Tony Sarno06 March 2007, 2:22 AM
Now that Geek Gear's up and running, it's dealing with the biggest challenge confronting any e-commerce site: getting prominence on the search engines and in customers' minds.
 The Geek Gear team getting the site listed on Google |
In this blog, Luke Amery, from our partners NetMerchant, outlines key marketing lessons from the first month of Geek Gear.
Getting visitors to a website is a relatively easy task, once you manage to list your website in any of the search engines. Geek Gear is a perfect example of this. We managed to enter Google's index around the 15th of December 2006 and that day we had visits from Eagleville, Tennessee and Oslo, Norway. Of course, these visits were very short lived, which points to the double edged sword of the web: the cost of actually receiving a visit is lower than any other medium, but the effort required to hold someone's attention is as high if not higher. Let's call it the "easy come easy go" effect.
If you have wondered how people submit websites to search engines, we have some good advice for you. By signing up for a Google Analytics account, we were scanned and added to the Google index within days. On other projects where we've manually submitted sites, it's taken up to three months to be included. In the past we had noticed this apparent penalty and avoided it opting instead to place a link on existing websites that had already been included in search engine indexes. This approach reduced the inclusion time frame down significantly, but knowing what we now know, our strategy moving forward will be to sign up for Google Analytics and use the linking strategy for the other search engines.
 Can you find Geek Gear in this Google search? |
Obviously two hits, one from the US and one from Scandinavia, is not going to result in e-commerce success. We need to try and make sure we are as close to the top for as many relevant searches as we can be. This is the art of search engine optimisation. There are many people making many claims in this field so it's wise to tread carefully when engaging an "optimiser", especially one that says they can guarantee results.
Frankly, guarantees of search engine results are a contradiction. Application of some simple common sense shows up some big flaws. Google is popular because it gives relevant results, therefore it is in Google's interest to keep results relevant. If people external to Google could manipulate the results directly how long before search results were totally irrelevant? This contention sets the stage for the cat and mouse game that search engine optimisation really is - Optimisers vs. Google Engineers. It is an ongoing battle where Google attempts to produce relevant results and Optimisers attempt to infer the algorithms Google is using to gain advantage.
Our opinion on search engine optimisation is that any trick applied to content is only a temporary win that can be possibly wiped out during the next algorithm or index update. It is much better practice to build a well structured conforming HTML site that uses the structural nature of HTML to describe the important terms within the content of the site. If this is done appropriately as soon as the website is included in the index it is a candidate for all the terms in the content that has been presented. So the next step is to concentrate on ranking.
Google and most other search engines these days pay particular attention to the number of websites pointing to your website. Each link pointing at you is like a vote vouching for your content. The higher the vote, the higher the ranking and the closer to the top of the results. Obtaining inbound links is a challenge. If there wasn't a challenge in it then it would be a poor candidate on which to base rankings.
There are things that can be done, such as inclusion into directories or link exchanges. But again, be careful here, it is more advantageous to be linked by a few high quality sites than thousands of lowly ranked ones. In fact on occasion the quality of the low rank sites can sometimes hurt the ranking effort.
Traditional advertising can be used to drive the right people to the website. The Internet has changed mainstream advertising, ads need not be a choice between brand building and message delivery anymore, it is possible to achieve both by providing a URL on the ad for people who want to learn more. The use of traditional offline media for advertising is still a very critical component for the right venture.
Online paid advertising such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing are a simple way to boost traffic to a website. It definitely works to increase visits, but to get the necessary return on paid advertising (online or offline) it's vital to ensure that what's being delivered when people arrive is worthwhile - remember easy come easy go! This is a function of finding what your customers want and targetting marketing effort at them.
When using online paid advertising services it's easy to get caught up in driving traffic to the site and then find that the actual return doesn't match the investment. I have seen plenty of Adword campaigns paying a high price for generic terms. Generic terms cast a wide net and produce a generic set of traffic. This obviously increases visitors but not necessarily the visitors that are specifically interested in your offering. It often pays to reduce your overall traffic but make it much more targeted. More specific campaigns that drive less but more targeted visitors are often more rewarding. No point in paying for clicks for passers by.
The real trick to e-commerce is trust. Can you convince the people visiting the website that you are worth "investing" in?
Some technical strategies for quickly establishing a level of trust are:
* Design, don't skimp on this, people make snap judgements in amazingly small time frames on the look of your website. It needs to look professional and it needs to build confidence.
* Website quality is critical - you can't afford to have broken links, broken images, or script errors. The website should be working for the customers, not getting in their way. Don't become a victim of easy come easy go.
* Geek Gear has applied for an EV SSL certificate. I am told we are a phone call away from being validated. An EV SSL certificate makes the browsers address bar turn green during a secured transaction. This has to help confidence during the checkout (however, a lot of things have to have gone right to get someone to this point).
Some business strategies for trust building are:
* Branding - ideally you have a brand people trust, we are attemping to create our own at Geek Gear, but we have obviously leveraged APC's brand to give it a leg up. Not everyone has a brand like APC to throw around so it is definitely a hard slog but the equation here is no different offline. Brands like Attitude clothing prove it can be done.
* Make sure you have your "red tape" in order. Have contact numbers and email addresses on your website and make sure those contact points are manned. Make sure you have a clearly labelled return policy. Take the uncertainty out of dealing with your business online. Let people know they have a place to come back to.
In most e-commerce projects my company NetMerchant has been involved in, the businesses don't start rolling until they get at least 100 visitors a day. Even with all the publicity from APC, we're well short of that number on Geek Gear. It goes to show what a long hard slog build up an online business is.