Search Engine Optimization » web design

Study Finds Ecommerce Experts Believe SEO is Crucial

admin — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:02:53 +0000

Using effective SEO practices on your ecommerce business website can ensure a steady, reliable flow of targeted traffic that should give you a good conversion rate and a healthy bottom line, and according to a recent survey from the online trade publication Practical eCommerce, search engine optimization has become a top priority for digital marketing professionals.

The Magazine conducted the study in April 2010 and concluded 95 percent of respondents said SEO was important to their business, with 3.1 percent said they didn’t know, and only 1 respondent replied that it was not important. The survey found that 82.8 percent of respondents indicated their website is search engine optimized, while 11 percent said it wasn’t and 6.3 percent professed they did not know. In addition, the survey found that 40.6 percent of respondents “completely” understand SEO, while 54.7 percent understand it “somewhat” and 4.7 percent said they don’t understand it at all.

This news comes after a recent survey conducted by Genius found that many B2B organizations are missing out on opportunities to use SEO. Of the respondents, 32 percent of B2B companies didn’t use SEO tools, reported Genius. Similarly, many didn’t use social platforms, like blog software or social media, either.

A report recently released by Conductor reported that among the top 500 ecommerce companies based in the United States, the average grade it awarded for their use of SEO was a D. While most seem to understand its importance, many organizations have not implemented it as well as they could to enjoy optimum benefits. Without SEO, eCommerce organizations will struggle to draw both impulse online shoppers and those who use search engines to find the best prices for planned online purchases.

When it comes to search engine marketing, it seems natural search has emerged as the most effective. A recent study from Internet Retailer found that 51 percent of retail marketers said a quarter or more of their website traffic comes from natural search, compared to 28 percent who said so for paid search.

Web Usability and Conversion Pt. 2

Greg — Sat, 16 May 2009 03:58:17 +0000

A simple but often overlooked design requirement is to make sure there is a ‘call to action’ on your web pages. One of the website optimizer tests you should always run is to determine the best text, graphic and placement of your call to actions.

A few hints for your initial testing: Use clear short concise statements. use colors of high contrast that stand out on the page. Place the call above the fold so that every visitor sees it (not all visitors scroll down on each page). There is no right answer for every website. We seen significant differences between what works on different sites. It depends a lot of the nature of the site, how it is typically navigated and I believe it also has a lot to do with the demographic of your visitors and their predominant preferences. Text links can work surprisingly well, you don’t have to always create elaborate graphics. For some sites, we’ve had the most success with a very clean site with minimal graphics and text links. For other sites where the customer expects graphics, text links don’t work near as well.

As with everything on websites, testing is everything.

Is a website still a capital expense?

Greg — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:19:05 +0000

During our annual budgeting process, we were discussing funding of the replacement website for thenetimpact.com that we planned to do this year. In years past, the complete development would be a capitalized expense (i.e. expected to have a lifetime greater than 1 year) which would be depreciated over it’s lifetime which historically has been from 2 to 5 years. This year we will be building our site in our newly developed content management system myimpactCMS rather than as a static site as in years past.
It is clear that the cost of the content management system product itself should be capitalized since it will last a long while. However, I no longer believe that the cost of the content development should be part of the capital expense and rather should be treated as an ordinary operating expense no different than writing a blog post or running a pay per click campaign. With CMS tools enabling the rapid deployment and modification of web content and the highly competitive nature of business on the web, it no longer makes sense to develop a static site that simply sits there for a couple of years and then gets replaced again. The constant updating of your web content should be built into your operating budgets and not treated as a occasional one time expenditure.