Magento Blog

Adding a blog to your Magento store is an excellent way to connect with your customers, increase your SEO efforts, and make your store an authority site on the products and services it offers. With a blog you can constantly add relevant content(for both your customers and search engines) making your store a destination for information relating to your product or service.

A blog allows you to connect with your customers on a never before seen level. You can publish news releases, detailed product reviews, related content, take customer comments/questions/concerns and respond to them in kind. Coupled with the latest social networking platforms you can cultivate this relationship even further. The relationship you establish with your customers is a great way to see market trends and analyze customers wants in needs. Most importantly it will increase conversions, purchases, and create a loyal customer base.

By successfully connecting to your customers through your blog posts your Magento store will become an authority destination on the product or services you sell. Along with this authority status will come an increase of traffic.  The increase will come not only from returning readers and customers but those looking for information. As your authority status grows people will link to your site from other websites further increasing traffic flow.

Connecting with your customers and becoming an authority site on subjects concerning the products and services you sell will cause your search engine rankings to improve dramatically.  You can further your SEO efforts by providing links to different pages in your Magento store in each individual post. Not only will your customers be lured in by this stream of content but search engines will use it to determine what your site is about. By keeping your posts focused you can manipulate this into better SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) rankings for your site.

A blog for your Magento store is a good idea on many levels. By becoming an exporter of fresh relevant content related to the products you sell, your blog will become an importer of customers and indispensable marketing tool.

Video is now an intricate part of the web. With 24 hours of video being loaded into YouTube every minute, new video friendly platforms like the iPad & Google TV emerging and search results serving up video your internet marketing strategy should include this ever-expanding medium. If its a bottle of wine, hotel room, RV, electronic gadget, or just about anything, video can show your customers what you are selling close up and personal. So how should you go about promoting video on the internet?

Quality Camcorder or Flip Video: No, you don’t have to go spend an arm and a leg, but a clear steady image goes a lot further that a shaky, blurry one.

Upload to Multiple Video Sites: The more sites you share your video with the better. YouTube, Yahoo Video & AOL Video are great to start with. Remember to always provide a link back to your website. The page it links back should have the video along with keywords that describe that video.

Use keywords In Title: The Title of the video is a huge factor with both search engines listing it as a result and users choosing to view it. Make sure you make the title catchy as well as keyword rich. Also provide engaging keyword rich descriptions of the video as well. If you are able to put a link in the description back to your site in the description, by all means do so!

Embed the Video on Your Site: This is a must. When you embed the video on your site make sure it is titled and the content on the page relates to the video.

Using video as part of your internet marketing strategy is a must in this day and age.  By implementing these simple rules you can be sure that your video and thus your website and products will be found by interested consumers.

The use of mobile devices used for internet search and purchases is on a dramatic rise. Ross Sandler of RBC is predicting mobile searches to rise from its current level 9 % of all searches today to 20% of all internet search queries by 2012 (See Techcrunch).  As our cell phones evolve into more sophisticated portable computers you can be sure that this trend will continue to increase and mobile commerce (m-commerce) will become the norm and a huge percentage of retail sales.  Is your eCommerce business ready for the change?

Enter Magento Mobile. With its full release expected later it will be the worlds first mobile commerce system. The biggest advanatge Magento Mobile has over its competitors is that is doesn’t just rebrand re-theme a merchant’s website for mobile browsers. Instead a retailer’s product catalog is transformed into a fully-functional, branded, native application.

This app makes for a great shopping experience for the buyer. Load times are fast. Purchases are secure. Navigation is easy and logical. Page functionality is great. Everything online shoppers have come to expect from Magento while shopping from their home computers or laptops can be found in Magento Mobile.

For the seller the benefits not only include satisfied shoppers but a hassle free product that fully integrates into their existing Magento store. The full list of Magento Mobile benefits include:

• Integration with Online Magento Store – The Magento-mobile admin will fully integrate with your store’s catalog, checkout, inventory, reporting, and other features.
• Magento Managed Submissions – Magento will take the worry out of submitting your online store application. The time and complexity of maintaining application standards will be taken care of for a low monthly fee. This lets you focus on selling to your customers instead of dealing with the latest upgrade and/or complicity issues.
• Build customer Relationships – How better to build customer relationships then through their smartphone? Geo-targeting and the ability to provide users with an immersive native experience are enhanced with Magento Mobile.
• Manage Multiple Devices – With new mobile devices coming out almost yearly if not monthly (droid, ipad, ect..) managing your storefronts from a single portal will be save time and improve efficiencies. Customizing and creating different reports will also be simplified.
• Fully Customizable – Device oriented features and branded themes can be added and modified with just a few clicks. You can easily and quickly update the colors and layout of your app with the new Magento mobile admin, even after customers have downloaded your app.
• Low Cost of Ownership – Bring the the high end experience of a mobile app store to your customers for a low price. By paying for the feature you only want or need saves you money.
  The Age of Mobile eCommerce (m-commerce) is here. Mobile Magento is a great cost effective way to get a piece of this quickly expanding marketplace and grow your bottom line.

Great question. You’d be surprised how many companies spend thousands of dollars getting new website’s build without a clue as to where their customers are online.

20,340,000,000 web pages were indexed as of November 2009…so as far as the web is concerned - “If You Build It, They Will Not Come”.

That’s why at InteractOne we specialize in helping companies first find their customers and see how they are behaving before endeavoring to build new website systems.

This fact finding process is hugely beneficial.  By identifying online customer “who, what, where and why” data we are able to create smart marketing campaigns that leverage the right technology with relevant information to efficiently target and reach markets much more effectively.  The results,  significantly higher ROI and Brand impact from your web marketing efforts.

The product pages on the Magento Shopping Cart system are often overlooked and not optimized to their fullest extent. Optimizing them properly for both search engines and human visitors might take some extra time but is well worth the effort. Here are some tips to make your Magento product pages easier for search engines to find as well as more inviting and encouraging for the people shopping them.

Magento’s product pages are pretty well optimized for search engines right out of the box.  Most meta tags are automatically filled given the data you include when loading products into the system.  The key is to fill out as much of the product fields as possible.  This can prove challenging but will pay off in a big way with your products getting found on the web.  The job of search engines is to provide relevant search results for the user. The more product description, images and related information you can provide, the more of a chance you have of getting found.

An often overlooked field is the label field in the image tab. Think of this tab as another place to add keywords that support the title tag and description.  By filling it out,  your image title and alt tags will have unique values instead of using the title tag text that Magento includes by default.

Providing an adequate amount of information not only helps with the search engines but with selling and gaining a loyal consumer base.  Consumers often use the web to find information on the products they want to purchase.  Product descriptions that are complete, point out all the product benefits and features and are supported with multiple images and video that are clear and crisp will not only encourage viewers to buy but to come back, tell their friends and come to rely on you as a the guru in your market.

As you can see, optimizing for search engine robots and human online shoppers are not completely opposite practices.  Making sure that your products pages are geared toward both, you can ensure that your site is found and your products are seen.  More importantly, product page optimization will result in converting your traffic into sales!

The secret to internet marketing can be boiled down and concentrated into a couple of phases. Yes, there are important SEO techniques, product placement algorithms, hosting decisions and other endless tactics you will need to implement; however, what really determines your success online is your overall strategy. A solid strategy will keep all your internet marketing efforts inline and focused towards a common goal.  A successful strategy for running a business online should include these major phases:

1) A Well-Designed Website. Before you start worrying about traffic or conversions be sure your website design fits well with the genre of the market you are aiming to be a player in. A well-designed website should take in account not only form, but function as well. Navigation, forms, checkout, and any other processes a visitor might go through on your site should be logical, easy to complete and blended seamlessly into the design.  Your website should be pleasing to the eye yet easy to navigate. All websites, regardless of which type of market, should have professionally written text, free of grammatical errors and have a unifying theme or focal point.

2) Increase Traffic to Website. Once you have a well-designed website its time to introduce it to the masses! Implement a Search Engine Optimization plan for keywords that are attainable through organic search. For keywords that are beyond your SEO budget use pay-per-click (PPC). PPC is a great tool to get capture traffic that comes with those particular keywords that prove elusive to your SEO efforts. Other online advertising tools you can use to connect to your customer base are banner ads, social media, and e-mail marketing. Remember what works for one business might not work for yours. Be sure to craft the right mix these tools to get the optimal amount of traffic.

3) Increase Conversions on Website. Now that you have your traffic numbers up its time to increase your conversion rate. Whether you are selling items through an eCommerce store, selling ad space on your website or just looking for viewers to fill out a contact form to get leads, the goal of most websites is to increase conversions. This can be accompished by the strategic placement of ads, contact forms or products. Maybe its the call to action or other site text that needs to be tweaked. Increasing conversions on a website requires careful analysis and testing of almost every aspect of your website.

Having a well thought out overarching strategy to success online separates the businesses that succeed from those that fade out into oblivion. Sun Tzu put it best: “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat”.

An “abandoned shopping cart” happens when an online shopper adds items to their cart, then decides to just close their browser or go somewhere else.  It happens to every site at some time or another for various reasons, most of which are preventable.  To help minimize abandonment, there are steps you can take to ensure that your shoppers will see your checkout procedure through to order fulfillment.

Think of your online checkout process like a traditional brick and mortar store.  In a physical store, shoppers browse the aisles to locate the products they want to purchase.  When they find one it is placed in their metal cart.  At this point there is no commitment to actually buy the items in their cart.  If they see something they don’t like, they can simply park the cart where it sits and walk out of the store.  Most brick and mortar stores have an advantage over e-commerce because the customer is physically in their building.  The shoppers had to walk or drive to the building, and most are already certain of the items they want to buy.  Online storefront shoppers don’t have to do anything except turn on their computers and type in your store’s website address or find your online shop on a search engine.  Abandoning an online cart is very easy to do so your storefront should take extra precautions to make the shopper feel comfortable and safe.

The first thing to do if you haven’t already is purchase an SSL certificate.  SSL, or Secure Socket Layering, is a protocol that web browsers use to give the assurance that the data being transmitted from the shopper’s computer is encrypted, making it illegible to anyone who might intercept it.  SSL is what gives websites the httpS:// instead of just http://.   SSL certificates are relatively inexpensive and can be purchased from vendors like GeoTrust, Verisign, Thawte or GoDaddy.  After installing an SSL certificate, most vendors provide a “site seal” which is usually a tag that can be inserted into your website to show that your store is secured.  If you have SSL installed but don’t have your seal displayed on every page, then go do that now!  It sends a clear message to your customers that you are aware of Internet security and have taken an extra step to protect their private information.

When you need help or have questions while shopping in a physical storefront, it is nice to be able to ask a smiling, friendly employee to guide you to what you are looking for.  People that shop online expect a level of customer support comparable to what they would receive in person.  If there is no way to contact a representative then how is the customer supposed to know that your store is still accepting orders?  There are many eCommerce web sites that were created and then forgotten.  At the very least your online presence should not feel like no one is home.  Post your 800 number prominently on every page of your site.  Have an “About Us” page that details your physical mailing address so the customer knows that they are dealing with a real business.  There are also online Help Desk packages available ranging in price from free to a few hundred dollars that gives the customer a direct line straight to you!  Using an online chat or help desk, if someone has a question they don’t have to even pick up the phone.  A small piece of software on your computer will tell you when someone needs to chat.  Having a real person available can make a huge difference if someone is on the fence about their purchase.

Keep your checkout process simple.  This point can’t be stressed enough!  Don’t make your customer fill out a form with so many fields that they feel like they are applying for a bank loan.  Filling out a long form online is comparable to waiting in a long line at a physical storefront’s checkout.  Get the information you need to fulfill the order and to contact them with confirmation information or if there is a problem.  A short checkout process gives the shopper less time to close the browser window.  Offer the customer a Guest checkout, or checkout with creating an account.  If your customer likes your store then they’ll create one, so don’t make it mandatory.

Showing your customers that you care about their privacy and security is key to stopping shopping cart abandonment.  A shopper must trust your online storefront.  There are services that can offer your customers some peace of mind when shopping online.  McAfee offers a badge that your store can display that shows you have someone on the outside verifying that your store is safe from hackers.  They do this by scanning your site every day for vulnerabilities, similar to how a virus scanner checks your local computer for problems.  The result of the scan is displayed on your website along with the last date of the scan.  It is updated daily which shows that your online shop is safe and secure.

Here are a few more credibility indicator tips that will give your shoppers more confidence while browsing:

Check your grammar and spelling!  A poorly worded sales pitch or a simple spelling mistake can give the impression that you don’t care about what you are trying to get the customer to buy.

“If I have a problem, can I return the item?”  This question should be answered as soon as someone visits your store.  A clearly labeled Return Policy link with clear and concise information will help put the shopper’s mind at ease.

Be sure to have a product review section on each product page.  Don’t make the mistake of faking reviews.  It might look good to see positive reviews but your customers are no dummies!  Authentic positive reviews from real customers will go a long way to building trust in your store.  Offer some kind of incentive to get customers to post reviews on products they have purchased.  A follow up a few days later is a great way to build trust and open a line of communication.

Keep your website simple.  Don’t complicate your site with loads of graphics and animations to get people’s attention.  Remember that the shopper is already on your website so you don’t need anything else to bring them in.  Instead, make their shopping experience enjoyable by providing a straightforward and easy to navigate website.

Comparing some aspects of physical storefront shopping to online shopping can give a different perspective on what the shopper expects from their online shopping experience.  There’s no way to stop all instances of shopping cart abandonment, but it can be reduced by following the advice that we have provided.  If you haven’t at least added everything in this article to your eCommerce website then go do it as soon as possible.  You may be missing out on sales over a simple mistake that your competitor didn’t make!

Email Marketing is a great way to remind existing customers about your business, drive traffic to your site, and to keep customer relationships fresh and healthy.  Today’s spam filters getting tougher on incoming email and email marketing services such as Constant Contact® are making guidelines for sending email more strict and less forgiving. Follow these five tips out of trouble and maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns.

1) Clean Contact list – Only send email to people/customers who you have done business with or have opted into receiving your emails. Failing to do so can get you banned from email marketing providers and hurt your reputation with potential and existing customers.

2) Clear Straight to the Point Subject Line - A email subject line designed to lure the reader into opening the email might actually never reach that intended reader. Subject lines with a dozen exclamation marks, all caps,  or content that doesn’t match the body of the email likely won’t pass muster with most ISP’s (Internet Service Providers)  and could go straight to the spam/junk folder of the recipient.

3) Relevant Content – Know what your audience wants. Sending them content they have no desire to read or engage in could give them the wrong impression of what your company has to offer them. Find the niche they need and show them why they should choose you albeit a better price, quality, service or all three.

4) Professional Design – A professional designed email template catches the eye but is not overbearing. Like a well designed website it melds functionality with aesthetics. Some of the most effective email designs look just like the website or e-commerce store they are representing.  Remember to always make the follow through by the email recipient as easy as possible. This can be done with links to actual products, links to forms, easy to read 800 number, ect.

5) Handle Unsubscribe Requests Quickly - Removing unsubscribers from your email marketing lists promptly will keep you from being labeled a spammer and avoid the hassle of trying to get back into good straights with your email marketing service provider.

Email marketing is a great tool to actively engage customers and draw traffic to your website. These five tips are designed to keep your email marketing campaign efforts in the clear and maximize their effectiveness.

eCommerce is much more than just getting people to your site. While traffic is unarguably an important aspect to internet marketing, getting viewers to purchase from your store is equally important. Here is a list of 10 basic features* your store should encompass to encourage viewers to not only make a purchase but engage in a long-lasting relationship with your store. (*Gartner)

1) Product information should be easy to read, detailed, and promote the best features of the item.

2) Your return policy should be clearly marked, easy to find and interpret.

3) Every page of your website should load quickly. This includes not only the main pages but every page a customer engages through checkout.

4) Product reviews from other customers should be displayed with every item. Product reviews really set eCommerce stores apart from their brick and mortar cousins. Leverage this difference and include product reviews throughout your store to encourage and reassure customers while they shop.

5) Multiple product images or  3d rotators should company every product. Customers like to know what they are buying and clear multiple or 3d images of products do just that.

6) If a picture is worth a thousand words than a video must be priceless.Video of your products included in the description is marketing gold. Viewers feel more connected to video and better informed. Video also offers other marketing venues such as YouTube, video search and more.

7) Online Chat assistance is a great way to bridge the personal connection gap that plague online retailers. Nothing is more reassuring to the customer than knowing that help from a real live person is only a mouse-click away.

8 ) Related products should be displayed with every item. This not only helps you increase sales but helps fill the need for the shopper.

9) Easy and quick checkout is a must. Laborious and slow checkout systems are the culprit for many abandoned shopping carts. Minimize the risk and maximize your customer satisfaction with  a one page checkout system or similar system.

10) Many shoppers don’t want to sign up to your eCommerece system. Cater to these customers by allowing them to make purchases a a guest. If you make them happy with the first purchase they might come back, sign up, and become lifelong customers.

Implementing these listed features  will put you on the the right track to increase customer retention, loyalty, and overall satisfaction. If your eCommerce shopping cart is falling short of this list please contact us to learn more on how InteractOne can get you back on track.

Despite the major search engine’s (i.e. Google, Bing & Yahoo) continued evolution of more and more complex algorithms, content still remains as a major player for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). What does this mean for your business? That every page of your website; whether it is a blog, eCommerce or static website should be looked over and analyzed for keywords in meta-tags, keyword density, page focus and user functionality/readability. While existing content should be analyzed and optimized, new fresh content should be created weekly, if not daily, following the same guidelines.

Despite their recent downgrade of importance with major search engine algorithms, using keywords and keyphrases in your meta-tags is still the best practice and should be followed. This does not mean that you should go stuff keywords in the meta-tags and wait for traffic to come in. Rather use them legitimately and follow these basic SEO rules. On-page tags such as image alt tags and title tags should also be filled. If you have a blog make sure you use the tag function because there is recent evidence that these are of growing importance.

Keyword density and page focus go hand in hand. Each page of your website should be focused around no more than two keywords or phrases. More than two and your content becomes diluted and search engines will have a hard time categorizing your website which will result in poor rankings for your desired keywords. You should be careful not to repeat the same keyphrase over and over again.  A good rule is 5 times per 300 words. You should use supporting words and synonyms that go along with the the subject. H1 and h2 tags should also be used, but no more than one each per page and they should be very similar to your meta-tags.

While search engines may not be able to truly experience your website’s feel and function, they do take in account navigation and text to code ratio (more text, less code is best). These two aspects will also directly affect the human user’s experience.  Less code means a faster website and a more logical user-friendly navigation.  People will be able to view and peruse your site easily.

There are many factors that come into play when making your website  search engine friendly. Optimized content has withstood the test of time and has even grown in importance. Ensuring that your new and existing website content follows these rules will go a long way in your internet marketing efforts.