John Cashman's blog

Have you ever gone into a retail store and not been able to find anything? Doesn't it drive you crazy! This is the principal reason why clean website design matters for ecommerce. In order to have people buy from your site it's imperative not only to have a clean website design, but to organize the site in such a way that it is easy to find what you are looking for. Therefore in order to make sure an ecommerce site sits on a strong foundation, we recommend doing the following:

1. Make sure your design is clean and uncluttered. You can read a lot about "wow" factor, user testing, etc., but you should know within about five seconds of looking at the site whether you know what the company sells. If you don't know quickly, the site design is too complicated.
2. Make stuff easy to find. Have you ever gone to a supermarket and not been able to find something on the list and then walked around aimlessly? Yeah. It's not fun. Make the products easy to find by categorizing them and offering a search box.
3. Speed matters. It never fails to amaze us when we come across a site to either design or SEO and its on a shared website server at $9.95 a month and the owner invariably tells us they are saving money. Unfortunately, when the site is slow (pages loading under 3 seconds) you start losing customers and SEO, so why it may be saving you costs, it's definitely costing you revenue. There are plenty of solutions to get more speed. Think of it like owning a store, if you have a small cramped store, you can only get so many people in the store. If you have a big store, you can get lots of people in there. With more people on the site, you need bigger servers to keep them buying without slow load speeds.
4. Keep it simple. Each product page should explain or show what your product is in ten seconds or less so people know exactly what they are buying. If you need more than ten seconds you need to rethink your product.

Those four reasons are pretty much what can allow you to design an ecommerce site that can help convert visitors to customers. Using SEO, content marketing, PPC and social media is what gets them there in the first place.

Here in the northeast, we are seeing the last days of summer and realize that it's time to start thinking about holiday SEO. As most retailers will tell you, the Christmas season is what will make or break their year, however what some retailers forget about is planning for the holiday season on their site and how holiday SEO can play a big part in having a great Christmas. 

One of the best tools to accomplish some holiday SEO planning is called the Google Insights tool. What it does is show how search traffic spikes during the season and what keywords maybe trending and what words may not be trending. 

As you can see by the graph above, people start searching for Christmas gift ideas in October, with rising amounts of searches in November and a peak in December. Being able to capture those three months and not just December is what is key to having good holiday SEO.

Also, not only will Google Insights give you trends but will also tell you what are the top searches during those time periods so you can use the right keywords on your site.

By looking at these keyword trends, you can start to plan out a holiday SEO strategy that can consist of the following tactics:

1. Make sure your site is actually SEO friendly, nothing is broken and all your products have descriptive keywords people are looking for.
2. Blogging - Create holiday blogs like top ten lists, gift ideas, etc.
3. Post pictures of your holiday catalog and make sure you use and Alt Tag to get them in the Google Index
4. Change some page titles and H1 tags to keywords like Holiday Gifts or Christmas Gifts 2012 (use this year)
5. Talk to Mommy bloggers or local newspapers who are looking for gift ideas and get links back to your pages
6. Go Pinterest! Set up a holiday product board. The links can help get you some more Google love.

A little bit of the above can really help especially for some niche products people are looking for.

Happy Holidays!

One thing we stress to all of our clients and prospects is to do an SEO evaluation before you buy and at least once a month after you buy. Here is how we go about doing an SEO evaluation for our prospects, client and ourselves:

1. Fire up Screaming Frog and have it crawl your site. Look for broken links like 404s and some easy to fix 301s that might be on your site and may only need a quick adjustment.
2. Take a look at the Screaming Frog output and make sure all pages have keywords in the Title and H1 Fields and the URL has keywords instead of code
3. Go to your browser and enter http://yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com to ensure one redirects to the other
4. Log into Google Webmaster and click on crawl errors. This will be a list of errors on your site that may come from other websites. This can easily be fixed and get more links to your website and help your search results
5. In Google Webmaster check to see if you have a site map submitted and Google is reading it correctly
6. Go to OpenSite Explorer and enter your domain. Check your page authority, domain authority and who has linked to you.
7. If you use Google Analytics, check under Traffic Sources for the keywords that are driving traffic to your site from Google. These are the ones you are most likely ranking.

That should give a quick view of your website and what may be effecting your rankings.

Recently we added our ebooks to the Kindle store, Nook and iTunes to not only increase impression but also get a few sales as well. To become self-published on iTunes, you need to become an Apple Publisher and once you are approved, you use a program called iTunes Producer to upload content to iTunes for sale. While we were uploading some of our books, we found an issue with iTunes Producer and the Euro physical list cost where using a decimal point actually causes the price to be priced in Euros rather than in euro cents. So if you use a decimal point for say 0.49 Euros your output looks like this:

What we ended up finding online was if you use a comma rather than a decimal point, so you write your Euros like this: 0,49. You end up getting the right price into the system, so your output looks like this: