The increasing role the web is playing in retail sales

The BBC yesterday reported the buoyant online sales by Next in stark contrast to poor performance by its high street stores.  John Lewis has also experienced an increase in its online sales which now account for over £600m + p/a.

These stories just highlight the increasing importance of developing the web as a profitable sales channel for retailers. The increasing trend across a panel of retailers is for the ecommerce channel to increasingly support existing retailer operations, and this trend does not appear to be abating. All macro & micro economic factors indicate an increasing trend towards a greater % of time spent online by consumers, plus improved usability of websites and deeper penetration into older demographic groups as further indication of growth in online sales as a % of all sales channels.

Central to driving online sales is the visibility of your business in the main search engines; and how deeply contents dominates the search engine results pages through natural search, paid search, and shopping results primarily.

With increasing search engine competition and tougher price competition just to achieve the same order volume; now is the time to start dialling up the visibility and ensure that your search channels and budgets are most focused on search strategies that deliver maximum value.

To find out how Seek4Commerce work with our partners to drive improved revenue and profit performance from search engine marketing contact us.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

Quick Christmas tips for eCommerce retailers

With the critical run up to Christmas in the next few weeks it is important to try and stay ahead of the competition and make the most of each and every visitor. Seek4Commerce have outlined a couple of quick tips and  small points that could help you in the final run up to Christmas and over the new year promotions sales.

Some quick tips for ecommerce retailers below.

1)    Home page: Put your top sellers or high sales forecast products on the home page

2)    Resolve negative user feedback: Ensure that you have a resource dedicated to respond to negative reviews on the key market places that your website is posted. Review negative feedbacks and try and resolve the issue with customers, with the aim of them removing the feedback. Negative feedback can affect your websites positions in the SERP’s in Google products, and other market places. Everything counts, and sales %’s are affected by the small details.

3)    PPC optimization: Keep an eye on adword bid prices as the level of competition increases and bid prices increases. There is always a point at which it is no longer profitable to bid. Understand your product gross profit margins and maximum value per click to ensure that campaigns and/or product ad groups remain profitable.

4)    Keyword position movement: Keep an eye on movements in search engine keywords phrase movements in the SERP’s in the run up to Christmas. Ensure that your top keywords positions are not lost in critical weeks in the run up to Christmas. Where negative changes are spotted ask your agency to take measures to remedy.

5)    Traffic funnels: Keep an eye on traffic funnels and conversion rates with changes to promotions, policies and prices in the run up to Christmas. Also, review last years statistics and/or lessons learned logs (if they exist) from marketing to ensure you do not suffer from sales or opportunity loss.

Just a couple of points for you to consider in the run up to Christmas. Never forget that sales targets must be accompanied with profit targets, sometimes in the heat of the moment retailers often forget that increases in campaign spend may result in a diminishing rate of return over a certain level.

Please let us know your thoughts.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

10 new Google algorithm changes discussed by Google

Read the Search engine watch article by Rob Young about the recent algorithm changes to search engine results pages to titles, descriptions, date specific searches etc…

The big change that has been reported is the freshness of content relative to search phrase being searched upon. The fresher the content the better; but clearly this does not apply to all search terms but increasingly so to others. For example, sports news results will see older content decay faster as the newer content becomes more relevant. Relevancy of content is something that Seek4Commerce have discussed in the past; and to keep your website and its content pushing higher in the search engine results pages it is important to keep adding new and useful/relevant content for you target audience.

No matter what Google Algorithm changes Google implement it important to remember that Google makes its money by delivering to users the most relevant search results. If you focus on developing, fresh, insightful and useful (and SEO optimized) copy for your websites users then Google algorithm changes will not impact your website too much.

The quoted article states that up to 35% of search results will be affected by the Google algorithm changes. With the new changes being published and Google displaying a greater transparency to ranking factors website operations managers should take notice and make sure that their websites are aligning their websites to best practice to ensure they get the most from their SEO work.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

Online sales climb again year on year in September to £5.5bn

Retail week recently reported that year to date sales online climbed at a continuing staggering rate of 15%. This clearly illustrates the ever increasing importance of search engine marketing to retail clients overall success online, with increasing competition and more advanced strategies being employed the base of work required to rank is getting higher.

Online companies must understand that generating more qualified and sustainable traffic than their competitors is the key differentiator online. The first step in any successful campaign or business development project online is to increase the volume and scope of the traffic, the next step is to ensure that your business handles that traffic more effectively than your competitors to make your business viable long term.

A better than sector average conversion rate for your business, or even better, a conversion rate better than the top sites in your sector means that your marketing budgets and new customer acquisition activities will go even further having a direct effect on top line revenues.

If you would like to understand how an enterprise level approach to keyword research and search engine marketing, or SEO services can help your business generate more traffic in the short, medium and long term than contact us for an initial chat.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

Why is website authority important for SEO?

Today we return to briefly reiterate the importance of trust and authority of a website for it to consistently rank highly in the search engine results pages.

What do Google want?

They want their surfers to be presented with high quality, fresh, relevant content created by authors who are experts in their field. This improves the quality of their results listings for user queries and keep people using their search engine and clicking on their paid ad’s too.

So we again reiterate to our readers the importance of having a high quality and authoritative websites, that provide unique and relevant material to its users.

At Seek4Commerce, we always ensure that we align any SEO work with best practice white hat techniques, Google web master rules and leading Google patents available that indicate the importance of the key ranking factors used.

Is your website an authority in its field?

If you are a retailer and you sell fragrances for example. Create the best page that exists on the internet for that fragrance, this will clearly give you a much better chance of ranking higher than all the other dross out on the internet for those product keywords, if your website is also configured for on-page SEO with good keyword research and SEO friendly copy, you again step up the ladder.

The important thing to make sure that through copy production process you always aim to create authoritative and high quality web pages. If you cant do this for every product then select your campaigns carefully and dedicate more time and resource to those.

Also, remember that site age and its history also play a role in its search engine positions. Do not expect to be able to rank highly for competitive keywords if you launched your website two weeks ago.

If you would like to discuss how we can help craft a winning SEO strategy for your business then please contact us.

This article was produced by: Christian  –  SEO Expert,

Account Manager at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

The impact of SEO for user generated content

Today we briefly review the benefits of having SEO friendly user generated content in the form of product reviews on websites.

Earlier, this year Bazaazvoice released its smart SEO technology that made user generated content from the leading retail websites more SEO friendly.

In effect what the technology is doing is using user product reviews, and displaying them as static text and generating keywords on the fly from the user copy. This has the effect of increasing the keyword profile of the product page, and allows that page to penetrate further in the search engine results pages (SERP’s) for long tail keyword results. The process is not too far removed from a word press site that creates automatic keyword tags from blog posts.

Who would benefit from using this type of social & SEO technology? Below a few benefits and reasons why it could be helpful.

• Increase the website traffic from long tail keyword phrases, used by the websites own users becoming more relevant.
• Higher click through rates on results lists in the search engine results pages
• Higher conversion rates because users increase their
• Websites that have a large traffic base and high retention rate.
• Businesses that have a loyal user base of regularly returning users such as the BIG retailers. Tesco, Marks & Spencer’s etc.
• The insight generated from the analytics could also be used when expanding the scope of the SEO strategy, and even help retail buyers with product sourcing insight. The additional benefit being that merchandisers can use the search data to better formulate a better crafted product portfolio for its users.
• Site that already have a high SEO domain authority in Google et al will automatically benefit by having its long tail keywords benefit from that authority and rank higher.
• Frequently updated user reviews linked to product pages will also keep the relevance of those product pages higher in the search engines view and they will naturally rank higher than competing pages, one reason among many, why Amazon’s product pages are almost always at the top of the search engines for product terms.

The drawback

• It is mainly suitable for large to mid market retailers who can justify the fee for the technology from the expected traffic uplift from new business; where a quarter of a percent can make or break an online strategy.
• There are possible alternatives for smaller websites to increase long tail keyword penetration and page relevance. Please call us if you would like to discuss.

Get your product SEO strategy right!

Getting your product SEO strategy right for your business is central for survival online and continued growth. In this increasing competitive market search any tactic or combination of tactics that allow you to improve your KPI performance can have a transformational effect.

Please contact us to find out how Seek4Commerce can help you craft a killer long tail SEO strategy.

This article was produced by: Christian P –  SEO Expert,

Account Manager at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

Retailers – key SEO considerations for selecting an ecommerce platform

When implementing a new ecommerce platform it is vitally important understand the systems technical and SEO constraints as these can affect the business benefits case. We always recommend clients include their internal  SEO team or an external SEO agency in the platform selection process to make sure that the correct decision is made from the outset.

The importance of Ecommerce platform selection for SEO

With the e-Commerce channel being only growth areas for many retailers in these tough times; Getting the decision wrong can mean a much higher SEO total cost of ownership for your ecommerce project, including SEO management work. That is not too mention that SEO constraints of ecommerce platform can directly affect top line sales  revenues affecting not just online revenues but even business feasibility in the long run in the most critical cases.

Below our quick tips for ecommerce platform selection.

SEO Quick check list

• URL taxonomy: The ability of the ecommerce platform to create user and search engine friendly URL’s out of the box.
• Unique page titles: The ability to create unique titles, descriptions and content on a page by page level.
• Unique Meta data: The ability to amend meta data on page by page basis in the console of the platform, allowing non-technical personnel to manage meta data.
• Page load speed: Does the platform have the ability to set page caching options.
• Redirects: Does the platform create 301 redirects to new content; give internal users the ability to manage redirects. For large sites the ability to create 301 redirects instead of the 302 redirects is an important for SEO.
• HTML tags: Does the platform give you the ability to create unique H1 tags in the system, without adversely affecting the ecommerce content or architecture of the website.
• The flexibility of the optimization suites of the ecommerce platform; what comes as part of the standard implementation and the what components need to be added to the package to give your web operations the flexibility to make your website as discoverable as possible.
• Multi-language platforms: The flexibility to set up, structure, and manage multi-language content & URL strategy. This can have a big impact of you are running one website for numerous territories for how that discoverable that website is locally via search engines. See our international SEO service.

Other key considerations involve around

• SEO website migration
• Systems integration impacts on reporting
• What comes as standard, and what plug ins and components are available
• Can you add third party plug ins into the platform to mitigate any technical SEO short comings

The ecommerce platform selection process is a huge step and should be approached in a rigorous and methodical manner. Its ramifications go way beyond SEO, but SEO is a key commercial consideration for any retailer that affects the business justification.

Seek4Commerce, through our expert retail and SEO knowledge will be able to guide you into ensuring you take into consideration all the main SEO factors when selecting an ecommerce platform.

Contact us to find out how we have helped retailers with their ecommerce platform selection process on 0844 870 9806.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

Maximize sales earlier by including SEO in your product launches

Include SEO in your product content approval process

Not having an on-page SEO stage as part of your new product content workflow results in a lot of missed SEO sales opportunities from poor planning.

Long tail SEO is imperative for retail businesses trying to survive and even increase sales from online channels. It is amazing how many retail websites have not effectively optimized product content before approving and posting it on their websites. Sometimes entire supplier/brand product portfolio’s are posted un optimized compounding the problem even further.

Below a set of quick SEO tips to help your content approval process

• Educate product managers / buyers of the value of SEO
• Ensure that SEO is in the content production process
• Develop a checklist to include all the key SEO information on a product level
• Have an SEO sign off process
• Quality control products for SEO after approval & posting online

SEO Training

If you want to discuss how we train internal teams to include SEO as part of their product content development process, to drive the SEO benefits from the outset then contact us for more information on 0844 870 9806

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company

Refine internal site search to drive an increase in sales

Onsite search can increase average order values & improve SEO results

Improving internal search results through refinement & testing to increase average order values, and increase SEO traffic from deeper keyword penetration should be a key low cost tactic employed by business’s that have an ecommerce presence.

Maximising the value from internal search is a vital tenet in realizing the additional sales value wrapped up in internal search engines.

Refinement & improvement of search results can be made in following areas;

• Product categorisation of products
• Product attributes / descriptions
• Internal keyword search analytics
• New content generations
• Modifying search engine settings / parameters
• Creating sample data sets tested & compared between test and live environments
• Activating SEO friendly settings for on-site search

The process of ongoing refinement and improvement will lead to more relevant and improved search listings presented to your websites users. In commercial terms that should lead to increase in traffic from SEO, and an increase in average order values as users more easily find products on your ecommerce website.

Contact us on 0844 870 9806 to find out more.

This article was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

How to expand online retail sales in a slow growing sector

The BBC today reported a weak growth in the retail sector. However, being optimistic at heart we always believe that opportunities for sales growth exist even in a declining or slower growing retail market. Many of the online retailers we speak with or analyze often are leaving money on the table by not implementing a few simple low cost changes that could be transformational in the results obtained from their ecommerce retail web stores.

Understanding the key success factors in setting up and operating a web store; we can an rifle in most important KPI’s. Understanding what to look for, where to look and how to uncover sales opportunities is vital in extracting as many pounds from your website as possible. Below are 3 areas you could look into which cost very little or nothing at all.

1.     Good quality and regular keyword research and analysis can allow retailers to quickly identify quick win SEO keyword sales opportunities at low cost, and which have a fast time to impact.

2.     Understanding how to extract the benefits from long tail search to drive product sales growth. Optimizing underlying product data to drive visibility in third party portals such as Google product search results.

3.     Improving conversion rate; even by a fraction of a percentage point for a larger site can lead a major profit contribution from a minor change or piece of work.

Taking an enterprise approach to website and search marketing, that is focused on maximising the value from the website sales growth KPI’s can lead transformational sales growth.

To find out how we can help please contact us on 0844 870 9806

This post was produced by: Steve Bernard – Ecommerce SEO Expert,

Director at Seek4Commerce, a leading London SEO Company.

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