Morgret Designs

First speaker: Rob Snell.

Rob spoke about his experiences running several sites using Yahoo Stores, and used several examples from his brother’s Yahoo Store that sells things for hunting dogs.

When starting to optimize your site, look at what customers have already said. Look through the sent emails, harvest the email addresses, and look at the content of the help messages (and phone calls if you’re in a state like Louisiana that lets you record calls). Take those points that confuse people, and turn them in to mini FAQs on your webpage.

Main points for optimizing your ecommerce site.

• Rewrite the manufacturer product descriptions. This helps avoid the duplicate content issue.
• Play 20 questions with each product. What to people want to know about your product.
• Steal competitors’ ideas (both retailers and manufacturers). Look at what works well for them. Don’t need to copy everything, but look to see how they do certain types of things.
• Use content from manufacturers. This is a case where it might be easier to beg forgiveness rather than ask permission. Things you might want to use:
  • Press releases
  • Product sell sheets
  • Owners manuals
  • Catalogs and brochures
  • Try typing up stuff that is only printed and not online. This gives you something unique to offer your customers.

Pay attention to the web pages that matter. When you go to the section and product pages, look at the ones that are giving you the most traffic and revenue, don’t go hit the product pages alphabetically. There can be a 30-fold difference between your best and worst product, spend the time on what matters most.

• Home page
• Information page
• Top five section pages
• Top ten products

Optimization starts at the home page. Optimization for users is a pain, but optimizing for SEO is easy. When optimizing for SEO, you can build templates to help optimize the home page and the product pages.

• Title tag. Include your product name here. This can be optimized. You can give details in the title tag in addition to product name. Ideas include MSRP and your discount price, specific product details (size, color), etc.
• Meta description. This can be automated. Put the product information page here. Put who you are, how long you have been around, phone number here. Think of what you want to show up in the search engine results. Can try to sell just from this snippet.
• Lots of body copy. Make this keyword loaded, with 500+ words. If you want lots of pictures, that’s fine to include, but do make sure that you have the text on that page, even if it is below the fold.
• Show me you are real in all cases. Putting a picture of Rob’s brother with his dogs and guns helped make his site real.
• Build in links for good navigation. Yahoo stores has little navigation built in. Add breadcrumbs. Add previous/up/next product so people don’t have to keep hitting the back button to browse through your products. Make it easy for me to browse your store.

Other important pages:

• The information page is important. More than 50% of the people who order from one of Rob’s sites had viewed the information page. This is the biggest chance to tell people who you are, why people should order from you, etc. Review this page as if you have never seen it before. Make sure the page is searchable, make FAQ-style links.
• Contact page. Show me how I can contact you. Give me all of the information so that I can contact you if something goes wrong. Give information about yourself, make yourself real. Helpful things can include where you are from, especially with something like a map showing where you are and shipping times (UPS has a map generator for this on their site).
• The goal of section/category pages is to get people to the product pages. Tell me what you want me to buy.
• Product listings: start optimizing the pages that have the best offers, most orders. Include manufacturer logos and images.

Cash in on your converting keywords.

• Collect the converting keywords.
• Optimize the store product and section page text and links. Make sure that the words people are searching for actually appear on your pages. Many retailers do not actually do this.
• Track the search engine rankings for these keywords.
• Advertise. Buy paid search ads. No one is optimizing for strange, unique keywords (especially one-word keywords) that convert well.
• Rinse. Repeat. Don’t do once then just ignore.

Yahoo small business gave a brief presentation.

People think that conversion is the Holy Grail. Forget about conversion. First, look at your own store and see what people on your site are doing. In-store search delivers much more revenue but roughly the same number of visits as the top shopping engines combined.

Revenue also isn’t everything, especially total revenue. Look at the highest revenue per visit and average order size in addition to conversion. What drives revenue is average order size. Search does deliver lots of revenue, but not as much revenue per visit or as large of an order size. Your money may be better spent as shopping comparison engines.

A note that the major search engines are almost identical in terms of activeness metrics.

Interlude while computer was being fixed.

There was a discussion about the best way to create a call to action. An “add to cart” button works better than “buy now” when there are multiple items that are being sold. If a person will just buy one item, then use “buy now” and don’t stand in their way of buying that one item. Size matters. Make the button text larger, and even larger. Back off font size when sales start to drop. If you can, do A/B testing to see which works better for your site.

Some sites convert much better when there is a hacker-safe icon or other icon to help people feel comfortable buying online.

Part II will include the website reviews.