Access All Areas
Search Engine Optimisation and the URL Re-writer
There are many factors that contribute to the success of your ecommerce project and many of these are mirrored by the principles you apply to your traditional business; how the shop is fitted, the products you sell, the pricing strategy and the location of your premises.
Location can be vitally important to success. The high-street guarantees great footfall whereas locating on the side-streets of a town means less visibility to your target audience, and you have to work to overcome this with marketing, promotion and advertising.
Location is just as important to your ecommerce business, however unlike in a real world situation, you can’t buy your way into a prominent location on the World Wide Web. Search Engines will usually only allow new online shops to open on the edge of WWW-Town and place a number of obstacles in your way before accepting you in to the community as a fully-fledged member and awarding you prime, high-street positioning in their search rankings.
For some, the way to be noticed is by spending money, often big money, on advertising campaigns (such as Google AdWords) to drive traffic to the online shop. This is a fine strategy and can work very well, but there are many things that can be done to get the Search Engines to respect you; maybe even love you enough to make you the first thing that springs to mind when a user asks them to recommend a good shop for buying whatever it is you sell!
Search Engines love to find out as much about you and your products as they can, and the easier you make this for them, the more they’ll respect you for it.
They, like your customers, love to see that you know your stuff, understand your customers and their needs and that you offer yourself up as a friendly and welcoming company that is well laid out and easy to browse.
They are inquisitive, nosey-parkers and will send out their finest investigators to bring back as much information as you can offer up.
But they want to come whenever they want and they want to visit you any which way they choose. Your shop probably only has one way in and one way out, but your online shop can be accessed on any page and the more you can do to keep those doors open, the better it will be for business.
So how can we help you provide an Access All Areas pass to the search engines?
The answer is found in Search Engine Optimisation.
Modern ecommerce databases serve up product information dynamically and our product is no different. When a user asks to see a product in the inventory, the database is accessed and the information retrieved from the database and displayed on the screen. Having one static page for every product listed in the database is hugely inefficient from a development point of view but also in the ongoing management you would have to go through just keeping things up-to-date.
So, instead, there is one page for displaying product information and that changes dynamically to present new information each time a new product is requested. This is great news to the developer (us) and the database manager (you).
But what you save in efficiency, you lose in accessibility. Search engines love reading but they struggle to interpret unusual languages. They like their information served up in a simple fashion.
What does this mean?
By default, the addresses for your product and catalogue pages look like this:
http://www.your-online-shop.co.uk/detail.aspx?id1234
Ironically, the Question Mark is where search engines start to get confused.
“What is ‘id1234’?”
It’s a question they often can’t answer and so move on and look for something else. The thing is - all of your product information is served up this way.
Search Engines would much rather you kept it simple. They would much rather see the address to a product that looked something like this:
http://www.your-online-shop.co.uk/great_value_widget_you_want.aspx
So that’s what we will do for you. Our URL Re-writer Service takes all of the products you have in the product database (and any that you add in the future, always!) and applies some technical voodoo that convinces the Search Engines that you have one page for every product in your inventory. We also apply this method to the Catalogue pages too, as they behave in exactly the same manner and so pose exactly the same challenge.
Now the Search Engines will enter the shop and have a really thorough browse around, consuming the detailed information they struggled to find before and keep it on record for the future. When someone queries a Search Engine database, if your content matches the search words, the appropriate page will be listed.
Yippee! Problem solved. (Phew, you’ll sleep easier tonight.)
Well … not quite…
As you’ll know, the result of putting some keywords in to a Search Engine can bring back many, many results. How often have you put in some simple words and seen Google tell you that it is showing you the first 10 listings of over 10 thousand or even 10 million? It happens all the time.
How far into the results will you go to find what you’re looking for before you give up and try a new some new words to search on? Research states that an average of 9.2 results is viewed before a new search is conducted. Typically, no-one goes beyond page three of Google and only the most determined web-user will go even that far.
So really you want to consider a listing to be:
- Acceptable if found within the Top 30 results (Google - Page 3) but a potential candidate for improvement;
- Performing pretty well if found within the Top 20 (Google – Page 2) but a serious candidate for improvement;
- Successful if found within the Top 10 and one to be closely guarded to ensure that it stays in that position or closer to the highly desirable and coveted Number 1.
There is one very important question to consider, though:
What makes the same page list in a different position within the exact same Search Engine?
The answer is … Keywords and Phrases.
Being the only listed web page to contain the keywords “Womble Dustbin Manifesto” will almost certainly guarantee you first-page success in the listings*, but who is searching for that and how is that relevant to you?
*Why not try it and see who’s there?
Of course, you will want to target keywords and phrases that are relevant to you, and that you think potential customers might type into a Search Engine when looking for information about the products you sell.
Some keyword phrases are not that competitive, "Womble Dustbin Manifesto" for example. Others are very competitive e.g. "Cheap flights" or "car insurance". The more competitive the keywords, the harder it is to get on that all important first page! And, of course, it’s the competitive keywords that tend to be most searched for and therefore will drive the most traffic to your site.
So now it is getting really tricky to compete for that crucial Top 10 positioning. We can help you with this dilemma by providing an on-going support service that takes the Keywords and Phrases that we identify as being relevant to your business, and tailoring the pages of your site to make sure that when they are typed into a search engine your site is visible.
We do this in a number of ways but all of them can be listed under three simple headings - Getting You Listed, Getting You Seen and Getting You Sales.
Getting You Listed (URL Re-writer Service)
Once your online shop has been launched, we need to start getting you listed. As you now know, left to its own devices, it is blind luck whether anyone will find you. Interestingly, Father Time has an influence over your search engine visibility. The older your online shop gets the more your shop is respected and listings start to climb the rankings*.
*Search Engines place your domain (web address) in something called ‘The Sandbox’; a (kind of) containment area with hurdles and obstacles on all sides aimed at making sure you aren’t setting up a website to ‘spam’ the web with spurious links and content that do nothing to enhance the usability, efficiency and value of the world wide web. The time spent in the Sandbox is an unknown variable but the more you do to prove your worth, the quicker you’ll make it out!
Taking the ‘Wait and See’ approach is somewhat the equivalent of taping invitations to a snail one week before your birthday and sending it on its way – you are getting the message out but it’s a gamble as to who will receive it before you run out of time. So it is much better to begin with the URL Re-writer Service and get the message out faster.
There is, unsurprisingly, a cost associated with this service but (in order to control your costs in the early stages of your site development) we offer this free for the first 6 months of its use.
After this period, we’ll provide a Search Engine Position Report that looks at where your shop pages have climbed to in the listings. This will help you to determine the relative successes and identify areas for attention and improvement.
At this stage, the support fee for this service becomes a part of your regular monthly costs*.
*You can, of course, choose not to continue with this service but you will quickly see that your indexed pages and subsequent listings will begin to drop down the Search Engine’s rankings, effectively putting you back to square one.
Included as part of the integration of the URL Re-write service is to put a dynamic site-map in place (though static ‘in display’ because that’s what the Search Engines love!) and ensure that catalogue and product pages display keyword-rich titles.
These complimentary features of the online shop will serve to enhance listing potential alongside the URL Re-writer.
The fee for this service is £200 per month with the first 6 months free of charge.
Getting You Seen
Now that you are listed and we need to decide how you want to be seen by your target audience. In other words, we need to establish a list of Keywords and Phrases.
With that list in place, we can begin to tailor page structure and content in favour of the defined list of keywords and phrases.
With your products, it’ll most likely be by brand and product type that we can expect potential customers to search and find you under and, fortunately, our URL Re-writer has been working hard in the background to get those products seen and the titles displayed since the shop launched.
Remember, however, that every page of your website is a potential entry to your website and making these perform equally successfully and even creating new pages and features will be necessary to keep your site competitive.
Areas we analyse and make recommendations on include:
- Entry-Page Development (not just home-page maintenance)
- Internal Link Quality
- Reciprocal Link Building
- Content Development
- Keyword Density and Search Successes
We do this by utilising analysis software packages. The process is iterative, but quantifiable, and we can (by working together with the data we gather) build a competitive online business that is capable of growing from strength to strength.
Getting You Sales
Having a well-indexed, highly-listed online shop is great but it is all driven towards one thing – your key objective.
In this case, that is likely to be the conversion of a visitor into a buyer.
In other words - Sales. Lovely, valuable sales.
If we have brought the horse to water and we know that it is thirsty, what is it that could be stopping it from drinking?
We will offer you support, advice and services which, based on our years of experience, we know result in sales. Sometimes it’s simple – price sensitivity and delivery charges or lack of regular contact can create a barrier to sales. Sometimes it can be more subtle like a lack of decent calls-to-action, the order of content being delivered, loss of focus and all the way down to a shift in the most popular monitor resolution or web browser.
The fee for the ‘Getting you Seen, Getting you Sales’ service is £300 per month*.
*In addition to the ‘Getting You Listed’ service fee.
Timing it Right
When you choose to take advantage of the ‘Getting You Seen, Getting You Sales’ service is a decision that will be influenced by a number of factors. As you now know, Search Engines discriminate by age and how old your domain (web address) is will influence how quick and how well your online shop pages will be indexed and served up.
The older your domain the quicker you’ll be indexed, so we would recommend that you start all services immediately after launch. You’ll have good experience and knowledge of your traditional customer needs and shopping behaviour and will be able to start targeting them (or their equivalents online) from the beginning.
If your business is new and your domain is fresh to the web (or still relatively young*), then you may need to allow time for information to be gathered in order to build a picture of your customer-base and the way in which they choose to interact with you. We would recommend that you take advantage of the ‘Getting You Listed’ service first and attack the deeper areas of search engine optimisation after the 6 month period. This will help to control your initial costs as well as your first year development costs.
If your confidence is high, knowledge is good and the purse-strings allow it, you should consider starting all services immediately. A head-start can’t hurt!
*Young being under (approx.) 30 months.
If you want to know more, feel free to get in contact on: 0845 603 9254.
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