eCommerce merchants rely on organic traffic from search engines like Google and Bing to attract new customers. When organic traffic drops or never seems to get any better, it can be frustrating. There are several reasons why a website or specific pages are ranking poorly in search rankings.

Below are four reasons why a website or individual pages are performing poorly in search rankings and how to fix them.

Issue 1: Technical Difficulties

One of the first things to check is if the page or pages are functioning correctly. If there are technical issues present, that could be a significant factor for search engines to exclude the page from their rankings.

There are few ways to fix fundamental technical issues. First, try doing a hard refresh in the browser, or try viewing the page from another computer or device. There could be something wrong with the HTML, CSS, or any other scripts on that page. Improving the page’s ranking could be as simple as identifying this problem and correcting it.

Issue 2: Duplicate Content

Another common reason for poor rankings is duplicate content. It can be challenging to create new and engaging website copy for every page of a website, especially for a large site with many pages. Some merchants copy text from other pages, from a supplier, or even competitors. However, when search engines notice that the copy on the page matches that of another, they could remove the page from its rankings. Or, the search engine may not know which page to rank first. In this case, it’s possible to have multiple pages on one website competing against one another for the same organic rankings.

There are several tools to help check for duplicate content. Google Search Console will look for duplicate content in meta descriptions and titles tags. To review a website in Search Console navigate to Search Appearance > HTML Improvements. Refer to the image below.

There are also site audit tools like SEMrush and MOZ  that can help diagnose duplicate content as well as other performance issues. The key to duplicate content is to avoid it from the get-go. However, accidents do happen. Just be sure to resolve problems as soon as possible.

Issue 3: Page Speed

Page speed is also a key performance indicator for organic rankings. Search engines are serious about page speed. Pages that are slow to load will drop in organic rankings. With Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, it is easy to test page speed.  Add a URL, and PageSpeed insights will analyze the page and offer solutions for improvements.

Slow page speed could be a result of broken scripts, server overload, or large image files.

Issue 4: Competitors Are Ranking Better

There are always going to be competitors competing for the same keywords. So another possibility for poor rankings could be that your competitors are doing a better job. Maybe they optimized their pages better, or have more backlinks.

To get ahead, analyze those competitor pages. There are plenty of competitor research tools available. With the competitor research tools, merchants can learn quite a bit about competitors, their marketing strategy and learn ways to make adjustments based on those findings.

Search Rankings Require Regular Attention

The real key to success search rankings is to make SEO a priority. Technical issues can arise accidentally, and competitors will always be working to win. Regularly monitor the website and take care in how pages and content are updated to avoid mistakes. With weekly or monthly evaluations, it is possible to find issues and work to correct them quickly. Being vigilant is critical because even if pages are ranking well now, that doesn’t mean they always will.

To learn more about SEO and organic rankings or to learn why your site is ranking poorly, contact us today!

Merchants put a lot of effort into attracting new customers through SEO, PPC or social media marketing to name a few. However, attracting new customers is only half of the battle if they do not make a purchase. Merchants need to convince customers to convert. Abandoned carts and conversion rate optimization are struggles that merchants of every size experience.

In fact, eCommerce merchants collectively missed out on $7 trillion in abandoned shopping carts in 2017.  With much time, effort, and money spent on getting customers to the checkout, it’s tough to lose a conversion at the last second.

For merchants experiencing abandoned cart issues, here are a few ways to increase conversions.

Identify The Problem

The first thing to do is identify why customers are leaving their carts. There could be several factors at play, and it’s important to recognize them all. There are a few common factors among sites that see high cart abandonment rates, which include:

• Surprise fees, such as taxes or shipping
• Forcing the user to create an account before checkout
• A complicated or lengthy checkout process
• Trained customer base to wait for a promo

Analyzing the check out process from start to finish is critical. Do any of the above factors apply? One way to receive feedback on the shopping experience is to ask customers directly. For instance, ensure your sales and service team is in constant communication with your eCommerce team to convey customer comments and issues so they can be identified and resolved. A survey is also a great way to learn why some customers are abandoning their cart, and learn more about the user experience as a whole. It is becoming more common for site visitors to begin checkout and then intentionally stop, waiting for the best promo email to come their way. Then they circle back to complete their order after receiving a coupon code.

Fix the Problem

Once potential abandonment issues are identified, it’s important to resolve them. For example, on matters concerning shipping costs, be sure to show taxes and shipping rates as soon as possible. Notably, 61% of customers said they abandoned a cart due to high shipping rates. Make those costs known upfront and before customers reach the final checkout page.

For issues concerning an account required checkout, consider implementing a guest checkout option. With 35% of customers noting that they abandoned their cart due to needing to create an account, it would be prudent to offer this option. Conveniently, Magento merchants can implement a guest checkout option in the admin.

For more tips to streamline the check out process, read more about the path to purchase shopping experience.

There are plenty of ways to streamline the checkout process, and the effort to do so will pay off in conversions.

Bring Customers Back

Even merchants with a seamless checkout process will experience cart abandonment – it’s just part of the game. Customers may experience interruptions while shopping, and then forget to come back and finish the purchase. One way to get customers to return to their carts is with an abandoned shopping cart eMail strategy that includes eMail reminders. Personalized, timely retargeting eMails will move leads through the sales funnel at the right time.

Notably, eMail doesn’t have to be a chore, but it does require a well-thought strategy and seamless execution. One merchant found that sending a reminder eMail 30 minutes after a customer left their cart led to conversions. Further, the 30-minute reminder eMail strategy recovered 7.9% of what would have otherwise been lost sales.

Don’t Let Customers Get Away

High shopping cart abandonment rates can be frustrating, but they can also be an indicator of a more significant problem and an opportunity for growth. Analyzing and resolving shopping cart issues is a great way to enhance the user experience for customers and increase conversions and sales.

To learn more about cart abandonment and ways to streamline the checkout process, contact us to get started on your eCommerce project.

In the early years of the World Wide Web, the ideas and standards of fleshing out a website were in its infancy. The codependency of HTML usage and finding a site in a search engine was also beyond the horizon of understanding at that time. As HTML developed and elements (i.e. “tags”) were created and retired, the structure of a web page became more standardized and the way search engines handled delivering quality websites to your desktop was (and still is) under constant development. The way the developers, designers, content creators, and search engines all understood how and why things should be structured eventually started to become a science as well as an art.

In the past, search engines simply looked for “keywords” to decide if your web page was important to the searcher. Then came the consideration of content and how many words were on the page (because if someone is writing a 5-page article on a topic, then their web page must really have a lot of information on that topic and be really useful, right?). Fast-forward to the Google-ized world of today and we have very intelligent search engines powered by very complex A.I. algorithms that consider everything from keywords, to content length, to whether all of those keywords and content are actually relevant to the search, and finally, how well structured that content is on the web page as well as how the entire website is structured.

This all leads back to where a developer fits in, as they are the ones who actually build out informative and beautiful websites. That  provides compelling and informed web pages for the precise topic you were searching, without fail.

Eight Technical SEO Tips From A Developer

1. Page Structure

A web page has three primary sections: head, body, and footer. The head (HTML element <head>) contains other elements with directives to tell the software loading the page (your browser) what exactly the page is structured on, what assets are necessary to build out the page (calls to CSS and JavaScript components) and also what basic information describes the page you (or a web crawler) are viewing, found in the metadata elements (<title>, <meta name=”keywords”>, and <meta name=”description”>).

The body (element <body>) of the page contains the main content of the page. This is where the meat is, where all of those headings and paragraphs of information are laid out. The structure and focus of this section are also extremely important, as there is a specific way to handle the content for both the human and the robot reader (i.e. search bots). More on this later in the article.

2. Metadata

As implied by their tags and attributes, these sections provide the primary title of the page, plus the short description (typically used in search engines), and any keywords that help target the page for search engines. These sections are likely the simplest to create, and also the simplest to get terribly wrong for SEO. In fact, due to abuse of the keywords meta, it’s often overlooked by modern search engines, but will be considered by some so it’s still useful to keep as long as it’s set up correctly.

Having a “correct” keywords meta simply means supplying only the keywords relevant to the page, and those should be kept to a minimum since the target subjects of the page shouldn’t be more than a few words anyway. Also, keep in mind that this relative to the page it’s on and not the entire website!

The title and description metas should contain keywords as well, but just like the keywords section itself, they should be concise and focused. If they are too short, they aren’t informative. Too long, and they’re distracting and tend to lose focus. As simple as these elements may seem, maybe almost too simple, they are very important when it comes to the initial “snapshot” of your page. Think of them almost as the “business card” that will be indexed by the search engines.

3. HTML Headings

This is the part that also seems to baffle many web developers and content creators since the true intent of these headings is often misunderstood. Most who have ever created or altered a web page quickly learned that choosing an <h1> or <h2> or <h3> tag when placing text on a page meant changing how big or small and how bold (or not) the fonts were. It’s simple web design because you don’t have to choose font-size and boldness (and depending on the design platform, the actual font used) when putting anything on a page. The downside to quick designing is that you may be placing incorrect and/or multiple iterations of headings all over your page without even realizing it. Which might look just fine to the human reader, but a robot web crawler trying to figure out the design and structure of your page is pulling its ever-loving bolts out.

So here’s the secret: Think of your web page (and overall website) structure like the table of contents section of a book. You want a clean and well-structured listing of headings and subheadings that organize all of your information accurately and logically.

Headings (i.e. heading tags) are numbered from 1 to 6 in level of importance. The main heading of your page (the “title” of your article”) should be inside an <h1> element. The subsequent headings on the page should be represented by the next level of importance: <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, etc. There should never be another <h1> on your page unless it is declaring an entirely new section that holds the same level of importance as the <h1> before. Since most web pages almost never would do this, it really shouldn’t ever be present.

Here’s an image for  as an example of what your page should look like:

In the above image, you can see there can even be multiple sections to your page where a navigation menu and a sidebar may exist above or alongside the body, but the body’s <h1> heading is the primary heading of the page that describes what all of the underlying content will support. The <h2> subheadings mark out each major section beneath the primary heading, and so on. As a caveat, the footer section does not necessarily need header tags for the sections under it. Since the footer often simply links to other pages, but if there are even brief descriptions under those headings (some design templates provide boxes to allow for a short content description) then it would be helpful to stick to the format of headings listed above.

4. “Alt” and “Title” Attributes for Images

These image attributes are at best misused (or poorly used) and at worst are completely overlooked. Not only are these attributes helpful for your SEO, but they are mandatory in what’s becoming an area of increasing importance: ADA Compliance.

The “alt” and “title” attributes are available for all images and are intended to provide extra information that a web crawler “bot” can’t obtain from the image itself (since bots can’t “see” images). For example:

<img src=”images/happycat.jpg” alt=”A happy cat, drinking some milk from a dish.” title=”Happy cat drinking milk.” />

Not only does the image filename itself help search engines figure out what the image might be about and whether it’s relevant to the page on which it’s located, but the “alt” attribute helps provide a concise description of the image, while the “title” attribute provides something even more direct and concise. Both of the attributes help users with disabilities view web pages using a “web reader” that will seek out these attributes and describe the images on the page to the end-user who may otherwise have difficulty seeing the image.

Again, adding these attributes not only helps the web crawlers decide what your page and its assets might be providing information, but also shows you took the time to ensure your page can be completely indexed and digested by search engines. As well as be understood and accessible to all end users who may find your page a valuable source of information regardless of their abilities or impairments.

5. Sitemaps

Sitemaps are files that provide a “map” of your website for web crawlers and search engines. They can tell search engines which pages on your site are most important thus, what to crawl first. As well as provide other metadata such as, when pages were last updated thus, when they need to be indexed again.

The inclusion of a sitemap is especially important when launching a new website without a lot of external links pointing to it, as web crawlers spend a limited time crawling a website on a single visit. By providing a sitemap, a web crawler will make the most of each visit from one of those external links, crawling priority pages first and ignoring pages that have not been updated since its last visit.

6. Web Analytics

It is important that web developers setup web analytics for any site they build, as well as give the appropriate individuals access to the analytics dashboard. Examining the keywords users are searching for when they find your site, as well as noting how users click through it, can aid in the tailoring of content, both to search engines and to users.

7. 404 Errors

Site quality is very important to high search rankings and quality score is greatly impacted when a website throws errors to the web crawlers indexing it. The more 404 “Page Not Found” errors a website has, the worse it does. Use Google’s Search Console or your web analytics dashboard to find any errors and be sure to remove the dead links promptly. If an external link is generating a lot of traffic for your site, but is going to a dead or improperly formatted URL, consider setting up a redirect to send traffic to a working page.

8. Page Load Times

Bounce rates, the chance users have to navigate away from a site after viewing only one page, increase astronomically the longer it takes a web page to load. According to Google, a two second increase in load time from one second to two seconds increases the bounce rate by 32%, while an increase from one second to five seconds increases it by 90%.

A web developer can do many things to aid page load speed. Such as decrease the size of a page by optimizing image file sizes and compressing CSS and JavaScript files.

The know-how of a developer is vital for proper search engine optimization of a website. If you think your website needs a technical review, please contact us to learn more about the SEO services we have on offer.

This year, is improving your marketing accountability and growing your business at the top of your goal list? If your eCommerce business has been struggling to make the most of your marketing dollars, then try this on for size this year: make your marketing efforts more accountable!

You don’t need more arbitrary marketing that you simply hope will bring in the customers your business needs. Instead, find ways to make your marketing count and discover how well it’s working for you. Data from Forbes suggests that using data-driven marketing strategies can help increase your marketing success by 5% or more.

Five Ways to Make Your Marketing Efforts More Accountable

1. Create Specific, Attainable Goals

It’s easy to fall into the trap of setting intangible goals. You want to increase your marketing success, bring in more sales, and add more people to your mailing list. Creating marketing accountability, however, means taking it beyond vague goals and creating specific numbers that you consider to be a measure of success. For example, would you like to raise sales by 10% over the next quarter? Increase mailing list signups by 25%?

Setting goals that you can measure won’t just give you a way to evaluate success. It will also provide your marketing team with a benchmark to help them see how well they’re performing.

2. Watch the Right Metrics

Many merchants and business owners fall into the trap of watching vanity metrics. Vanity metrics look great on paper but don’t really contribute to the success of your business. For example, a thriving blog may draw in plenty of visitors on a daily basis, but if they aren’t making purchases or turning to your business with their purchases, these aren’t effective visits.

Another example. Social media likes and follows are great, but are they genuinely contributing to your business’s overall success and ROI? Make sure that you’re watching the right metrics. How many customers are you moving through the sales funnel? How are your sales working? Are you constantly struggling to bring in new customers, or is it easy for your business to attract repeat customers? Define the metrics that are right for you to watch your marketing efforts thrive.

3. Use the Right Tools

Talk with your marketing department to make sure that they have the right tools on hand to meet their marketing goals. Do they have a scalable website site that can support a massive traffic spike during sales and promotions? Is there solid analytics software in place to help measure traffic, check your site’s pages, and evaluate the search terms that are bringing visitors to your site?

With the right tools, your marketing team is able to accomplish more while reporting a better picture of what they’re accomplishing.

4. Know How to Target Specific Customers

Do you know how your customers’ past purchases relate to their current and future needs?  How can bring them back for another purchase? How can customer interaction teach your team more? Make sure your marketing team is taking advantage of that opportunity to learn more about customers’ needs and create targeted marketing for future efforts. Making a consistent effort to analyze your customers is a great way to increase customer lifetime value with a comparatively minimal expense.

5. Keep Measuring

Once you’ve set your goals and taken the steps necessary to attain them, make sure you’re keeping track of the marketing team’s successes! By evaluating those goals and checking in on their progress on a regular basis, you’ll find that you’re better positioned to maintain accountability and make the most of your marketing dollars. With an accountable marketing strategy, merchants have the agility to make changes quickly when numbers start to drop during slow seasons. The right data and numbers are invaluable to an agile marketing team.

This year, marketing accountability should be your primary focus for your business. If you need help with marketing accountability, contact us today to discover how we can help make that critical difference for your eCommerce business.

For eCommerce, digital marketing is absolutely crucial.

Regardless of the products you sell, you have to make sure that your audience learns about them and moves toward conversion on your website in some way. You probably already know as much. But what do you do when your digital marketing efforts aren’t working? When, regardless of your monthly spend on social media, paid search, and other avenues, you don’t get the conversions and transactions you need to meet your sales goals and grow your business?

In that case, not all is lost. Instead, a lack of digital success sends a signal to re-evaluate your current efforts and find opportunities for improvement.

From analyzing your customer journey to improving your eMail efforts, here are four steps you should take to revitalize your digital marketing efforts.

1. Reassess Your Audience

Even the best digital marketing message and strategy will not work if you simply target the wrong people. Consider the hypothetical example of a fitness and nutrition merchant whose marketing efforts reach audiences with little to no interest in fitness. The message, visuals, and value proposition might be spot on, but if it doesn’t reach the right individuals interested in fitness, that message will not resonate.

In examples like the one above, the targeting mistake is obvious. But often, more subtle miscues can lead to the same lack of results. Too many merchants make one of two mistakes in determining the audience for their digital marketing efforts. They either choose their desired audience based on a hunch or target their messages too broadly based on the traditional shotgun approach.

Merchants can earn a lot of information by examining their current customers. To get started, limit your targeting just to them at first. Go a step further and break down your current customers. Who are your highest-converting customers? Which portion of your customer base offers the greatest lifetime value? By examining these two groups, they will begin to display common characteristics. With this data, you can build and adjust your digital marketing strategy to a wider group with a greater chance of success.

In other words, one key to digital marketing success is to move away from the traditional shotgun approach. Seek out the most relevant and profitable segment of your target audience, and develop a strategy specifically designed to reach and convince them.

2. Analyze Your Customer Journey

Optimizing your target audience, of course, is only one step on the way to digital marketing success. In addition, you also have to make sure that your individual tactics and messages fall in line with audience expectations and pain points.

Depending on your industry, your audience may experience a very different journey on their way to becoming customers. If you sell convenience products, purchasing decisions are made in the moment, with little research. More complex alternatives prompt research, comparisons with your competitors, and other steps that lengthen the buyer’s journey.

Part of the reason your digital marketing efforts are failing may be a lack of consideration regarding the path to purchase. Put simply, you need to understand not just your audience, but also the ways in which they act and interact online. For products like yours, what research do they conduct to convince them it’s the right choice? Where do they conduct that research, and who do they trust most in making that decision?

In the same vein, you also want to consider just how your audience views your digital marketing efforts in context. Potential customers don’t read eMails, Facebook ads, and product pages on your website in isolation. The content, tone, and value proposition of each has to be integrated to provide a consistent picture, avoiding fragmentation and cognitive dissonance.

3. Dig Deep into Analytics

Another crucial step to take when your digital marketing efforts do not result in conversions is to take a close look at your analytics. If at all possible, try to identify the exact points of failure by looking at data points most relevant to your conversion and business growth goals. Some metrics to pay special attention to include:

• Web conversion rates, separated by variables like referral channel and tactic.
• Exit points, or the pages and tactics that are most likely to lose your audience before conversion.
• Micro conversions, such as visits to your pricing pages and long stays on your website that do not lead to immediate purchases.
• Bounce rate, or the percentage of web visitors who leave after only viewing a single page.
• Lead to close ratio, particularly in relation to your individual marketing channels.

A deep dive into your analytics will also allow you to determine which part of your digital marketing strategy does work. You might find, for instance, that your paid search ads actually result in clicks and lead conversions, but your eMail follow-ups are not sufficient to provide consistent customer yield. That, in turn, can drive improvements in your eMail marketing that better leverages your existing successes.

Finally, even in digital marketing, it makes sense to go beyond quantitative analytics. When possible, gauge your audience’s opinion about your digital marketing and online presence in general by talking to them directly. For example, point-of-sales surveys help you determine how your customers heard about you, which messages resonated most, and more.

4. Improve Your eMail Efforts

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to take a closer look at your eMail marketing efforts. Even the most successful digital ads matter little if the leads they generate do not end up resulting in purchases. And even when they do, a better eMail marketing strategy can help you improve your customer retention rate and lifetime value.

Done right, eMail remains the single most effective digital tool available for any merchant. One study found that eMail marketing can boast a 4300 percent ROI, while another showed significant improvement in engagement, conversions, and customer value as a result of personalized eMails before and after the transaction. You might get attention to your products through paid ads and other digital tactics, but eMail is the key to helping you leverage that attention into actual revenue.

With the right eMail marketing platform, you can improve the way in which you nurture your existing prospects. You can re-engage cold prospects, and keep new customers involved and engaged with new products and sales. You can build a personal relationship with each customer through better messaging that ultimately results in higher transaction rates and revenue.

Refocus your digital marketing efforts and get back on track

Your digital marketing efforts might be failing in a number of ways. But ultimately, the point of conversion tends to be the biggest pain points for eCommerce merchants across industries. If you have a great product and message, you will get the attention of your audience. But you also have to make sure that this attention actually results in revenue for your business.

eMail marketing can be the boost you need to help in that regard – if you get it right. That means not just sending the occasional message, but building a comprehensive eMail strategy that leverages the timing of your send, your audience’s behaviors, and their individual pain points into a more effective conversion journey.

And of course, you need to have the right eCommerce platform to get to that point. InteractOne offers development solutions specifically designed for eCommerce merchants while helping to refresh any failing marketing efforts and improving your strategy as a whole.

Contact us to start the conversation, and to grow your business through the process of more effective digital marketing.

Digital marketing takes a giant leap forward with each passing year to help businesses of all kinds generate new customers and increase revenue. Below are some of the top trends digital marketers will be using in 2018.

Five 2018 Digital Marketing trends to try in the new year.

1. Create a content series

If there’s one thing businesses have learned with respect to digital marketing, it’s that creating good content is really, really hard. You need an aim, a purpose, motivation, and good creative skills.

A great way to give your content marketing campaign direction and bring users back is to create a content series. Practical Ecommerce article explains how this strategy can keep your audience engaged:

“While it may be beyond your business’s means to create a streaming video service, you can produce original content, publish it on a regular schedule, and use it to keep your audience of potential customers engaged. In 2018, create a series of podcasts, videos, or even books. Publish them on a predictable schedule, and create a following for your content and your business.”

A content series gives consumers something to look forward to. You’re able to go more in-depth with each episode, and consumers can always catch up by starting at the beginning of the series.

2. Go mobile-friendly

If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website by now, then you’ve likely already driven thousands of leads away from your business. Mobile users have no patience for slow, clunky sites that were clearly designed for desktops.

We always knew that at some point, the average business would have to prioritize mobile over desktop when it comes to website design. We think that point will come in 2018. Especially if your target audience is young, consider designing your site for smartphones and tablets first and worrying about desktops later.

3. Invest in Instagram

Facebook has been the go-to social media site for marketers for years. That might finally change in 2018.

Instagram is showing no signs of slowing down. This Entrepreneur article predicts it to become the most important channel for brands in the new year:

“In 2017, Instagram announced that approximately 800 million people use the platform each month. Their latest tool, Instagram Stories, became more popular than Snapchat just one year after going live. Since brands tend to see better engagement on Instagram than any other social media platform, and because of great advertising controls, Instagram is poised to become the go-to channel for brands interested in social media marketing.

“Instagram has everything: pictures, videos, stories, influencers, ads, and so on. It passed Twitter long ago and is now creeping up on Facebook.

As an added bonus, Instagram lets you send DMs to anyone. It’s perfect for generating leads and getting in touch with influencers.

4. Create more videos

There’s a reason why so many businesses are investing in video marketing. Videos are engaging, immersive, and great content to share on social media.

We expect that trend to continue in 2018. Create some room in your budget to create a video and put it on your homepage. You can also combine this strategy with the content series. By creating short, informative videos with professional editing, you can increase your brand awareness and establish credibility.

5. Get a chatbot

Many marketers are predicting chatbots to become widespread in the upcoming year. You’ve probably already interacted with one before. Typically, they’re set to trigger after a user spends a few seconds on a website. They are then prompted to contact the business.

Chatbots are either powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or real people. Either way, they’re great for getting in touch with leads and prompting them to contact your business.

To talk more about the 2018 digital marketing trends detailed above or anything else, contact us today.