Now more than ever it makes absolute sense to have a shopping site attached to your website, especially if you are an offline business with a physical location.

An online shopping site is a showcase for your business and helps those customers who want to browse online to see what you have before visiting your retail store.

Shopping sites are also excellent for helping you with search engine rankings, providing your website with more content for the search engines to index and giving you the potential to rank for more keywords.

Making sure your shopping site is search engine friendly is also essential for any new shopping site you intend to build – being search engine friendly simply means that your site is built to the recommendations of the search engines, which makes it easy for them to let searchers know what it is you do and sell.

A good shopping site will also interact with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest – enabling your customers to discuss your products with their networks of friends.

A good shopping site will also be resizable for mobile devices such as iPads and other tablets devices, small screen notebooks, and mobile phones. A search online is now 5 times more likely to be done on a mobile device as it is on a desktop computer, so having a shopping site that works on all devices is a must.

We help you establish a  shopping site that is search friendly, interacts

90% of commercial web searches are searching for local businesses, so it is more important than ever to not only have an effective and informative website that showcases who you are and where you can be contacted or found, but also one that gets found within the search engines and social media sites.

Here in Australia, most people still like to engage the services of local businesses when they can find what it is they are looking for.

Without a good web presence you are losing access to a lot of ‘easy’ business – that is, customers who would do business with you because you are local.

You can claim that business by ensuring your web presence includes a website that is clean, has all the essential “Find Me” details about you, tells people about your local presence, and what it is you do, AND, you make sure you are represented on the social networks.

Sounds too hard? Well yes it may sound hard but in fact the process can be very straight forward and simple.

We take the hard work out of it all by building your web presence step by step. First off we research the search engines to make sure your current website is focussed on what it is you are offering. We may want to make some changes to your existing site. Once your site is optimised we will also look at your social presence and recommend how to best interact with networks such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,and Google+.

The process is simple, straight forwards and easy to understand. What do you have to do? You can pretty much leave everything to us. We will tweak, or rebuild you current site to ensure it is search engine friendly and we will take care of the setup of your social network presence.

For a no obligation consultation contact us here

That’s how a whole lot of small local businesses must have felt in the past few days as Google made an unheralded move and decided NOT to show maps at the top of Page one of the SERP’s for local searches.

What?? Yes its true – maps have disappeared from search results….so when you type in “Dentist in Mosman” – you no longer see a map with all the Dentists in Mosman. This is a killer blow for small businesses as it had enabled them to at least get a foot in the search engine results if they matched the profile of a local search.

My guess is that Google decided small businesses were getting a free ride in the maps section by showing them right at the top of page 1, and this in turn was losing them revenue from Pay-Per-Click advertising. Well that is part of the equation. Google seldom does things without thinking ten steps ahead – they employ the best brains on the planet and pay them big bucks, so it stands to reason that Google Places was always a pawn in the chess game and was destined for the scrap heap from inception.

So what has happened to Google Places? The data is still there and you can still go in and create a Google Places account and profile, however, Google has ported all the profiles over to their wannabe social network – Google+ – and its under Google+ that you now can create a business profile, much the way you do on Facebook.

So another social network we need to maintain??? Yea, pretty much…however if you had an existing Places profile then that information is now also sitting on Google+, so there is minimal effort required to activate your Google+ listing and this is something you should do asap.

But back to the maps….they have gone. Will they return? Who knows. But plan for the fact they are gone for good and a new strategy is required for small businesses hoping to get ranked for local searches.

Essentially there has been a shift some time ago in Googles thinking. It probable started when they saw mobile searches skyrocketing and they realised that a mobile searcher looking for someone local would likely bypass the search engine and go straight to a Maps application to find what they were looking for – you can easily search a Map app and find a local business without having to get all the additional advertising sites showing up.

At some point Google also decided that social chatter was becoming much more important than it used to be in determining if a website was a credible authority on a particular topic. In other words Social networks are now playing a much bigger role in determining search engine rankings. The big three social networks are Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest – with Pinterest being the fast mover in this space. Google is yet to develop a credible presence in the social networking space, which looks a heck of a lot like how Microsoft struggled to establish a significant presence in search a while back.

Which brings us back to Google+. Google needs to get a greater foothold in the social networks, and it may do so by purchasing Pinterest, but at the same time they need to have something to go to war with Facebook with and Google+ is the weapon of choice. Hence they are forcing all Places accounts to switch over to Google+ Local - this helps them populate out their social network – in a nutshell – of course it goes a lot deeper than this…….because now it is going to be so important for your business to generate good chatter about you and your services and products. Going forwards its going to be about the collective chatter, and Googles algo’s are going to be sifting through social networks to determine not only who is chatting about what but the credibility and authority of those doing the chatting. So a shift in thinking is required.

Search engines love shopping sites with their frequently updated content and products that a lot of search engine users are looking to buy.

So why is it that so many shopping websites are poorly optimised fr search engines and therefore do not achieve high page rankings?

Getting your shopping site online is not that dificult these days. There are a lot of shopping cart systems on the market and many have a low cost point of entry. The temptation is to jump in and launch your store exactly the same way many people took the leap with their first websites.

“Get online and the customers will come” was the catch cry, and yes in those early days this did occasionally happen. However over the years the internet has become very competitive and it is no longer a simple matter of launching a site and assuming that you will get noticed. It just doesn’t work like that. There are a lot of shopping sites going live everyday in hundreds, and thousands of different niches.

So how do you stand out? How do you get onto page 1 of the search engines? 

Its simple – start with a strong strategy, research the niche where you plan to operate your store, be focussed on that niche in terms of your products and services that you have for sale, and ensure your online store is fully optimised for the search engines.

That is step one. Will it get you to page one of the search engine? Well, yes in some cases it may do for some of your products that are not being heavily targeted by your competition, or if your competitors shopping sites are poorly optimised.

Generally however you need to take additional steps to give your site a boost in terms of getting search traffic to your site. This can be done using search engine marketing programs like Google Adwords and these can get you traffic in the short term albeit you have to pay for it.

However when you first start your shopping site, as you do with any sort of retail outlet – be it online or offline – you do need some budget for marketing. The big advantage with an online store however is that the budget for marketing can be way smaller!

You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on signage, furniture, decor, and shop fitout with an online store the way you do with a brick and mortar store.

You do need to allocate a small budget each month for online marketing and SEO. And that budget can be as little as $50-75 a month - thats nothing! I know business owners who spend more on beer each week!

Fully integrated with it’s own CRM system, Infusionsoft delivers with auto-responders, targeted emails to prospects dependent on what stage of the sales cycle they are in.

Add in shopping cart functionality, as well as the ability to deliver messages via email, sms, tweet, and traditional fax and you have a powerful sales and marketing application!

Read More about Infusionsoft here …

Rss feeds are collations of your content – from your websites, blogsites, email marketing newsletters, social networking sites – the list is a long one. Pretty much any content that is on the internet can be turned into an RSS feed, then once it is created it can be submitted to RSS Aggregators for distribution across the net.

Once your RSS feeds have been distributed widely you will find that web searchers will view them, some will subscribe to them as they are interested in receiving your content, search engines will crawl them and follow the links back to your site. All of these actions are good for your web sites as it brings in both Search engine traffic and more importantly – Direct Traffic!

Notice I capitalized the last two words of the previous paragraph? I did that because Direct Traffic is something we tend to forget about when trying to generate web traffic. We focus pretty much on building up our websites position in the search engines and generating traffic from Search results. We pay money out for Pay-per-click search campaigns (PPC), thinking this is the answer to our needs fro traffic.

Organic search results via Google, Yahoo and Bing, and PPC traffic, is all good stuff – I am not knocking it at all and I encourage anyone to use both these strategies for generating traffic.

However organic search engine traffic and PPC advertising do not make up all the traffic on the internet – there is a portion of traffic that is the result of direct traffic, and another portion due to referral traffic.

Used correctly Direct Traffic and Referral traffic can and should make up a reasonable % of your overall traffic volume. Why do you need Direct traffic? Well lets say that you are ranking well for a few keywords, and you have a PPC campaign that is also bringing in traffic. Suddenly a giant competitor decides to target your sector, and leaps into take over your positions in the Search engines. They then outbid you for keywords in your PPC campaign – and suddenly your traffic has tried up. It can happen!

If 30% of your traffic is coming from direct traffic and another 20% from referral traffic, you are much less exposed to being knocked out of the search engines, or being outbid for PPC advertising terms.

Start using RSS feeds now to help build your Direct Traffic, if you need any assistance feel free to contact us here