the REO Industry Directory helps agents and vendors in getting a prominent online listing and in training them through an industry leading REO Training & Certification Program too. REO Industry Directory believes in the motto – Experience, services & training – all at one place.

Within a short span of time, the REO Industry Directory became a well known name in the Industry. However, David Tal realized that it was still lacking something. Why were the results just satisfactory & not excellent?

A brilliant concept, strategy & with a second-to-none service orientation, REO Industry Directory had all of it, so what was missing? In today’s competitive world, one not only requires a great vision but an excellent platform too, and the REO Industry Directory was missing that. Their website was unable to convey the owner’s vision and thoughtfulness. The shortcomings & loopholes in the website were preventing users and thus it demanded for a makeover.

Ocular Concepts took the challenge of giving REO Industry Directory an entirely new look which along with spreading its vision was intended to give them a cutting edge new look too. We redesigned the website and developed it in Drupal CMS. We developed their search based web application using custom PHP giving them the perfect content management solution and the exceptional performance of a reliable and stout programming platform.

Using a mix of great content management features and custom application programming in PHP, our web design experts developed some remarkable functionality for the client:

•  Search Locator: A search locator was developed using the Google Geolocator API and Google Maps API. Users are prompted to share their location on the home page. Once users accept to share, Google’s Geolocator API comes into action. Their position coordinates are now used to track create a map using Google’s Maps API, which will display the location of REO Agents within a 30 mile radius of the user’s ZIP code area.

• Ubercart: We integrated Drupal’s Ubercart module and customized it for report generation based on users’ status. We also used Ubercart’s recurring payments module for Featured Membership payment on the website.

• PayPal  Pro: We connected Ubercart to PayPal Pro offering a branded purchase experience for the website visitors. When using PayPal Pro, your visitors do not leave the website for paying using their credit card. The card is charged on PayPal’s servers and the pages for these processing are built into your website, now this is what you call a branded experience, right?

• Custom CRM Features: We talked to the REO Industry Directory owners and they placed a lot of emphasis on fostering the relationship with their customers (REO agents). We custom programmed features like individual and batch emailing, follow ups using Google Calendar, admin notes & checkmarks and communication history management. All these features are build to support their customer engagement model.

The Website was given a Web 2.0 look, which made it more attractive and appealing to the users. We also developed landing pages for all the major cities in the nation which list the REO Agents from these cities.

The Website makeover was overwhelming for the clients. We received accolades from the clients to accomplish the task within the given timeline.

• PHP 5

• Drupal 6 CMS Integration

• Drupal Custom Modules

• MySQL

• CRM

This article throws light on some of the important points to be followed from the start itself so that your website redesign doesn’t equates to loss of traffic with the slick design that your website designer did for you:

• For most of the sites, about 60% of the traffic is from search engines, so a cool home page with 90% of content in flash or the ultra geeky AJAX driven navigation menus may sound hip, but it may interfere with the natural rankings and search visibility of the website. Your web designer should tell you this and if you absolutely want it, ask for provisioning alternate navigation mechanisms and XML sitemaps. However, this would cost extra for your website redesign.

• Changing the URL structure– This is a cardinal sin if proper redirection is not set up properly. The SEO expert should be asked to set up a Webmaster tools account and should see the top pages from external links quantity and quality perspective. If the URL structures are changing, the SEO expert should make a document of all the old URLs and where the new ones should point. This SHOULD be done using .htaccess on Apache or the Microsoft URL Rewrite Module 2.0 on IIS 7.

  Personally, we recommend to keep the URL structure same for the existing content.

• Decision making on content accessibility of login protected regions–This is a bit tricky and is usually applied only when there is premium content on the site. As the website owner it is you who needs to decide how this content should be indexed? Should it be a bait or should it be fully accessible to ONLY search engines? These questions need to be asked and communicated to the SEO expert so that an appropriate content accession strategy is worked out.

• Content Management system URL output – Always emphasize the importance of Clean URLs without parameters or IDs. Anything which cannot be construed and indexed properly by search engines should be avoided at any cost. Since we use Drupal most of the times, this isn’t a problem when we do a website redesign for our clients. However if your site is designed using a custom CMS, URL architecture is something you will have to monitor closely.

• Proper content transcribing along with the meta tags and title tags – This is the easiest portion but should duly happen.

• Consistent internal linking – The internal pages should properly link to the sectional indexes and the sectional pages should link to the home page. If the www version is used, always use it, if it is the other way round, decide to maintain the consistency.

• Alt attributes for images – This is like delving into the free SEO territory but is always a good thing to do. A small alt tag for the images on a page goes a long way in stabilizing the rankings after the site redesign. Your website designer doesn’t needs to undertake an extensive keyword research, but just should read the content and put up the attributes appropriately and concisely.

• Proper placements of Google Analytics code – Your web design firm needs to ensure that if the site previously carried Google Analytics code then it should be present on the newly designed site as well. In case you were not analyzing your website previously, you always should and Google Analytics is the best free tool to do this.

• Fixing outgoing links – Usually a website redesign has two main issues with respect to outgoing links. The first issue is about the broken outbound links. If your website designer uses content from your existing site, it should be thoroughly checked for proper outgoing links. It may be possible that links in the content point to non-existent URLs. A proper outbound URL check is needed and Xenu is the best tool to use. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html.

  The second issue is the linkage to social media and profile sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Almost everyone has grown fond of these social sites and you would wish to link to these profile sites. Remember that these sites in themselves are like black holes of SEO. These sites absorb your website’s link popularity and don’t ever reciprocate (since all their links carry the dreaded “nofollow” attribute). It is thus essential that a rel=nofollow is used when linking out to these sites from your website.

• Showing respect for the Robots Exclusion Protocol – The site administrators give directives to the search engine crawlers using the robots.txt file that resides on the root level of your website server. Scripts, login protected regions, membership content folders and test sub domains should be protected by this file. It is important that your website designers respect this file and protect the barricaded sections on the new site too. In case any such sections exist on the new site (and were not there previously on the older site), it is important to consult the SEO expert so that selective content access could be enabled.

These SEO techniques can help you reduce the loss of traffic upon website release. Remember that any redesign effort will always be accompanied with traffic loss, but if the above mentioned best practices are followed, the loss would be minimal and recovered quickly.

With “Affordable Elegance” as their positioning statement, Choice Cabinet (www.choicecabinet.com) uniquely fits in between a wide gap of an overall cluttered cabinet marketplace. On one end of the market spectrum there exist the big box retailers and online cabinet peddlers who are more focused on selling low-quality cabinets that come with very little support from the suppliers. On the other end of the cabinet market, exists a diminishing mix of custom cabinet makers that can be very high priced, but deliver the maximum level of customization and service, at a high price.

For customers that need a custom cabinet service experience at stock cabinet prices, Choice Cabinet is the perfect answer Choice cabinet provides cabinets, accessories and solutions for the entire home with the focus being on improving and modernizing the kitchen. These cabinets are constructed from better materials, the craftsmanship is more like what you would see in a custom cabinet and they back their product quality with a limited lifetime warranty

The Need

With the website redesign, Choice Cabinet’s objective was to emphasize the distinction of their quality materials and designs. Also, when users land on their new website they should see that Choice has the best styles as standard products. The service level difference that makes Choice more similar to a custom cabinet provider at stock cabinet prices needed to be communicated properly.

People perceive all stock cabinets are similar in quality and hence it was a challenge to develop graphics and content to overcome this perception.

Their existing website, in their own words, was neither inviting nor intriguing. It was a plain looking website with serious navigation issues and virtually no differentiation from other players in the industry.

The Web Solution

The impediments in unleashing the true potential of a vivacious, customer-friendly company were identified and now it was time to overcome these obstacles. From website planning and wireframing to design, the immense potential of this niche player in the cabinets market was realized to its fullest. Ocular Concepts devoted time in identifying all the important elements of their online presence such as:

• Their social integration needs.
• The graphics and layout planning for exuding quality at affordable prices.
• Their need to keep the website content updated.
• Their need to track visitors’ activity on the new website.
• Their requirement for displaying dealers that they have across the states.

As can be seen from our elaborate planning and steps that we take for careful execution, we are not just another web design firm. We pride in being a marketing company that provides valuable solutions for all your online needs.

We proposed Drupal as the content management solution for this website. Drupal, with its awesome list of modules scores at the top when it comes to offering editable galleried of videos and photos, image and text based content, Google maps integration, automate the loading of large amount of datasets and a secure platform for development that is completely scalable

Drupal helps choice cabinet in maintaining all the facets of their business. This includes their products, product showcases and locations of their dealers from where these cabinets can be purchased.

The result?

Choice Cabinet’s website was not only praised by their customers and their partners, but also by their friends and family. Choice Cabinet’s marketing team gets an apt representation of their company and products’ strengths. The website distinguishes this business well and targets it properly to the customer segment that needs these solutions the most.

The content management solution which is based on the Drupal platform, helped them in decreasing their dependency on web designers and at the same time, still being able to update the website as and when required.

Technologies

• PHP 5
• Drupal 6 CMS
• Drupal CCK, jQuery and Image Gallery Modules
• Editable Slideshows built using jQuery
• Javascript and AJAX
• MySQL

Google Analytics is an indispensible tool for anyone running a website. It doesn’t matter if you’re a non-profit or an enterprise or a blogger, the information that Google Analytics shares with you is highly useful and actionable. Even a quick peek at the dashboard of your website’s Google analytics will tell you the number of visits to your website, the sources, the main keywords, regions, your top content and how the people interact with your website. Armed with this information, you can take corrective action to improve the quality and quantity of traffic to your website and to fix navigation and page issues on it.

The keyword report in Google Analytics shows which keywords were typed on search engines when the visitors landed on your website. The higher the ranking, the more is the traffic. Using advanced analysis techniques, you can determine the relative value of keywords to your business too.

However, Google has recently stopped sharing keyword data if the searcher is logged in to her Google Analytics account. Google made this announcement a week back on their blog.  This means that if the searcher who landed on your website typing a keyword on Google.com is using any of the Google services (like Gmail, Adwords, blogger, Google+, Adsense or any other service) and is logged into her Google account, all you see as the keyword referral is “Not Provided”.

It is not just Google Analytics that is devoid of the keyword data but for a logged in user, the search engine redirects them to https://www.google.com. HTTPS is the secure HTTP and no other service will be able to get the keyword data either. Well not all of them. If you are a Google Adwords advertiser, you can still see the exact keyword in your Google Adwords account.

What we are unable to comprehend is that how hiding keyword data for anonymous data set helps in improving the privacy for users. Moreover if it does, why has Google not implemented it in Adwords too? It is a legitimate question and a debate is necessary around this topic. As of now we have seen around 3-4% of our keywords across various client websites showing “Not Provided” as the keyword. This is bound to increase over a period of time with the increasing popularity of the Google+ service, which is fantastic BTW. If Google is able to push Google+ to a higher extent be ready to lose more than 10% of your keyword data. Way to push Adwords? Well, only time shall tell.

To put it in a clear manner, if you have good information architecture, people can easily find your products and services, analyze its technical details and get answers to any questions that they have about them. However, it is easier said than done. A good information architecture is a challenge and if you overcome this challenge, you can convert visitors to your website into satisfied long term customers.

Customers’ “buy decision” depends on the information that they get on your website. While it is true that the information needed by one customer may vary significantly from others due to differences in their personality and buying behaviors, your goal should be to cover as much as possible and visualize your most inquisitive customer.

To visualize what all pertinent question a person might ask, it is important to collect as much opinion as possible. The good news is that help is available in-house. Your sales teams, customer care teams and grievance address department know what issues customers face regularly. It is also advisable to have some outside customers or people whom you know (that are neither customers nor your staff) to participate in the process of defining the “information universe”.

Placing This Information in a Digestible Manner

After your company has defined the universe, it is time to categorize and prioritize the questions and concerned. While some questions will be very pertinent, some may be completely baseless or useless. After you know which questions and concerns need to be addressed, decide on the pages (or URLs) on which these need to go. Some questions are so pertinent that they should be linked from everywhere. For example, if you offer airport pickup services on your website, a question may be – “What if my flight is delayed by an hour or more?” No pickup customer would like to avail the service without knowing your delays policy. Therefore, you might want to address this question on the home page, on the services page, in the footer and even give a reassurance on the contact/buy page.

Planning and executing this for a website that has many products and service might look like a gargantuan task, but in reality you can use a schema once it is built for the most important products or service categories.

Laying Out the WebPages

While your website design company can do a wonderful job at layout and design, you need to communicate the results of your architecture brainstorming sections to them. Good web design companies understand what it takes to “convert” visitors and would be happy to understand from you what each page on your website requires to convert well. For eCommerce websites, it is essential that the “Review” or the Shopping Cart” page does a good job at summarizing all conditions, terms, policies and assurances (like returns, privacy, defect in items).

Same is true for non eCommerce websites too where after addressing users concerns, you pay attention to details on your Contact/Request a Quote page.

Design or Redesign

Customers are inquisitive by nature. They look for information and base their decisions on this information. If you are building a new website, pay attention to the media that you use to answer their queries. Technical specifications of a complex industrial product can be well explained using text and images and it may be essential to reference it further too. In such cases, offering a PDF file download serves your purpose well.

You have text, images, rich media like videos, flash and also external resources at your disposal to offer answers to your customers’ questions.

If you are redesigning your existing website, you need to revisit the existing information architecture to see that everything is included and the choice of media is apt too. Keeping product/service landing pages clean with minimum information and links to PDF files, how-to videos, and links to blog posts on the product or subject matter are some effective ways of communicating with your customer.

Measuring & Improving the Effectiveness of your Information Architecture Set-up

Monitoring each and every phone call, support ticket request and the forms that are submitted helps you in identifying the loopholes in your process and in improving them. Going through their concerns or even proactively asking them questions help you in further refining your information architecture building process.

If your customers are trying to testify your expertise by asking questions about your company’s years in business or number of customers in California (or elsewhere), you need to understand that you need more testimonials and more expert documents like case studies or whitepapers. Of course, if you directly talk to customers, they may tell you all this without hesitation too.

In a nutshell, information architecture is the science of

• Leading users to their destinations

• Removing roadblocks and distractions in between

• Clearly labeling your website navigation

• Offering assistance at every instance and answering their questions/concerns.

Implement these steps and see your website conversion rate increase manifolds.

When you work with a web design company or a standalone website designer, there are many things that you expect them to know. Your list of requirements may range from professional design experience to robust communication and reporting systems. Clients also look for local web design service providers to that they can touch base with them on a regular basis and can hold them accountable for any drift which happens from the expected project movement.

While all the above criteria are important and form the basis of selecting a web design company, there is a vital ingredient to the success of your website – how well do you communicate with the designer and how well they understand your business. As an external firm, do not expect your website design company to know all what you know about your business. Some design firms are exploratory and research intensive in nature while others may only superficially ask questions or raise any concerns. While a web design company that asks penetrating questions or meets with you to have great planning guides for design are a boon, the onus of clarity in terms of what is required, lies solely with you, the client.

Here is a list of things that your website design agency should absolutely know about your business:

• Your goals – It is imperative for your website designer to know what you wish to accomplish with your website. This is the “bigger picture” we are talking about. Whether your website is about educating people on a topic and involving participation or is it about generating leads for sales? Most of the better web design firms have project managers and business analysts who look at your website more objectively in term of website conversion. If they are properly armed with this information, chances are high that your website will be conversion oriented.

• Your audiences – There may be multiple audiences that you cater to, out of which some are of higher importance than others. Your web designer needs to know the hierarchy of their importance along with their demographics, their spending patterns (most important for eCommerce websites), their needs, their concerns (FUDs) and also the way they are supposed to interact with your website.

• Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) – Most of the companies don’t know what is special about them. If you are among them, you need to step back and do a SWOT analysis to first understand yourself why you are in business, what makes you special and why people should buy/subscribe from you. Once you know this, you should clearly communicate your USPs to your web design firm. This would help them weave designs that clearly focus on the best parts of your offering in an unequivocal manner.

  Being able to differentiate your offering vis-à-vis your competitors helps you stand out and users notice you.

• Elements on your website – Your web designers should know the bigger picture and the focus element needs equally well. So while your goal may be generating more leads, the home page may focus on telling visitors what your business is all about and leading them to your projects portfolio or product case studies etc. Every custom page on your website has a goal which is known as call-to-action and your web designers should very well understand what every page is supposed to do and how it integrated with the overall objective of your website.

As a business owner, you are not spending money just make things look pretty, but rather to make them more effective. Tell your website design firm how important business and online conversions mean to your business and try to lead them to a goal that you and them, both understand equally well.

Here are some of the commonalities that we have found in successful eCommerce websites world over:

• Properly Defined Goals

  Every page on your eCommerce website should serve a purpose. This seems like an overwhelming statement to most of the people as they think that their eCommerce website has thousands of webpages.

  While this is true that your site has hundreds to thousands of pages, if you adopt proper eCommerce website design practices, this is an easy implementation. Your website actually has less than 100 most important pages. These may be your product pages (best selling ones), category pages, review pages, contact pages and about pages. With standardized design and a universal architecture, it is possible to offer visitors a unique path to follow. It also helps you visualize your website in terms of “hierarchical units” or steps that your visitors tread. You can adopt best practices for one category page and apply it to all of them.
  

• Effective eCommerce Website Home Pages
  
  It is true that eCommerce websites that have visitors landing in from internal pages, outperform those that solely depend on website home page as the landing page. However, the contribution of the website home page cannot be undermined on any website. If you confuse or overwhelm visitors with too many products, tens of offers and specials and an obscure search box or navigation, your eCommerce website will experience a high bounce rate and a lower conversion rate.

• Web Analytics

  Usually, SEO practitioners and businesses both, place Web Analytics at the end of their list. While it is important to increase the “mouth of your website traffic funnel”, it is equally important to take corrective actions, based on your web analytics data, to stop visitors dropping out of it. When you visualize visitors as people rather than “Visits” or “Hits”, things start making more and more sense to you. Once you realize that the Visit data shows the struggle of a real person on your website, you strive to end that struggle. That is what most of the successful eCommerce websites do everywhere and that is what you should do too.

  Same is true for easy checkouts, order confirmation and order shipment emails. Get the basics right! 

• Ease-of-use at every point

    It can be a simple one page checkout form or the diversity of the product image showcase, attention to details can help you in selling more and successfully too. An interesting case in point was a shoe company for whom we designed and developed and eCommerce website. The hiking shoes purchasers always used to place prominence on the sole and its grip. We understood this from a research that we did about their audiences. We made sure we asked the client to add the photos of hiking shoes that had their sole displayed prominently, helping the adventure types and sport lovers to take a decision in favor of buying.

• Establish a connect

  People like to deal with those whom they have trust in. This doesn’t means that you go all out and make friends with everyone who visits your website. It is simply not possible. Instead, make sure that you give your visitors every opportunity to know about your and get in touch with you. What made you start your eCommerce website, where are you located, do you have any real storefronts, people who run your office, some nice pictures of it being well run etc.

  Giving your eCommerce website a warm and a personal touch helps in improving the confidence level of visitors in it.

In a nutshell, thorough planning and impeccable execution is only possible if you emphasize each and every phase of your eCommerce web development process thoroughly. eCommerce website owners need to analyze and re-analyze their website and make updates based on smart information through the analytics tools that they can use.

Ranking is one of the most highly used, overused and abused SEO metrics. While most of the SEO experts are responsible for over-hyping this SEO performance measurement technique, the role of clients seeking higher results for every possible keyword, cannot be undermined. Clients or SEOs, everyone seems to be obsessed with higher rankings and we are yet to find a performance evaluation where rankings are not the first metrics to be reported.

Some result-oriented type SEO firms combine this with tools that predict SERP CTR rates. A SERP is a search engine results page and CTR refers to Click-Thru rate. While it is true that higher rankings bring more traffic, trying to predict accurate percentage traffic which corresponds to SERP position, usually leads to failure. Due to their relative positions on a SERP, rankings 1 to 5 get much more visibility as compared to the 6-10th ranking. Eye-tracking studies and leaked papers from AOL click-thru reports were used to predict ranking to traffic measurement numbers. Moreover, X or Y% increase was further translated and projected as future expected inquiries and sales for clients.

While everyone was looking happy with this so called perfect trajectory, a lighting of realization struck companies when the traffic figures didn’t match the predicted numbers. The reality to prediction numbers were so wild that there was nothing that businesses and their SEO’s could do apart from scratching their heads and tossing their prediction files into secret bins, so that they never have to see them again. Factors Affecting Click-Thru Rate on SERPS

While now you know what a SERP is and what CTR is too, it is the time to understand the most important factors that will make the predictions careen wayward. Remember that one or more or all factors might be at play together and it largely depends on the kind of keywords that you are targeting.

Searcher’s Intention

The search intentions vary from person to person and it varies a lot when the queries are short. A person typing in “Web Designers” might be looking for anything from web design services to looking for where web designers get work, to the most prominent web designers in their area for an interview and so on and so forth. The intentions can be numerous and so can be the choices for clicking. If you are a web design firm which wants to capture the attention of the visitor and the visitor is actually looking for a web designer, you might get lucky. If not, a job site which is listed just below or above you might attract the visitor or something else.

If you rank at the top for the searcher’s query but the intentions are different, you may just not receive the expected number of clicks. The predictions of the first result getting 45% clicks might prove wrong. Moreover, a lot of effort is involved in ranking your website at the top for short queries. You only realize that the keyword is not doing enough for you after you reach the top 3 on Google for that keyword. This is true for exact match domain names too. It is better to have your due diligence done before you invest heavily in a premium, exact match domain. The returns may be well below your expected numbers based on calculations of SERP CTRs.

Brand Names Competing With You

As SEO experts, we have observed more than one time that when the searcher’s query has a navigational intent (search engine used to reach a particular website) or if a brand name outranks you, chances are less that you will fall in the “click brackets”. Even if the brand does not outrank you, but is listed just below your result, your CTR will be badly shaken. We know that Google prefers brands, and user intentions prove that they are correct. It seems like people have an inclination towards businesses and products that they know of already, or are at least familiar with.

Local Search Results

Many of us have seen the Google’s 7-pack shown above the organic results when the search query has a local modifier in it. The results are pulled in from Google Maps and links exist to the “Place Page” for the businesses along with their reviews on review sites like Yelp, Judy’s Book, Insider Pages and other comparison shopping sites/Internet Yellow pages. Towards the end of 2010, Google rolled out a significant change in their algorithm promoting local results with a very high prominence that is hard to be missed.

An example search for “lawyers in New York”, gives this 7-pack result with a map of lawyer locations in NY, making them very conspicuous on the SERPS.

Universal Search

While nothing affects SERP CTR performance as local search results, Universal Search too plays a big role in affecting the SERP CTR distribution. Google introduced Universal search back in 2007 with an aim of covering as many intentions as possible. If someone is searching for cars, it is hard to tell what they require. Google comes to the rescue and show car pictures, news about new car models and even videos on Youtube. This mixing of results from alterative indexes is known as Universal Search. Searchers may enjoy a car video or the latest Volkswagen car and may want to see how the interiors look like. If yours is a text based result, get ready for seeing some discrepancy in the number of clicks.

On the other hand, Universal Search presents a lot many opportunities to businesses as well. A properly crafted content strategy with images, videos and presentations may compensate for the CTR loss on text results.

What this blog post brings forth Is the fact that forecasting may be good for number crunching, but is not an exact science when it comes to SERP CTR. Your SEO company might have their own reasons for showing you how more hours translate into more keyword traffic, but it is advisable to take this with a pinch of salt. When looking at SEO results look at them holistically and try tapping as many channels as possible. Get on-board with Video promotion, Google Base promotion, local internet marketing and web analytics/conversion optimization. This complete strategy and various channels to tap will prove much more beneficial for you in the longer run than an overt focus on a couple of short keyword queries.

Savvy business owners understand the need of well-trained and professional copywriters who can bring forth great content to the website, however most people overlook the importance of letting the content pass through multiple eyes or re-reading and proofreading the content that has been produced. A solid content strategy yields a dismal performance if content is plagued with errors and typos.

This is true in US, in England and true in a country where English is a second language. For opinions to be heard or brands to be sold, it is important to communicate clearly. Content written on your website is the first channel to establish a “connect” with your online audience. If the content on your website is riddled with spelling errors or typos, what are people going to think? Do you think that the “connect” will be maintained for long?

Truly remarkable content that is free of errors goes a long way in establishing what most companies want online – trust. Most of the website visitors are filled with FUD and it completely occupies their mindset when the credit card is about to come out to pay for your product/service.

A few tips to avoid spelling errors and typos on your website:

• Review your written piece after an hour or two – Assertion plays a big role in blinding us. While writing, you’re passing through a series of emotions which is blocking your perception of reality. Where on one hand it makes your points more passionate and topical, your content becomes prone to obvious errors in grammar, spelling or misinterpretations.

• Hire a proofreader or get someone else to read – People love to read and write and many do it for a living. If your website will be representing your business, a copywriter/proofreader may be an important part of your online team. The same person can help you in your print write-ups too.

• Do not rely on spell-check programs – Most of them will only catch spelling errors, but not misrepresentation errors. “On” can be replaced with “One” and this typo may get unnoticed. I just typed the word “type” rather than “typo” towards the start of this sentence, but proofed it to get rid of the error.

• Final Review – They always help. Even re-read and proof-read content may have errors. Remember reading your content piece once again before you publish it or print it.

Be careful, in a nutshell. If you are a quality company, promising higher level of product and service experience, it is better that your content reflects your philosophy. You may spend a lot of time in quality website design or immaculate internet marketing, but most of it won't matter a lot if your content has loopholes in it.
 

Most of the small and mid-size businesses in US still think of website as a peripheral entity to the day-to-day operations of their business. Most of them still do not realize the potential of their own website and the kind of pivotal role it is capable of playing when it comes to Integrated Marketing.

Your business website not just acts as your 24 hour active brand evangelist, but also has the potential of acting as a salesperson ready with all the arms and ammunition to fight a sales battle and convert visitors into prospects. You can even improve your customer relations and answer their questions, queries and handle their objections on your website, in a manner that increases your brand’s reputation online.

To fuel the growth of your business, you need a powerful website. Taking shortcuts with your approach towards getting an online “nirvana” can definitely beat your purpose and ruin your brand and business. Let us have a look at the top 5 critical mistakes to avoid while designing your business website:

• Not Choosing a Design That Aides Marketing
  

Being in the web design business for over 5 years, we know that business owners tend to worry too much about the visual aspects of their website alone. Their time should be well spent in fine-tuning their marketing and aligning it with the website look and feel, but it is unfortunately the later which takes precedence.  

This doesn’t mean that a business owner should accept anything less than professional and robust from their website design company. Yet, your website design, look and feel and the technology delivering it, should not get in the way of your marketing message. Remember that website visitors get impressed by your design, but once they move further, your message becomes all the more important. If you’re beautiful website is a puzzle to wade through or if the copy is less than substantial, chances are high that the effect of a great web design will wane away quickly.

That said, the website copy and the supporting graphics should very clearly state the value proposition of your offering. Your products, services, subscriptions or events should do more than just focusing on your “unique approach” or rock bottom pricing. Clearly telling visitors what they get by associating with you or adopting your offering is a great way of making your website pages “actionable”. Your message can always be enhanced by customer testimonials, client certificates, high participation numbers etc.

• Not Seeing Website as a Part of the Integrated Marketing Approach
  

Many business owners separate online and offline marketing to an extent where their gameplan for offline marketing is never adopted (or tweaked and adopted) for online communication. Many a times, there is NO gameplan at all. Integrating the to can not only result into a satisfying experience for your online and offline audiences, but can also help in lessening the customer management, reporting, updates and promotion related hassles. As an example, your web development company can develop “Customer Sections” where you can run special deals, offer download of product literature, have a communication channel, upgrade, sell AMC and what not.  You can also have dedicated chat facilities for your clients in particular or for all website visitors using an online chat tool.

• Not Defining Website Objectives Clearly and Concisely
  

While it is true that your website is a part of your holistic marketing approach, you should still be defining what is the purpose of its existence? Why are you investing in developing or redesigning an existing website? What do you want your website visitors to see and do? What are the objectives to be met and how do your prioritize multiple objectives? Once you yourself understand the requirements better, you can tweak the design and modify the functionality to achieve it.

• Website Functionality, Too Less or Too Much??

With an expertise in developing web, mobile and CMS applications, we have observed a trend that business owners are clueless about what functionality they require on their website. Sometimes, when they put forth their requirements, they are unknown to the fact that design apart, it is the web development (contact forms, databases, editable CMS, interactive sections etc) that consume time and add to the cost.

Web development can come in many forms. eCommerce product management and credit card integration is a form of web development and so is displaying live Twitter feeds on your site. Whatever feature needs “coding” on your website is classified as web development. Converting design files to HTML usually is still considered as design, but when your web company adds client or server side scripting to impart interaction to it, this is known as web development or programming.

While it is true that you as a business owner, may never completely know what you require, until you see a website working for you. It is always better to discuss in depth about what you want from your website, with your web designer. The expertise of your web design company kicks in here as a company with huge experience levels can help you choose your requirements with the minimum up-front investment.

• Not Measuring Your Website Progress

Website performances can be tracked! If this came as a shocker to you, please go and read more about Google Analytics, AWStats and Sitemeter. These tools are free to use and can measure your website visitor traffic, click patterns, traffic sources, time on site, top content, goal conversions and many other metrics. If your web design company has good SEO experts on-board, they should be able to help you with proper installation and reporting from the web analytics tool. You can also have a web analytics based reporting mechanism set up which tells about the state of your website activity on a regularly basis.

In conclusion, if you plan on getting a new website, have properly laid goals for it and see where it sits in your marketing mix. Also have a plan to get the best out of your website and keep improving it further, don’t think it is a onetime affair.
 

Business owners find it intriguing when they read Internet consumption statistics telling them that over 60% of the local purchase decisions are made online and that as many as 78% of the customers research about services and products online, before contacting a business, either online or offline. That is an awfully huge number and as most of the business owners would see – there is not much that comes their way, neither in terms of web traffic nor in the form of inquiries. What may be the possible reasons?

We are at an interesting crossroads when it comes to the Internet. It appears that marketing has become mobile, local and social; all at the same time. The local business owner is not faced with the question – “What to do”, but instead it is the plethora of choice, platforms and experts that make their life full of options and hence confusion. Add to that the still existent Yellow pages and trade publications. Small business owners have too many choices and this creates a hurdle in coming up with a decision of which channels to prioritize and which ones to leave.

If you have a business which is focused within a locality, a metro area, a county or even within a state, your traffic that “converts” comes from the target region. If you are in Cleveland, OH and sell dermatology services, chances are that most of your customers would be from North-east Ohio and not from other states, until and unless you have a big brand name and a spotless reputation.

Since we are in a mode of “prioritizing”, we would be looking at search rather than social as a traffic channel. The returns from a social marketing campaign originating on sites like Facebook and Twitter are still very low and for most of the small businesses, the traffic numbers are way too small. We have seen examples of Facebook sending tons of traffic to sites which are either in a particular industry type like hospitality, music, fashion, food or are a very well known brand themselves. For the other businesses, web traffic from social media websites is still an illusion.

Google is the dominant player in the search marketplace and with the “segmentation” that it has done over last two years, local is the new global. With the evolution of better Maps functionality and a highly evolved local business center, known as Google Places, Google has turned the table and made the playing field level for most of the small businesses which do not have a strong brand presence.

Any business focusing locally should have a 2 pronged strategy when it comes to marketing online locally on a search engine. The first focus should be on organic rankings on Google for terms which have a geo-local modifier. A geo-local modifier is a location name that is used in conjunction with a keyword to show local results. We all do it all the time. I am in Columbus as I am writing this article and to search for a music teacher in Columbus, I may add Columbus to terms like “music lessons”, personal music lessons” or “music teachers”. This would narrow the results locally and websites that are locally owned or operated or national businesses which have a local brand may show up.

How to Get High Rankings in Google for Keywords with Geographical Modifier?

It is the same as SEO and if you are still not sure what SEO means, you may have to do some learning before you can apply these local SEO techniques:

• Ensure the usage of hCard for address and phone number wrapper DIVs.

• Mention your address on the footer of every page along with the phone number.

• Have your business location map and driving directions integrated on your contact page using Google Maps

• Use the location modifier in your title, meta description and throughout the body copy, without making it look artificial.

• Build local links. These can be websites about your city and state, local newspapers, chamber of commerce, list pages, local directories etc.

• Promote your site on local websites for getting links and visibility.

How to Get a Better Ranking through Google Places?

Register on Google Places or claim your listing on it. Google Places is your new online address and claiming it means that you are telling everyone on the Internet where you do business from. Once your business is claimed online, there are several tools, tips and tricks that can be deployed as the parts of an effective local Internet Marketing strategy. Right from small things like updating your information and making sure that it stays at 100% completion to building citations and generating reviews (positive ones) for your business, there is a whole lot that can mean 10x exposure.

Google displays the Google 7 pack results when it sees preposition like “in” in the query. This happens with words like “near” too. To a customer, the 7 pack result is like an instant search from yellow pages directly, even better yet. It has a map of the business, the driving directions and a phone number that stands out. The customer is so compelled to click on this very relevant and very prominent result that even a high presence in organic rankings is going to be missed completely.

Ranking well for the terms that contain a local modifier should be the highest priority for small businesses with a local market. SEO and search engine marketing offer a wide opportunity for everyone to tap into and the one who moves early will definitely enjoy the advantage.