This blog post will focus on SEO factors related to on-page issues with the Shopify Ecommerce platform and some specific strategies that can be used to your advantage if you are on or considering using the platform. It is important to understand that you even if your on-page efforts are done exceptionally well you will still need to generate inbound links to your website in order to have the authority to outrank your competitors. On-page factors are only part of the equation, but are extremely necessary to get the most out of your store.

Parts of this blog post will provide tips that are relevant to any ecommerce store, and other will focus on the Shopify specifically.

Use Shopify’s Built In Features…..USE THEM!

This falls under my cover the basics category. Shopify is actually an incredibly SEO friendly Ecommerce platform out of the box when compared to many other out there, but that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t use the basics. Here will discuss how which to use and how to use them.

Title Tag Editor

Title tags are the most important  on page element on a website when it comes to SEO optimization (experts can elaborate on technicalities of this when combined with all factors, but nobody will disagree its extremely important). The more

Use case:

Most companies simply upload the information in their product excel files or feeds and call it a day. This is a great way to ensure you get minimum traffic. Instead, check analytics or think about how people search in your industry. We have a client that sell car electronics. They used to have their products names by the part number which when most of the people searching for their product didn’t know the part number of the part they were looking for. They would use their vehicle make and model. By rename products to how people were searching for them traffic increased by over 250%. All we changed was the title tags (on 250 products!). It was a lot of work, but nothing compared to what the rewards were.

Tip that good enough to copy without me rewriting for no good reason…

The words used in the title are used by search engines to determine what a web page is about. Here are a few things you need to consider when writing your title tags:

• The closer the most important keywords are to the front of the title, the more helpful they will be for ranking.
• The first keyword spot in a title tag is very important, so if your brand doesn’t have any weight, it may be best to place it at the end. However, if people recognize your brand, having the brand name at the beginning can help with getting you more clicks.
• 70 characters is the maximum number most search engines will display on their search results page.
• Make sure your title tag is actually readable! You don’t want it appearing as a just a bunch of search engine optimized keywords; your search results will just end up looking spammy.

One thing that wasn’t in this info I wanted to point out was that Shopify will turn the title of your page into your Title Tag by default. Pages like category pages that only have 2 words should almost always receiving custom title tags. The example below on a development site shows how to input Title Tags on the new shopify admin platform.

Earn bonus points by filling in a good description of 140 words or less for important products. Your description won’t help rankings, but a strong one will get your more click thru’s than if Google decides to pickup jiberish. 

Optimizing Your Images

In competitive markets you give yourself every advantage your possibly can. Putting the proper text into your alt image attribute can make that difference. It will also provide you with traffic from Google Images. It’s not the best converting traffic, but it is free regardless. Click the alt tab next to your images to an alt image attribute. An easy way to do this for a lot of product

Warnings for SEO and Shopify.

If you are using a custom design for your shopify store make sure the programmer keeps these features. It is common for coders to skip adding these elements back in to save time. The result is a shopping cart theme that reduces the effectiveness of your website. You will know if this is happening to you if you add info into these fields and do not see the changes on your live website. 

Broken Links & Redirects (especially important if you are migrating to Shopify)

Shopify has a built in redirect tool to make sure your site gets all the juicy authority it should be getting. It is very common for developers and designers to sever links to old pages without ever redirecting them to their new homes. This is also common when page urls are changed. Old pages that no longer serve a purpose but could potentially have links pointing to them should be redirected to a new helpful page on your site. We have seen sites that delete pages with thousands of visitor going to them, and they don’t think twice about it. Unfortunately, that means you could also be severing valuable links that are building your authority and ability to rank for competitive keywords. Use the url redirect tool to redirect old links to new pages and save your authority from going to the slaughter house. You can also use this to send authority from old promotional pages to new ones or to important pages on your site.

Example: You have a promotion you did for Christimas 2012. Instead of deleting, redirect it over to your new 2013 page and get a head start on ranking power for this year.

Site Architecture Planning

Most sites simply fail to think about how they will structure their products in the store. With an ecommerce website, the deeper the pages are in the linking structure of the website, the less authority and ranking power they will receive. Shopify has a strong natural link structure with the following layouts.

yoursite.com/collections/collection-name

yoursite.com/products/product-name

Collections, product titles, and tags are your main weapons for adding relevance to your site with proper link architecture. If you own a website where people could potentially use multiple paths to find the information they are looking for your should consider making collections to group similar products together in ways people would naturally search.

Example: You have about a dozen products that would make good wedding anniversary gifts, but that is not their primary focus and you don’t want to name those pages to focus on wedding anniversaries. In Shopify you could create a collection page that puts these products together with information about on various anniversary gifts. The collection page would have an excellent chance of ranking for wedding anniversary gifts as long as your website had enough authority compared to other search results in that niche.

Links are by far the most important factor in how Google calculates authority for a website and its internal pages. The more interlinked a specific page is on your website, the higher its authority will be.

Invest In Better Content

This has nothing to do with Shopify, but everything to do with Ecommerce and SEO. The more indepth the content is on your site for a particular product, the better it will rank SEO wise, and the higher your conversion rate will be. We tell our clients constantly to get as much information about a given product onto the page as they possibly can. Product reviews from client, video’s, specific uses, size, weight, color, etc. The more you can get on a page the better off you are. Many people don’t search for a particular product. They search for solutions to their problems. I recently bought a knee sleeve to help protect my knees while doing squats and olympic lifts during crossfit. I didn’t just search for just knee sleeves. I searched “best knee sleeves for crossfit”. Of course the ones I ended up purchasing weren’t specifically designed for crossfit, but I found information that made me confident they would fit my specific needs for the product so I bought them.

Better content isn’t just detailed descriptions. It’s Q&A’s links to articles to give people more information on a particular topic, video demo’s of the product so they can see it in action, reviews from other customers is also extremely valuable. Consider offering a discount to anyone who leaves a reviews. They go a long way to setting a store apart from the crowd.

References:

http://www.shopify.com/blog/5299042-improving-shopify-seo-several-new-features#ixzz2TrD2BJcf

As in life, there are many little tips and tricks you pickup along the way that accumulate into a body of knowledge that results in superior performance. 2% here, 3% there, Bobs your uncle, your an expert. One such tip I was delighted to just find was a  helpful little article over at the PPCHero blog about adding the trademark or registered symbols to PPC ads (admittedly something I have been wondering how to do in word for a while now as well. Its a pretty simple process. Good luck. The original article is linked to below. Anytime you can increase social proof or credibility it is a good idea to do so. Human beings are used to these symbols and they can definitely improve the legitimacy of a companies appearance (just make sure you are using them properly). Crash course coming….

To use the ® symbol you need to be registered with  USPTO. The ™ and © symbols are used when laying claim to a mark by simply using that mark. (note: I am not a lawyer so if this is an important point for you a suggest you consult them to get the facts correct)

Registered (®): ALT + 0,1,7,4
Trademark (™): ALT + 0,1,5,3
Copyright (©): ALT + 0,1,6,9

http://www.ppchero.com/use-trademark-and-registered-symbols-in-your-ads-to-increase-click-through-rates/

Time to get snuggly with your PPC friends.

The Google Train is bringing the pain with more (not provided) data into your Analytics. (Not provided) has been causing headaches for all SEO Analysts and Consultants around the world since October 2011. Especially here at InBusiness, Inc. where all of our marketing decisions for ourselves and our clients is based upon data, and sometimes that data is in Analytics.

Sure there are ways to “guess” at how to segment the (not provided) data. But that won’t give you the clarity needed to make sound, data-driven decisions.

Google Chrome 25 SSL Update

So what exactly is happening? Google Chrome 25, which is currently available in the developers release, is getting a face lift as well as expanding the capabilities of their SSL.  Here is the official post by Chromium (Chrome Developer’s blog).

Some of the cosmetic/functionality changes include a new look to the “New Tab” page by adding the Google search bar.

Chrome 25 is also updating how the Omnibar (or omnibox) interacts with Google search. There is no longer a search bar on google.com. You can only use the omnibar to search. The lack of search bar increase the real estate available for the amount of AdWords that can show up above the fold. Hmm, isn’t that interesting.

This is where the SSL magic happens, in the omnibar. Google Chrome 25 expanded the SSL to cover not only the people that are signed in to Google, but also to people that are NOT signed in. Google Chrome 25 is not the only browser that is doing this, Firefox 14 has already pushed this through back in July 2012.

Alternatives?

So now what? How do you deal with this lack of data or plethora of (not provided)? Some people are screaming to jump ship from Google, to completely boycott Google products. Or to use other tracking services like Clicky, Piwik, or Adobe Marketing Cloud (Omniture). These solutions still won’t solve the root of the problem, which is browsers are passing less and less keyword data.

One solution comes close cracking the (not provided), it was the suggestion to find keyword data in Google Webmaster tools. The problem with Webmasters tools is that it just doesn’t provide the detailed information about keywords, like landing page, browser usage, etc. This pretty much makes it unreliable as a decision making tool.

“Paid” Tracking

But fret not, my dear.

There is a knight in shining armor, disguised as a friend we all know, pay-per-click.

All impressions, all clicks, and all conversions are tracked. PPC has already been known to identify high production keywords and messaging. Though its data  currently not used to fuel 100% of the  SEO decisions, it does cross the aisle pretty well.

Granted, PPC will not track it all, unless you want to spend an exorbitant amount of money by not negativing out keywords, it will get you very close to the data you need to make those keyword decisions.

What Does This Mean To You?

So as business owner what this mean? These upcoming changes means that your SEO company needs to use or start using the data from PPC for keyword clarity. If you don’t have any active PPC campaign, it’s time to think about turning it on. If this still doesn’t sound attractive to you or you think it may be too expensive, PPC is still a good source of leads, so this is not just for data, but for additional revenue. In the end, it should be clear and accurate data that powers business and marketing decisions.

tl;dr Expect increased (not provided) data in Analytics. Only way to recover some of the data is to turn to AdWords. How convenient for Google…

Most of us are aware of and already using basic search engine optimization, SEO strategically on our websites. Depending on your tactics, basic SEO can help drive quality and highly targeted traffic to your website. The best start, of course, is to use keyword phrases that are further along in the buying process.

If someone is searching for the phrase ‘leather handbag’ online, they are still in the research stage and it’s not likely they are ready to buy. However, when an individual types the phrase ‘brown, leather Coach handbag’ in the search box, –now we’re talking.

Regardless of what you’re selling on line, you want to be sure that you are capturing traffic at the proper point of the sales flow. This one tactic, using long tail keyword phrases that are very specific instead of much broader terms, like ‘women’s purse’, will greatly increase quality traffic.

But what if you’re at the top of Google rankings, you’ve got plenty of traffic, but you’re still not seeing the conversions? After all, traffic is only useful if you’re making sales, right? Very few people talk about the next step of the optimization process, –conversion rate optimization.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

If you’ve thought about abandoning basic SEO practices because you’re just not seeing the financial reward, –wait! Your dilemma is more than likely about what happens when traffic arrives on your site. Massive traffic only leads to massive sales if your site has what people are looking for.

Isn’t it enough to just have the product? What else do online shoppers want? I’m glad you asked!

Research proves that potential online clients or customers go through a quick, subconscious assessment process in their mind. The entire procedure takes less than a minute, but it’s crucial that your site makes it past this mental tally sheet. A few red flags or negative reactions and bam, –your potential client just clicked back to Google in search of someone else.

Giving Searchers What They Want

Plain and simple, optimizing your site for conversions is about giving your site visitors exactly what they are looking for. If you can do this, you’ve got a sale.

Is it really that simple?

Yes, it’s really that simple.

Here’s the breakdown of what your visitors are looking for:

Information That’s Easy to Scan – Have you ever landed on a site that looks like one huge garbled block of words? Paragraphs that go on forever, a lack of bold subheadings and bullet point lists makes for unhappy visitors. Your site should be easy to scan, clear in its message, and so user friendly that a third grader can figure it out.

Client / Customer Benefits – Newsflash. Nobody cares about you. Visitors to your site are there to solve their problems and find their answers, period. You may have a flashy site with cool looking graphics but was your site built with the customer in mind, or you? Always start off by informing your visitor what they have to gain if they continue reading. Treat and talk to them as if they are a friend, or family.

Use plenty of ‘you’ focused language throughout your content and be very clear about fulfilling one or more of the following needs:

• Provide information
• Provide a product or service to be purchased
• Provide entertainment
• Provide a sense of belonging or community

Build Trust – Once your visitor is interested, he or she automatically moves on to the next assessment, “Can I trust this person/website?” While they are looking for clues to answer this question, your visitor will subconsciously be scanning your site for certain things. Do you have testimonials? Real contact information with your photo and phone number? Do you use a trustworthy shopping cart or method of payment? Do all your pages have information on them? Everything from a half built website with sparse and sketchy information to a contact page with just an email address can cause your potential clients to bolt.

Easy to Navigate – Do your visitors understand what to do next? Many websites and landing pages fail to convert simply because they don’t come right out and tell the visitor what to do. People like simple. Have a clear chain on your website that leads to the sale. Don’t assume they will simply “find it.” Trust me, they won’t. Talk about the value, tell them what they will gain, and then ask for the sale with a nice big “Buy Now” button.

Accessibility - 40% of users go to a competitor after a poor mobile user experience. If your site is not accessible from smart phones, you may be missing out on a big chunk of the action. Mobile usage continues to grow at an impressive rate, yet many marketers are not keeping up by providing a quality experience for their mobile visitors. You can easily gain a huge advantage just by putting yourself in touch with mobile users. Start by using your analytics to identify exactly what percentage of your visitors are accessing your site through mobile sources. Depending on your industry, it may be a much higher percentage than you’d expect. Digitalbuzz has a great Infographic on mobile market statistics.

Introduction to the Sales Funnel

Have you ever been on a website that seemed to be ultra-streamlined toward the sale? It seemed as though every question you were thinking was answered in the very next sentence or paragraph that you read. It was all so orderly and focused that you thought the site owner must be reading your mind!

It wasn’t an accident.  This website was probably built on the concept of a sales funnel. It’s a very purposeful approach to optimizing for conversions that will keep you on track as you’re creating your user experience.

There are plenty of examples of sales funnels online, but here’s one from WebSEO that we particularly like.

Traffic conversion is definitely a skill, but with a little bit of direction along with knowledge of the common mental obstacles you’ll be prepared to overcome each one.

Bounce: Bounce rate occurs when someone clicks onto your site, takes a quick look at your home page and says, “Oops, my mistake” then clicks away. You can stop bounce two ways: qualify your traffic by using the right keyword phrases. The second way to lower bounce rate is by having a clearly laid out website. If it’s too cluttered or too confusing, you may be driving potential clients away.

Motivate Your Visitors: Browsers who come up against ho-hum content will be easily distracted and likely not to make it to deeper into your site. Motivate your visitors with your passion. If you love what you do, offer real value, and are excited about it, –this will shine through. People aren’t motivated by mediocre. Always strive for excellence.

Track, Track, Track: You can lower the occurrence of both early and late waverers by tracking what works best with your particular traffic. Data should always drive your decisions.

Landing pages and websites need analysis:

1. Is qualified traffic reaching your site?
2. Is there a certain page of your website that a large percentage of your traffic exits from without purchasing?

Be sure all touch points that users pass through during the conversion chain can be tracked and measured for effectiveness. If some point of your site is not working, change it and track again. Tweaking and retweaking is a part of the optimization process.

Remember, you don’t know everything. Focus your efforts on learning what works, learning your audience and continue to test and analyze web pages, campaigns, and landing pages.

The Challenge

CanadaPassportHelp.ca offers passport assistance services to Canadian citizens in the United States. Sales from paid advertising using online channels had declined over the last 12 months and the CEO believed that more could be done to improve sales volume, and the variable cost of obtaining new customers. The CanadaPassportHelp.ca team expressed concerns on quality of the ad copy being used in their campaigns under management of Reach Local. They also expressed concerns of how effective the automated bidding methodology used by the Reach Local advertising system was for their unique business. Additionally, they had concerns on the lack of actionable data they received from Reach Local. As a result, they entered the marketplace to find replacement services and a more complete solution to generating revenue through paid advertising.

Analysis

Because of the lack of actionable data involved, benchmarks for lead cost had to first be defined before a recommendation of improvements could be made. There was no existing Adwords or Pay Per Click (PPC) account with conversion data (Reach Local does not provide this).

A goal analysis was completed to determine what company objectives were most important. Several strategy alternatives were identified that could be implemented with CanadaPassportHelp.ca depending on what the goals of the company were.

• Focus on volume and growth (lower initial profit margin or possible loss for the sake of expansion)
• Focus on ROI by lowering the cost per conversion (high return on investment, but could potential cause a reduction in volume)
• Combination of increase and volume and reduction in cost where opportunities were presented for quick improvement based on insights of the PPC team.

Additionally, a recommendation for split testing various ad copy and angles was given to increase potential sales volume in high converting marketplaces where 100% saturation had already been obtained. 100% saturation typically occurs in niche markets where the volume of business that could be won, is smaller than the budget capacity of the business attempting to win it. This occurred to CanadaPassportHelp.ca as there are only so many Canadians in the united states looking to renew their passports online at a given time.

The Solution

The team decided to allocate 50% of the budget towards experimentation for finding new markets (growth). The other 50% would be focused in reducing cost per lead for the most promising markets that result in high conversion rates.

David Wolf of InBusiness, Inc. brainstormed with leaders of the company to identify advertising messaging that more clearly stated the value delivered by CanadaPassportHelp.ca services with the goal of reducing unqualified clicks and increasing click thru rates. An advertising plan was implemented to purchase advertising directly from Google Adwords, and Bing Ads. This was done to gain clarity into what advertising was driving new customers and revenue, and introduce the ability to improve campaigns manually based on the information gathered from direct access to data and analytics (something that was previously missing). Conversion tracking was also implemented to properly track what keywords and placements were responsible for new sales. A remarketing campaign was also used to convert additional visitors into sales by increasing the number of brand impressions to qualified visitor without a dramatic increase in cost.

The Results

The result was a 210% increase in new business utilizing the same budget as before within 45 day period. A change to the ads used in the marketing campaigns caused a 350% increase in click-thru rates which increased the company’s visibility for its most important keywords. In addition, properly structured campaigns allowed for more granular bidding on placements in both the search and display networks. This enabled the ability to remove non performing ad placements and increase budget allocation to high performing placements. The combination of increased market saturation for converting keywords and placements with a lower cost per conversion resulted in the ability to expand the overall size of the marketing campaigns. CanadaPassportHelp.ca had its most successful month in the history of the company 45 days after switching to PPC Management with InBusiness.

This graph shows the growth in conversions from PPC advertising as the campaign started. The drop of at the end is due to the time settings by week, and the end date of the chart being set to the middle of the week. .

This analytics charts shows the total number of sales on a weekly basis. The red circle indicates when InBusiness, Inc. took control of the account. The dip in sales before the red circle is what prompted the company to take action in finding a new vendor.

Note: Google Analytics data was used in this case study instead of Pay Per Click campaign data because no Adwords account existed prior to setup. This would result in the availability of no benchmark for comparison that would make sense on a graph. Prior to the change in management, CanadaPassportHelp.ca determined its lead cost by simply dividing the total cost of advertising with ReachLocal, by the number of sales generated as a result.

Disclaimer: This guide was created only for dummies. Do the opposite if you’re not a dummy.

DO look at your rankings every day. They sometimes change every day, every hour, every SECOND, therefore you should check them every waking moment. Because if you look at them often enough, you can wish them to the top of the search engine.

DO NOT take ownership of your site. Leave it all to the marketing professionals to write all the content for you. Sure you might know the ins and outs about your business, the pains of your customers, or the right product/service that will help people. But they’re the pros, they will sprinkle magical marketing dust on to your site. BAM! Instant marketing that will attract customers.

DO use arbitrage tactics. Go for the tried and true spam links, spun content, directories, and blog networks. People have found success… briefly. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

DO NOT do any Real Company Sh*t (Stuff). You’re a businessman, you have better things to do. It’s not like Press Releases and real exposure is worth anything… or is it?

DO use Flash based website. Nothing tells Google more about your site than content stuck inside the Flash. Seizure inducing graphics is encouraged.

DO NOT build any relationships. They’re just so taxing in general. What should I wear? What should I say? Does my breath stink? And why bother, you just get your heart smashed to pieces.

DO ignore bad reviews. We all know they’re just trying to destroy your business. Close your eyes, plug ears, hold your breath, and ignore it all.

DO NOT build any value in your industry. No one looks for that stuff anyways. Custom calculators and insightful content just take too much work. It’s just going to get lost in all the tubes that make up the internet. And you don’t want clogged tubes. Been there, done that, not pretty.

Most of all…

DO NOT use the services or advice of any Internet Marketing company. They just sprinkle fairy dust and put pins in voodoo dolls to get results. They don’t know what they’re talking about with their content strategies, infographic distribution, Domain Authority, or reputation marketing. All made up words used to confuse suckers like you. Don’t call InBusiness, Inc. for any real revenue generating consultations. Don’t call 321-281-8353.

Images from http://www.kcparent.com/library/BIRTHDAYBOYCAKE.jpg

{Disclaimer from our head coffee mugger at the office: In case you are a dummy, I wanted to really spell it our for you. Anything in Harrison’s article that says DO….. is something that is not a good idea. Anything that says DO NOT is something you would be wise to incorporate into your SEO efforts}

(Warning: David has made the decision not to proof read his blog posts.  Expect spelling and grammatical errors. we don’t condone this, but it’s better than not blogging at all!)

Companies still don’t understand how email marketing works, and how to best use it. Lets this blog post serve as a quick guide to identifying the most common misconceptions and pitfalls that business need to overcome for a successful email marketing strategy that drives new business and brings old business coming back.

The two types of email marketing – broadcasts and autoresponders

Broadcasts are when you send a message to an entire list or segment. This is the most common way business use email lists. It is typically used to send coupons, monthly newsletters, or “deals of the month”.  Using broadcasts is still better than nothing at all because it keeps your brand top of mind for potential clients and customers, but it is not as powerful as autoresponders.

Autoresponders send a series of predetermined emails at predetermined times to everyone who opt’s in to your email list individually. It is extremely powerful because it can be used to setup a predictable series of engagements after someone takes an initial action used to build value with a client. Value means the ability to sell at a higher price. Most people don’t use autoresponders even close to their true potential because they don’t have the copywriting expertise to get people to open their emails or get them to read the emails and take action.

I know internet marketers that setup autoresponders with over 50 unique emails over the course of months to sell different products and services. The big benefit of a strategy like this is you tend to get predictable results because your prospects are taking the same document sales funnel every single time as opposed to having to worry about whether your sales team can close the deal or not.  Because of this, your autoresponder can be improved over time to increase open rates, click rates, and track their impact on generating sales. Once you have a system that works, it’s all about getting qualified prospects to do something that nobody finds threatening…..

All they have to do is give you their email!

How to build your list

When you don’t have anyone on an email list it is difficult to spend your time crafting high value content for emails when they are only going to be read by 1 or 5 people. Using email marketing to drive your business means you have to get people to opt-in to getting your information. This requires more than just having a small slot on your website that says “Join our newsletter”.  This type of call to action has one of the lowest conversion on the web.  You have make getting people to opt-in to your list a primary conversion.  This is difficult for most people outside of the infoproduct world, because they don’t want less leads, and they think that asking people for only their email instead of a sale or a complete lead form means they miss their chance.

The solution to this problem is to segment your market into different buying stages in your campaigns. For the stages towards the end of the cycle, make you lead forms or checkout button the main call to action that you are trying to get them to take. For people in extremely early stages of the buying cycle, consider using an email opt-in with an incentive as the main call to action. Here are several examples where email opt-in would work well as the main call to action:

Business – Ecommerce Website About Shaving

potential customer  searches – How to shave with less irritation

Buyer mindset – This search has no commercial intent associated with it, but at some point in time the person who made the search may become interested in premium shave products. By developing a high quality barber shop shavers guide and making it the main call to action on the landing page, and connection with a potential customer can be made.

Turning searcher into a customer – just because they opt-in for a free guide doesn’t mean that they are going to buy something. The sales effort must be deliberate.  One way of doing this may be speaking about a specific type of razor in the guide with a link to where they can purchase it. Most likely they will also need to purchase a badger hair shave brush as well as shave soap. These can all be done in a consultative manner as long as value is provided along the way.

Tip: A great way to get the ball rolling and turn searchers like this into paying customers is to drop in an entry level purchase that is extremely cheap and available only to those that have opted in. The goal is not to devalue your brand by discounting, but by lowering the barrier of entry for a person to conduct business with you for the first time. Once they do, they will be more likely to do it again.

Here is another example of how this strategy works in the B2B arena.

Business – a company selling software for inventory tracking

potential customer searches – reorgnization of product sku’s  (I am making this up as I go so stay with me)

This would typically not be the type of search that has the intent of obtaining a consultation from a sales person from an inventory tracking software vendor. People know that when they fill a form out with all their contact info they are going to be hounded and they may not be ready for type of interaction. By providing a suite of free tools or white papers that are helpful to them at their stage in the buying cycle, you can obtain their email and nurture the lead until it becomes ready to engage in a consultation.

How effective is this strategy?

It works incredible well, but it takes time and a lot of effort to put together. When you use copywriting to do your selling for you, your sales funnel will only be as good as the copy used in it. Attempting to use an opt-in strategy to drive your business when your sales copy and content is mediocre is the same as expecting a bad sales person to drive the growth of your company. A good content funnel requires significant time and effort to put together, but it is an investment that pays off.

What are the steps that need to take place to start working towards an effective funnel?

Think of the content funnel for your email marketing strategy as a bridge that your customers must cross. If one spot in the bridge is missing some planks, nobody gets across. You have to systematically remove the barriers that are stopping people from cross your bridge.  You can do that by focusing on specific steps of the funnel.

Step 1: Develop a landing page for a specific audience and content topic.

Your goal will be to get the opt-in rate as high as you possibly can by split testing different content and layouts on the page.  Remember, the more people you get to opt in to you funnel, the more of a chance your content will have to succeed.  Most people would find it hard to spend $1000 on writing up a single email content piece to send to 10 people, but if you are sending it to 20,000 it may not be a big deal.  Having a larger list creates a virtuous cycle of value.

Step 2: Track you email open and click rates and split test them to get them to improve.

Email is about delivery, open rates, and click rates. Go one step at a time and keep working your numbers up.  Most people make the mistake of using fancy email templates. Most people open their emails on their phone these days and all the major email programs remove images by default. Save them the trouble and use plain text split up in twitter like bite size pieces that make it easy to read the whole thing. This is where a great copywriting like our team member Jason Caluori comes into play.

Step 3: Moving them forward towards the sale

If you don’t know the path that customers will take to get to a sale then don’t expect them to. Every step of your process should have clear next step.  They may not always take, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep offering it.  Many companies who can get people to listen to them and open their emails because of great content still fail to turn that interest into sales. Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. You just have make sure you have provided enough value for the person before you ask to make them think ….I have to be crazy not to go to the next step.

Step 4: Closing the deal

This part tends to be the easiest. Anyone that gets this far into your funnel wants to buy from you. You just have to make sure not to screw it up.  Reiterates the benefits that got them here in the first place and you should be good to go. Just make sure not to distract with another goal or action until they have completed the one that you asked them to take by coming here. It is amazing how much impact a navigation bar can have on conversion rates. Make them take the action you want them to or nothing at all.

If you are in the ecommerce space and you are not leveraging amazon sponsored products than you are missing the boat. We recently acquired a new client that does over 1 million in sales on Amazon that was requested that we look into the platform, as his last firm simply ignored his request. We doug in and I was blown away be the effectiveness of the traffic. The traffic is typically less expensive per click and converts higher than adwords or bing and yahoo. I believe this is primarilly because people browsing amazon are in a buying mindset. Combine the Amazon Product Ads with a remarketing campaign and you can really start to do some damage.

Several thing you will want to know before getting started….

You have to have a product feed setup. For most seasoned ecommerce stores you can use the same product feed that you are submitting to Google base.

Amazon’s targeting features aren’t as robust as other advertising platform.

You products get grouped into categories and pricing bins. You can bid on each pricing bin but thats a granular as it gets. Make sure you are setting up propoer tracking so that you can see how the ads are doing by sku. Pause ineffective products that generate clicks, but not sales.

Overall the traffic is inexpensive, converts well, and provides a more balanced marketing approach.

Note: It is never a good idea to rely on one source of business for 75% of revenue as many companies do for Adwords and Google.

What about services?

Sorry….. Products ads are only for those that are selling physical products.

Want some help? The InBusiness, Inc. paid ad team turned the amazon product ad inventory options inside out to develop a proprietary strategy to deliver high profit campaigns for ecommerce. Take a test drive by requesting an audit of your paid advertising.

If your business currently has active PPC campaigns, using anyone of these tips will have a positive impact on your bottom line. If you implemented them all, your will have a major leg up on your competition. Most people don’t spend enough time thinking about how to get the most out of their Pay Per Click (PPC) budget.  . These tips are meant to be generic to help anyone get better results. There is no one size fits all solution for getting the best results out of your PPC campaigns. If you are looking for expert assistance, please contact InBusiness, Inc.  about conducting an in depth PPC account audit.

Note: For the sake of simplicity these tips will focus on Google Adwords

Tip #1 Adjusting Your Match Types

There are 5 keyword match types in Google AdWords:

Broad Match – Ex. Car Insurance (Will show up for any search even remotely related to the word car or insurance)

Modified Broad Match – +Car +Insurance (Has to have the word car and insurance in the search phrase in any order)

Phrase Match – “Car Insurance” (must have the exact phrase “car insurance” in the search)

Exact Match – [Car Insurance] (will only show for the search “car insurance”)

Negative Match -       -Car  (will cause ads to not show for any search with the word car to not show)

(Note: You can actually have broad, phrase, and exact match negative keywords)

There are plenty of explanations about what each of these match types do, but we won’t be addressing the details in this blog post. For now, just follow these simple guidelines. The less of an expert you are, or the person managing your AdWords is, the less complex your setup should be, and the more your bidding should be focused on exact and phrase match keywords. Exact match keywords operate exactly like you would expect. They allow you to bid on the exact keyword phrase and nothing else. The standard broad match keywords are the exact opposite. If you use the word “Car”, Google may decide that “automobile” or “truck” is also a good match for your term.

Broad match can be a very useful tool to get the maximum volume of awareness from Adwords, but it is far from targeted unless you are utilizing negative keywords to avoid showing up for erroneous and non-relevant searches that can waste your budget. It is for this reason that I only recommend broad match to experts.

Cliffnotes: Start by focusing on exact and phrase match keywords to get more leads out of your budget. If you are an expert or have an expert manager, stick to modified broad match (+car +insurance). Almost never use traditional broad match unless you campaign is already completely optimized and you want  to find a higher volume of leads from terms you haven’t thought of.

Tip #1 1/2  – Google recently changed match settings where you also have to disable close variants and misspellings in your campaign settings. Not doing this will cause you to spend money you don’t want to unless you are an expert and understand how it works.

Tip #2  See What Keywords Are Actually Spending Your Money

Most unprofessional campaigns in AdWords use broad match exclusively. There is not quicker way to waste your budget without results than this. If you insist on using broad match you at least need to understand what keywords you are bidding on.  To do this Adwords has a hidden tab once you are viewing the keywords tab called keyword details.

By clicking on the keyword details tab and selecting all Adwords will show you the actual keywords that are causing people to click and spend your money. Once you see this tab, it doesn’t take  a rocket scientist to see if you are wasting a good part of your budget on terms that have nothing to do with your offerings. This insight alone will save you thousands over the course of a year.  Once you see this tab, and you are done crying about all the money you have been wasting, it is time to do something about it. This leads us to you next tip.

Tip #3 Employ Negative Keyword Lists

Negative keywords aren’t as big of a deal if you are employing exact and phrase match keywords, although they are still valuable, but if you are employing broad match they are essential. Some of the most common money wasters are searches that include the words like the following list:

• Jobs
• Careers
• Diy
• Free

These are all keywords that your business can’t afford to waste money on in most cases.  Combat the issue by adding them to your negative keyword list. You can do this in several ways. One is from the keyword detail screen you identified from tip #2.

Another way is from the regular keyword screen. There is a link at the bottom below all your keywords that gives you access. Take  a minute to determine if you want your keyword to only be a negative for that ad group or the whole campaign.

Warning! Negatives increase the complexity of a campaign. If you exclude the wrong keyword you may cut off your visibility from key searches and not be able to identify why your results have suffered. Use them with care. If you are worried about screwing up your campaigns, speak with a professional.

Tip #4 Use Ad Extensions For Higher Click Through Rates

Google allows for several ad extension types that can help you gain more market share for your most important keywords by increasing click-thru rates of your ads by as much as 30%. This is coming from Google’s internal data from2011. To turn them on, go to the ad extensions tab when you are in a campaign, change the “view extensions” drop down to “sitelink extensions” and then click new extension. You can take up a lot more real estate than a traditional ad and get more clicks from the most important keywords.

Note: You have to bid high enough for ads to show in the top three ads for extension to take flight.

IGNORE TIP #5 At Your Own Peril

#5 Implement Conversion Tracking No matter What!

There is no question that you have to implement conversion tracking. It is what closes the loop to tell you what is getting results. You win at the PPC game not by getting the most clicks, but by getting the right clicks at the right time, and right price. Conversion tracking is what gives you those answers. If you have an ecommerce store where people are checking out, it is even better if you implement conversion value tracking. This is where your shopping cart not only tells Google a conversion happened, but how much it was worth. This type of information is a foundation stone in good PPC campaigns. It’s not always about the number of conversions. Often times, revenue per visitor and conversion rates don’t line up. It is entirely possible to increase conversion rates while decreasing revenue per visitor (RPV).  Generally, you will want to focus more on revenue per visitors because conversion is calculated in that number. The clearer you data tells the story, the easier it will be to get the results you are looking for. Want to know if you currently have conversion tracking enabled? Go to your confirmation page and look at the source code (Right click your mouse for the option on firefox or internet explorer) and search “google_conversion”. If it isn’t there, and you are paying someone to manage your campaigns, you skip the next payment because they are doing you a disservice.

Example Code Snippet:

<!–??–?? Google Tracking Conversion Page –??–??>

<script type=”?text/javascript”?>

/* <![CDATA[ */

var google_conversion_id = 10364519964;

var google_conversion_language = "?en"?;

var google_conversion_format = "?3"?;

var google_conversion_color = "?ffffff"?;

var google_conversion_label = "?ZW0aCNugoFufSDfsf"?; var google_conversion_value = 0;

/* ]]> */

</script>

Running a PPC campaign without conversion tracking is like playing poker without looking at your cards. You are at a huge disadvantage to your competitors.

Taking these tips to the bank

The majority of these tips can be implemented in an afternoon and save you 25-75% of your marketing budget while providing you with more leads if they are not already implemented. Of course there are a dozen more that can help you, but knocking them off one at a time is the best way to go as opposed to getting overwhelmed. If you don’t have the time to implement these, contact InBusiness, Inc. about providing an account audit to give you customized account recommendations. If the improvements that can be made don’t cover the fee’s  to do them, we will tell you how to do them yourself.