We recently had the pleasure of working on a seasonal site, in a hectic business! What a fast pace, and then after their peak season, BOOM all traffic falls off, I am still recovering from the mental anguish and long nights but it was a BLAST, now that I can dust myself off a bit, I’d like to share some things that I learned after an automated SEO tool was installed.

What was interesting is that for this client they had an automated SEO tool installed after we did regular SEO to the main e-commerce site with tens of thousands of pages. So I got to see just how these tools perform head to head.

For those of you who are going up against a competitor with an automated SEO tool here’s how to kick that things’ ass, we did it, and will share with you too:

1 – INVEST in re-developing your site to be SEO friendly, any good SEO company will be able to help here. Some basic things to consider in the re-programming of your e-commerce site from an SEO perspective:

The SEO company working on your e-commerce site needs to understand how to find the fine line between what terms need REAL day to day love and which ones can be done with the right template. This is done by evaluating the competitiveness of individual terms (short and long tail) to understand which can be hit with template-based, scalable SEO best practices. Developing the right site hierarchy is critical here!

Leave space for copy in your templates.

Give yourself control over page titles, meta descriptions, and section headers, so you can overwrite automated copy here if you need to because of competitiveness.

Create search engine friendly URLs (use Mod re-write or ASAPI).

BEWARE: This is the hardest part, I have seen re-developments run in the low 6 figures for highly customized old carts. If you can NOT do this, then call up an automated SEO company to help, but expect that your competitors will eventually make these investments and will likely beat your tail (and I do mean the long tail).

Do not fall for the “do you want to change you programming to keep up with the algorithms” sales pitch. Any good SEO company, with experience in e-commerce SEO, will help you develop a search engine friendly architecture that should stand the test of time.

If you have the resources to re-develop your site, or if it is already SEO friendly according to the few basic requirements above proceed to step 2.

(more…)

Internet retailer recently profiled an amazing tool built by Home Depot to help even the most novice outdoor chef pick the right grill. While I hate the web 2.0 label, this tool is what the web should be about in web 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0…the development of tools that helps to make information retrieval easier. Take a look below…looks easy enough right?

It is helpful (which is somehow web 2.0 now) in assisting people in narrowing down or honing in on the right grill for their needs. It uses a very nice interface to make the process smooth and easy! It combines product information, videos, and more in a very digestible and tastefully done way. See our thoughts on the Nike golf ball selector, who has a similar tool, that at the time was tough to find. Looks like it was a success, not to mention Home Depot has some serious numbers to show the REAL value of this tool. In the article it states:

(more…)

You know what I can’t stand!?!? Companies that have online reservation forms that don’t work. The whole point of filling out an online reservation form for a service is that I don’t want to have to follow up with you! I want you to contact me regarding my reservation. I don’t want to have to wonder whether you received my reservation submission, and I certainly don’t want to have to come back to the site and look up the phone number and CALL to make a reservation. If I wanted to do that, I would have done that in the first place.

Oh, and don’t tell me you didn’t receive the reservation form – like I don’t know how to operate a five-field form and press the submit button with my left click button. Let’s just come clean and admit that your form is broken.

But… I guess that’s what I get for submitting an online reservation for a service to a website that doesn’t even rank well for its own brand name. I had to get to the website by clicking on the 4^th result, which was a Citysearch page, and then clicking on the website link. Oy vey!

The site I had issues with today – and other reservation sites out there – can take some notes from my favorite reservation system out there: OpenTable. I can select restaurants by region & neighborhood and then by date, time and party size. I can find out what reservation times are available in 15 minute increments, and I get immediate email confirmations of my reservations. I also receive email reminders before my dining date. Additionally, I get reward points for booking reservations online and dining at the restaurant. My personal favorite – the OpenTable representatives are accessible and helpful. When I had a question about a restaurant’s participation in a special event after I had made the reservation, the OpenTable representative took care of contacting the restaurant (by phone), getting an answer, and emailing me back promptly.

The moral of the story: if you’re going to have an online reservation form, be ready for fulfillment. Potential customers may not follow up with a phone call when they don’t hear from you. In a competitive space, they might just go to the next result down.

Let me start by saying I’m a member of Performance Bikes‘ newsletter. I get an email from them on average every two business days. What a perfect example of how marketing can be overdone. With this frequency, readers will get sick of nonsense emails and eventually unsubscribe. In an attempt to get their specials in front of as many eyes as possible they generate less interest to a certain degree.

After determining my want for goods was greater than my frustration with their marketing, I bought some things. However, while checking out a few more things raised my left eyebrow.

I was near the end of the checkout process when I left to change the color of a product. It was disappointing to find it was my duty to reenter all checkout information again. No one likes doing this. This would be the first thing that I would fix.

Next I noticed the most predominant number labeled total on the next-to-last checkout page was incorrect (as far as I see it)! This total didn’t have the coupon applied. To find out what you’re actually being charged, you’d need to know enough to subtract the grand total from the discounts listed below in a different colored & aligned area. How many support calls does this generate, or even worse, how many customers leave silently at this point?

Performance bike seems to always have a promotion; they offer free shipping or a percentage discount on all items. Personally it’s a little strange. I’m either used to better prices all the time, think Trader Joe’s, or sales on a few select items every week, think Whole Foods. Having discounts at all times that claim to be “limited time” reminds me of the boy who cried wolf. I feel less incentive to buy today knowing their “soon to run out sale” will be back again in two.

I don’t doubt that Performance Bike does tons of business online, they claim to be the #1 retailer of bikes. I only think that they can do much better if they were to straighten some of these issues out.

On a side note, I was going to link “Trader Joe’s” above to a page of theirs that had something about Philadelphia on it, but I defaulted to a home page link. They decided to hide their location listings in a PDF.