There’s lots to do when it comes to running an online shop

A few small things can make all the difference and there are common mistakes owners of online shops make, which can even send visitors away! Here are 4 things to make sure you’re not doing on your website:

1. Complicated Navigation

Having pages too many clicks away from the home page can put visitors off from finding what they want. Making people click too many times is not only bad for usability, but can put the search engines off too! Try to make sure your products are no more than 3 clicks away from the home page to maximise visitor satisfaction and ensure efficient indexing by the search engines. Additionally ensure your products are categorised sensibly – the number of times I’ve clicked through to what I thought was a sensible category for a product on a website only to find it’s been put elsewhere! Also, if you have a site search facility make sure it works and brings back results from products relevant to the search (you’d be surprised how many site searches don’t work properly).

If you’re unsure about these things, get a few friends or contacts to complete a short usability test and give you feedback.

2. Delivery/Returns Info Buried Away

Some of the first things I look for when making a buying decision are delivery costs, returns policy, and how to contact the company if anything goes wrong. This makes me trust the business more so I’m more likely to place an order with them. But if this information is buried and hard to find, then it won’t inspire me to buy, and I imagine it’s the same for other people. The worst thing you can have on your site is only a contact form and/or mobile phone number. I like to see a physical address, email address and telephone number (landline) that’s easy to find on the site with all the information I need about buying a product from the company. Review your delivery and customer service pages to make sure you look like an honest, trustworthy business – not a fly by night site trying to make a quick buck! This leads us nicely onto customer service.

3. Shoddy Customer Service

Tip top customer service will ensure your customers stay happy and keep coming back, and this is an absolute must for any business, not just online shops. As mentioned above, your customer care information must be prominent on your site, but there are other ways you can keep your customers happy too. Twitter works well for businesses and they can respond to questions quickly and be seen to be doing so, which is really important. A blog can also act as a way of interacting with your customers and minimising anything that goes wrong – put up your hand and admit any mistakes you make rather than trying to hide them. We’re all human and as long as you keep customers informed, there’s no reason why they should go elsewhere. Above all though, don’t promise what you can’t deliver!

4. Shopping Cart Problems

Is your shopping cart making visitors jump through hoops to buy? This is another major sticking point for online shops, so if you’ve not reviewed your shopping cart process in a while, then it’s worth doing so. You should be able to find out your shopping trolley abandonment rate and make sure it’s not too high. You could also send a polite email to shoppers who didn’t complete transactions and ask them why. Whatever you do, ensure you don’t lose valuable sales during the final part of the process!

These are all mistakes that can be fixed but are still common across the web. In these uncertain times, fixing these issues can make all the difference between you retaining customers and keeping them happy, or losing them to your competitors!

Last week saw another major change in Google search

In my opinion, this recent move seems to be a double edged sword, which I’ll explain.

Until now, we’ve not set up a Google Places page, so to show you how easy it is to set one up, I recorded a short video when setting up our Savvy Marketers Places page.

Have you set up a Google Places page? Does it bring visitors and customers to your business website or premises?

Website showing lots of ads before any useful content

Many businesses take ads on their site as a way of generating revenue, so does this mean that businesses who do this are going to lose their rankings?

Not necessarily! It all depends on how the site is set up and on the content that goes alongside the ads. Google’s aim is to filter out low quality sites with little useful content for visitors. The type of sites which will be affected by this update are generally those which have been set up with the sole purpose of having lots of ads to maximise revenue from them. Essentially, sites which are full of ads with little or no content along side them. There are plenty of websites around like this and I’m sure you’ve come across them while surfing the net.

If you’ve created a site where you regularly create useful content, but carry ads alongside this content, then you shouldn’t need to worry as long as the content takes priority over the ads. So, for example, having a blog with ads in the sidebar, or perhaps between posts as well, shouldn’t lead to any loss of rankings.

If you’re not sure whether or not your site will get hit in these updates, then take a good look through it from a visitor’s perspective. Will visitors have to sift through the ads to find the content when they arrive on your site? If so, you need to make changes to make sure the content takes priority.

Do you take ads on your site? Are you generating much revenue from them? Please share your experiences with us in the comments! 

Small online retailers need as much help as they can get at the moment

1. No 404 Error Page
I come across websites that don’t have a 404 error page, time and time again. A 404 page will retain a visitor on your website even if they click on a broken link or arrive via an old web page. Since e-commerce sites are generally dynamic and products change regularly, old stock gets removed with new stock added. However those pages of old products can remain in a search engines’ database for some time. This means they may still get listed in the search results. If a visitor clicks on one of these pages, and there’s no 404 error page, the visitor will go to a browser error page. All they can do from there is click the back button, go back to the search results and click on one of your competitors listings instead!

Ask your webmaster if there’s a 404 page in place, if not, make sure you get one done asap and explain that the product is no longer available with suggestions for new ones, or help navigating to other products. Here are a couple of examples:
M&S – http://www.marksandspencer.com/gp/errors/404
River Cottage – http://www.rivercottage.net/not-found/

An alternative is to redirect old product pages to relevant new product pages via a 301 redirect.

2. Too much choice!
These days we’re faced with more and more choices for the same thing, and I have to say, too much choice generally puts me off from making a decision! If your site is cluttered and you’ve tried to cram too many products on your home page, then you may find you’re inadvertently putting people off from buying. It’s tempting to try and put as much as possible on your home page as you want visitors to see what you’ve got in stock, but going overboard will confuse your visitors! It’s a good idea to feature products rather than cram them on the home page, or change the products on your home page each month. Try different variations and see what works, but keeping it simple really can make all the difference.

3. Delivery/returns info buried away
One of the first things I look for when making a buying a decision is delivery costs, returns policy, where to contact the company if anything goes wrong. This makes me trust the business more so I’m more likely to place an order with them. If this information is buried and hard to find, then it won’t inspire me to buy, and I imagine it’s the same for other people. The worst thing you can have on your site is only a contact form and mobile phone number. I like to see a physical address, email address and telephone number (landline) that’s easy to find on the site with all the information I need about buying a product from the company. Review your delivery and customer service pages to make sure you look like an honest, trustworthy business.

If you’re unsure about any of these things, then ask some friends or contacts to perform a short usability test on your site. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but finding where customers have problems or can’t find items means you can fix your site, keeping shoppers happy. Small businesses may not have Amazon budgets for fancy websites, but can often surpass big retailers with a much better customer service! Checking a few basic things on your site makes sure it doesn’t let you down!

What tips do you have to help small online retailers make it easier for visitors to buy from them? Please share in the comments below.

Guest post from Adrian Bold of Bold Internet

Google announced last week a major change to the way signed-in users, i.e. those logged in with a Google account, will search within Google. The short version is that “many” signed-in users will be redirected to the secure (SSL) version of Google, i.e. https. Google have offered privacy and security concerns as the driver behind this.

One of the consequences from this is that these search queries will no longer be available to those of us who use services such as Google Analytics in order to see what keywords are driving traffic to a site.

As with most things to do with Google, this already appears to have stirred up a hornet’s nest with lots of those involved in the SEO industry appearing to be ‘up in arms’ over this. See this summary in Search Engine Land as an example: Reactions From SEOs Come Loud, Fast and Often Angry to Google’s Switch to Encrypted Search.

For my part, I’d rather wait and see ‘how bad’ the outcome is before tearing Google apart. One aspect that caught my eye in Google’s announcement was the reference to “…default search experience…”. I wouldn’t pretend for one moment that most users will turn off the default but I’d rather keep my powder to dry to see how this develops in practice.

Of course, Google have said that those search queries resulting from a click on a paid ad (AdWords) will still be seen. To me, this seems perfectly fair. If you are paying for advertising in AdWords, you should have complete visibility over where your money is going.

With the rest, I always try to remind myself who the service belongs to and the fact that these services are free to use (Search, Analytics, Webmaster Tools etc.). We are very fortunate that so much data is provided for free. I’m never going to be Google’s biggest fan but I do know whose toys I’m playing with!

Google’s announcement in full: Making search more secure.

Adrian Bold is the owner of Bold Internet Ltd, a Hampshire company providing SEO and PPC services. A Google AdWords Certified Partner offering AdWords campaign management.

When you log into your Webmaster Tools account, go to the dashboard and you’ll see a list of sites which link to yours (under ‘links to your site’). Click on the ‘more’ link and you’ll be taken to further information about your links. This information shows which sites link to you the most, which content is linked to the most and the text of the links pointing to your site. To download your list of links, go to ‘who links the most’ and click on ‘more’. From there you can view a full list of links to your site and you can download the list at the bottom of the page. The images below show this:

webmaster tools dashboard

links overview

website backlinks

Another way of finding out which sites link to your site is to use a tool such as SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. A free account will give you limited information, so it’s not as good as using Google Webmaster Tools, which I would recommend using to track your own backlinks. However, if you want to do some research into which sites link to your competitors websites, then this tool is worth using for this. I previously used to use Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but it is about to be taken down. I’ve therefore had to research other backlink tools to replace the Yahoo tool and SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is the best one I’ve come across.

The screenshot below shows the links it has recorded which point to forty-first.co.uk, but if you want to you can see some of the links to your competitors’s sites by just typing in their domain instead of your own. You won’t get a list of all their links unless you pay, but it can be useful as a guide as to what online marketing they may be doing and help you to research sites which may be worth approaching for a link to your own website. When you get a few moments, have a play around with the tool and see how it could be useful for back link research for your website.

SEOmoz Open Site Explorer

Backlinks play a very important part in how the search engines rank websites, so the more information you have about your own backlinks and your competitors, the better decisions you can make as to how you can improve your link popularity.

If you’ve had some recent success in generating new links to your site, please share how you achieved this in the comments below! 

I’m not going to go into monitoring the technical performance of your site in this post, but look at how you can find out how your site is performing in a search. This is a great tool and if you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, then you need to do so!

When you log into your account, you need to navigate to the option, ‘your site on the web’, then ‘search queries’. This section will show you which search queries your site is ranking for, their average position in the rankings, whether the rankings have improved or decreased in the dates shown (default is last month to date), as well as which pages of your site are ranking for those terms. It also gives you an idea of impressions (when your site was shown in the results) as well as an idea of click throughs. You can see why this is useful.

The image below is a snapshot of this report for my Forty First website. You can see a list of terms the site is being found for in a search, their rough position and impressions (NB I’m no longer actively promoting this site, hence the low rankings!)

Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report

Clicking on each keyword on the left of the report (under ‘query’) will take you to information about the page(s) ranking for that particular keyword. This is very useful if you’re actively promoting your site in the search engines as you can find out which pages are ranking for a particular keyword and work out if some pages need improvement – perhaps you’re expecting certain pages to show up and they’re not. It can also help you to focus your keywords better too, you may find that a page is ranking for a keyword that isn’t very targeted and therefore need to refine the content and/or keywords used on the page.

Scrolling down to the bottom of your search query list allows you to download the data into a spreadsheet and also click through to your Google analytics keyword report where you can see which keywords resulted in traffic to your website.

Other tabs at the top of the report also show top pages performing in the search results (in this case it’s the home page of the site), and you can also filter results to show particular countries, and type of search e.g. web, mobile or image etc.

If you’re looking to make improvements to your website’s overall optimisation in the search engines, this report is a great place to start and more useful than relying on rankings reports or checking rankings manually yourself.

If you’d like to find out more about measuring and tracking the performance of your website, then check out our new Online Marketing Tracking & Measurement Guide.

We never liked the .html at the end of the links and also wanted to get rid of the dates in the links too. The reason we kept the old format when we moved was so we didn’t lose any initial rankings we had, but looking back, it would have been a lot easier to change the permalinks back then as there were far less posts and we might as well have changed everything at the same time (e.g gone the whole hog with moving the site). As an aside, don’t change the urls on your site for the sake of it, only if you have good reason for doing so (although you could argue that perhaps we could have lived with our old permalinks!).

We decided to tackle this once and for all, but there is a right way of going about making these changes to make sure you minimise any loss to rankings in the search engines. It was very laborious, but now the work is done, we’re glad we did it. These are the steps I took in case you decide to do a similar thing with your website. If you have a webmaster, it would be best to ask them to do this for you:

1. Copy and paste the urls (permalinks) of each of your blog posts onto a spreadsheet. We have over 300 posts so this took quite a bit of time.

2. Back up your WordPress database! This is important as you don’t want to lose any work in case things go wrong. We use the WP-DB Backup plugin.

3. Install 301 redirect and broken link plugins. We used the ‘Redirection‘ plugin and the ‘Broken Link Checker‘ plugin.

4. Disable any plugins which link to posts. I disabled a couple of plugins we use called LinkWithin which links to selected posts at the bottom of each blog post and Tweet Old Post, which automatically tweets out old blog posts.

5. Decide which format you would like your posts to take, we went from the format of year/month/post-title.html to category/post-title/. Make this change in the permalinks section under ‘Settings’, making sure you format the links correctly. The correct format of our new permalinks is:
/%category%/%postname%/

6. Record all the new permalinks of each blog post onto the spreadsheet you created earlier. It’s important to put the new urls in a second column against the old urls. This will take as long as it took in the first instance. I don’t know any shortcuts, but let me know if you do!

7. Using your new 301 redirect plugin, redirect each old url to the new url. This is very time consuming, but very important! It has to be done so that you don’t lose any rankings in the search engines and so that any links to posts in the old permalink format redirect to the new urls. Visitors clicking on a link in the old format will be automatically redirected to the blog post in its new format. Once done, do a few random checks to make sure the redirects are working.

8. Back up your site again.

9. Check the broken link checker for broken links and fix them (this doesn’t have to be done specifically for this exercise, but it’s good practice to check your site for broken links and fix them).

Now you can see why I put off doing this for a while! I would advise making any major changes to your site like this to a time when you’re a bit quieter with work. Don’t tackle it when you’re busy or during important trading times, e.g for retailers, during the run up to Christmas in case anything goes wrong and it affects rankings.

Although this is specifically for WordPress sites, you need to follow similar steps for any website if you plan to change the urls for any reason. The most important thing is to make sure the redirects are put into place properly. Your webmaster should be able to advise the best way of tackling it for your website.

Here’s a list of things you should include in your summer clean up which will make sure your site is in tip top working order:

1. Check for broken links on your site, either pages which have been removed on badly coded links. Hopefully you have a Google Webmaster Tools account which will highlight broken links on your site. I also recently wrote a post on why you need to bother with broken links. It’s laborious but worth spending the time fixing them. I also recently found a neat WordPress plugin called ‘Broken Link Checker‘ which tells you of any broken links on your WordPress blog.

2. Check for out of date content, particularly on your site’s home page and main product and service pages. If you have products or services pages on your site which haven’t been updated for a couple of years, now’s a good time to make sure the content is not only still relevant but perhaps could be refreshed to encourage more leads and sales.

3. Check links to external sites still work, and that those sites haven’t shut down or changed to something else. I recently did this exercise for a client and found not only that a number of links were now irrelevant and out of date, sites had shut down and one site had become something entirely different from the site originally linked to and not one my client would want to be associated with! At the same time, check links to your social media profiles all work too.

4. Check your 404 page still works and contains a useful message to visitors if anyone comes across it. I’ve previously written about 404 pages, ‘Are you turning your customers away?‘.

5. Check you have a robots.txt file in place and it isn’t blocking the search engines from indexing relevant content of your website. I wrote about this a while ago but the post is still valid.

6. Do you have a Google Places page and is it up to date? Don’t neglect to complete the page as fully as possible and make use of the update box, which can be updated with news and content each month.

7. Make sure you include sharing buttons on your site so that people can easily share your content with their social networks, to distribute your content and get your business name out more widely. Popular sharing buttons include ‘add this’, ‘share this’ as well as many useful social sharing buttons for blogs such as Twitter retweet buttons, Facebook like buttons, LinkedIn share buttons, Google +1 buttons.

8. Finally, check where links to your own site come from. There are a few tools for this such as Yahoo! Site Explorer (although unfortunately this is going to be shut down later this year), SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO’s site explorer. It’s a good idea to have an idea of where your links currently come from and work on improving your link popularity if necessary.

That’s plenty to get on with for now, and doesn’t include going through your Analytics stats and improving the site based on your findings there. I’ll save that for another post!

Happy summer cleaning!

Image: Clean Up or You’re Out! :Brooklyn Street Sign by emilydickinsonridesabmx, on Flickr