The Problem With Online Commerce
Not many things can be quite as exciting to the would-be online entrepreneur than seeing their first shiny products appear in search results. At last, the money will soon start to roll in they think.
The reality is often very different. Firstly, potential customers need to find the shop, then they need to find the products within the store, and finally, perhaps most importantly, the price must be right….and thereby lies the problem.
With literally tens of thousands of new online stores appearing each year, we will in time reach saturation point. Just as high street shops have been dwindling due t
he the enormous buying power enjoyed by the big corporate giants such as the supermarkets, so too online retailers will soon face similar issues.
On the face of it only the strong will survive. I already speak to online store holders who are struggling to compete with the larger buyers or conversely, with the ever growing crowd of eBay sellers who cut prices to such ridiculously low margins of profit that only someone who already has another form of income will manage to survive.
Is that it then? No point in starting a new business?
Thankfully, no. There are still unfilled niches that can pay a good return. Niches where those already trading products within the niche have not slashed prices beyond all hope of profitability.
Perhaps the store could sell unique products? It seems to me that there is a lot of scope for manufacturers to sell there own products online to good effect. A bit daunting for some maybe, but even as I write I notice the larger number of adverts appearing for in-house e-commerce specialists, so it is probably only a matter of time before many cut off their stockists and represent the brand in every respect.
As always, those who get the best domains will certainly get the initial advantage, and I predict that many of the generic names will start selling for stratospheric prices. Country specific domains will become ever important to make the most of the local search bias that Google et al have been busily rolling out throughout the SERPosphere.
Professional SEO services are becoming ever necessary for all who want to appear above the fold in any given niche, so even though we have frozen our prices for a year to give everyone a chance to cope with the current financial crisis, it is only a matter of time before the bigger SEO companies will be able to name their price.
Is Non Disclosure and Anonymity Killing Your Portfolio?
I don’t know about you, but if you are a professional in the SEO world it is getting harder to ‘brag’ about our body of work.
Why? Well we have found that more and more companies are choosing to opt out of our portfolio in recent years. It’s not that they are ashamed of us you understand (well…at least, I don’t think so), it’s more a matter of privacy. After all, who wants the world to know the people behind the scenes who are working hard to make a site rank? If the whole world knew then there is always a danger that competitors might be more familiar with an individual SEO or SEO company’s modus operandi, thus endagering the business.
To be fair, it’s what I would advise anyway. After all, it might be possible to work out the level of service the company is paying for if a competitor started to piece the jigsaw together.
At the moment we have three major ecommerce sites all in very strongly fought markets that I would love to shout about but cannot. It drives me mad. It sounds so weak when you are talking to new clients and start with all the cloak and dagger stuff…”Ah yes we have this client who turns over £12 million per annum on the web….tell you their name? Uh er no, if I told you I’d have to kill you” does nothing for me, and far less, I am sure for our potential client’s confidence.
Thankfully there are a few who don’t mind us using their name when speaking confidentially to new clients, so…phew! We have stopped showing aportfolio online now though as it really doesn’t instill much confidence in isolation.
Perhaps we only have ourselve to blame for all this. After all there are many SEOs today who never ask their clients if they can splash the company logo all over their portfolio….oh well, back to the braglessnesslessness of it all….oh what the heck…we are the best seo company in the UK after all. Just know this – we’re good and others think we’re good too ‘nuf said.
Build Media Offer Complete Marketing Packages to Housing Developers.
As many of you know, SEO Clinic work hand in hand with our sister division, Build Media. Build Media offer building companies and developers all-in-one packages to provide marketing solutions for new developments. They provide CGI 3D renders of not-yet built / finished buildings in order to allow potential buyers and investors to imagine what the finished product will look like.
In addition to this they design a series of media products that help developers to take the project to market. This includes such things as websites, professional photography, brochures, email designs, posters , hoardings etc. In other words everything necessary to attract buyers.
We of course can provide a tailored SEO package and PPC campaign to boost web-based traffic, but the majority of the initial onsite SEO is handled under the Build Media umbrella.
The really great thing about the packages on offer is that a company can easliy budget for the entire media coverage. There are of course, modules that can be added to include extras that not everyone would intially need as well as expanding a package for the needs of much larger than average projects.
The new Build Media website is being put together at the moment and should be online by the end of June. Be assured that this fresh approach will make it far easier for architects, developers and builders to develop brand awareness. It will allow them to approach estate agents with a ready organised action plan, reducing points of contact that can normally amount to four or five different companies providing multiple services, and thus making everyone’s job easier.
Based outside London in Dorset and Shropshire, Buildmedia offer a more cost effective solution than many city based media agencies. Build Media work through the country, though as one would expect, much of their work is in the capital. For the moment, if you need to discuss any upcoming projects then please contact via the www.buildmedia.co.uk website.
Keywords – Where Did it All Go Right?
If in recent times you’ve started to ask yourself ‘Why are my sites doing well in Yahoo and Bing, but not in Google?’ Then you probably need to keep reading.
We’ve all heard the advice: Get your keywords at the beginning of your page title, mention them again in your title, get a couple of mentions in your page description, and then feature them prominently in H1 tags plus bold text on the page. This is still the mantra of many ‘SEO’ companies.
If we still lived in 2005/6 then this technique would be fine. Yahoo and Bing will still reward you for using these techniques, but Google….well Google have seen this all before and are not impressed.
Why we should all be glad about this.
Just imagine a set of search results that rewards identical treatment of all pages. All SERPS would begin to look identical. Samey titles, descriptions and page layouts…how boring. If there were truly a magic formula then that is precisely what we’d start to see.
Thankfully Google are looking for pages that read well and offer true diversity and relevancy.
So what can we do to ensure that we are using keywords and key phrases wisely? How can we mix them up enough to ensure our well chosen words are meaningful, natural in tone and, perhaps most importantly, effective?
Synonyms, hypernyms and hyponyms are your friends (…no, really!)
Using Synonyms – words that are similar in meaning to our keywords is one effective way to improve the quality of our page, without going off-topic. For example, a page featuring cars for sale might use the terms purchase automobiles, buy motors etc.
Another way to include variety is to use hypernyms (or sometimes spelt hyperonym). These are words that relate to a general category e.g. vehicles is a hypernym of cars just as it would be of another type of vehicle such as a bus or a truck. In other words it is a generalisation of a number of more specific terms. Conversely, hyponyms are words that fall beneath a general category. For instance, car is a hyponym of vehicle.
Using this principle will get us thinking of other related terms we might find on a car sales site. We would expect to see a list of brands such as BMW, Mercedes, Chrysler, Ford etc and perhaps more general terms such as 4×4, coupes, saloons, family hatch backs, hot hatch backs, estate cars (station wagons), sports cars etc.
All of these help Google to see that this is indeed a page selling cars and not a spammy, worthless site unworthy of ranking well.
Using this lateral thinking method to gather a larger group of related words will allow us to write pages that are good to read and are appealing to Google Bots.
Another important thing we can do is to use the stem of our keyword and change the tense, adding a plural or altering the ending of the word. When you put your mnd to it, there are a number of variants for most words that we might want to emphasize. For example, from Car sales we can get the following words: cars, car’s, sale, selling, sold. These five words all carry similar meanings respectively to the two stem word’s car and sales, but are all different from the originals and therefore add variety to a page of text.
So we’ve got our new list of varied keywords, now what?
Rather than stuffing our title, description, body text, H1 and H2 tags full of our keywords, now is the time to step back and see how the page scans. Is it a page that you would like to read? Would you spend any time reading it, or would you think ‘ah, yes I can see what they are trying to do here’ i.e. rank for these keywords and phrases.
If it doesn’t look natural and read like a genuine page written by a someone who has something valuable to say, then the chances are Google will not like it. There are, of course always going to be some exceptions to this, but as time goes on we likely will see the keyword filled pages disappear from all but the lower rankings despite large numbers of inbound links.
There is growing evidence that H1 tags are no longer what they were in their ability to improve ranking ability, so how much better then to simply use them in a natural manner that increases the value and readability of the page. Some well written relevant body text is still important no matter what else is on the page.
‘Yes, but what about my beautiful, shiny new ecommerce site? I don’t want to fill it up with loads of text’.
Of course you don’t. We’ve noticed that a couple of paragraphs of informative and relevant text, even placed low down on ecommerce landing pages is often enough to have a beneficial effect on ranking. As a general rule simply placing a single and short paragraph will have less benefit on a product-rich page, more is good.
‘Can I have too much text on the page?’
Again (and sorry to go on about this) relevancy is key. Does the text belong on the page, or does it look like a load of waffle placed there only to aid ranking? If it doesn’t look right, then it probably isn’t right and will be marked down. Whereas if the text is some useful information relating to the products featured, then Google are more likely to smile on it.
In summary, perhaps the hardest thing for an SEO to get his or her head around when using keywords is to not be so devious. It is already way past the time to stop following the clichés. Shrug off the tired old thinking and realize that Google has come of age. Of course, this being the case, it’s only a matter of time before Bing and (by default) Yahoo follow suit.