I have been on the business development team for the website WholesaleKeychain.com (WSK) since 2002. Over those years the website has gone from selling 15 to 1,500 products.
As the business grew from just selling automotive keychains to one of the largest supplier of keychains, search engine competition started to set in.
It easy to obtain a high ROI when you are the only company selling a niche product. Conversion rates from 4% – 12% are common in small non-competitive niche markets. As WSK product line grew, the company realized that conversion rates on automotive keychains were not comparable to more competitive keychains; for example digital photo keychains or heart keychains.
Since I am the internet marketer for WSK this became a huge problem. The company was not seeing a ROI when promoting the new keychains, even though they were the same marketing efforts that were working for our automotive keychains. ROI was good for automotive keychains, but not for all new keychains added to the site. Profit margins sunk to 12% in 2009 compared to a 20% to 30% profit margin in years past.
This was a problem. The reason I am writing this blog post is because I was expressing this problem to a friend and after thinking about the problem he brilliantly said, “Does anybody really care where they buy a keychain online?”
It was a question I never really thought about. Amazon.com has high customer loyalty. Websites like BestBuy.com, Walmart.com, and Walgreens.com have high customer trust. Coming to the realization that many customers could care less if they purchased a keychain from WholesaleKeychain.com or UltimateKeychains.com never occurred to me.
So I decided to analyze conversion rates for WSK top 100 organic search (Non-Paid) & PPC search (Paid Search) keywords and see if any correlation existed between ranking #1 in the Google’s Organic Search Engine Results or #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, or #10. The results are below:
Average Non-Paid Search Conversion Rate: 3.41%
Average Paid Search: 2.75%
What Did I Learn: More people trust organic search engine results than paid.
Ranking #1 vs. Ranking #2-10 in Google – Conversion Rates
Average Conversion Rate – Ranking #1: 4.25%
Average Conversion Rate – Ranking #2-#10: 3.17%
Average Conversion Rate – Ranking Page 1 – Page 2: 1.41%
What Did I Learn: More people trust a website that ranks #1 than #2-#10.
Summary: Search Engine Optimization does more than drive traffic to a website. Ranking #1 in Google also increasing your brand, reputation, and ultimately causes more products to be sold from a website.
There are a lot of reasons why you will not appear when you Google your website or company name: brand new website, no links coming back to your website, lack of ORIGINAL content, or the worst case your website was not been built search engine friendly. The last reason is the most common because it affects all the other.
What do I mean by “your website was not built search engine friendly”? There are two main parts to optimizing your website in search engines. Off page optimization (building links and content pointing to your website) and On page optimization (coding your website correctly so Google can index your website). If you don’t build your website correctly no amount of off page optimization will help because your SEO foundation will not be there. It’s like trying to sail across a lake with a huge hole in your sail.
THE BEST SEO ANALOGY EVER!!!!! This will help you understand
If you think of On page optimization (building your website so it’s search engine friendly) like building a 50 story skyscraper and Google like the people coming into your building. Each of those 50 floors is a page on your website that Google wants to see “index”. Making a website that’s NOT search engine friendly is like building that building with no elevators or stairs going to any of the floors. Google can get into the first floor but has no way of getting to any of the other floors to see what’s there.
If you build a website that is search engine friendly it’s like building that same building with elevators, stairs, and signs on all the floors. This way Google can walk in your building, know what’s on each floor, and index it correctly so it will always remembers what your building “aka website” is all about.
The next stage, off page optimization, is like putting up billboards all over the city that direct people to your building. Essentially this becomes the internet marketers’ job to find the correct billboards and put them in the right spot to move you up search engines and drive people to your building.
WHAT TO DOES THIS ALL MEAN?
Obviously there is a lot more to SEO then these two analogies but always make sure you are working with someone who knows how to build your building correctly and put your billboards in the correct spots. WebBizIdeas.com has the experience to do all of this as a one stop shop. Our doors are always open so please feel free to call us anytime for a FREE ANALYSIS.
With over 50,000 blogs created each day bloggers have become an influential voice online. Reading the FTC’s New Endorsement & Testimonial Guidelines this voice has caught the attention by quite a few people. Our company has been working on an internet business idea over the last few months called Tomoson.com that we are now revealing that will help these Bloggers, Advertisers, and Endorsers.
Problem: No organized & cost effective to generate, promote, and manage product reviews, contests, endorsements, and advertising testimonials.
Solution: Create an application that will help Bloggers, Advertisers, Endorsers, Business Owners, Product Marketers, and eCommerce Website Owners manage online product reviews & contests.
That is what Tomoson will accomplish. We have manually tested the product review & contest process through out 2009 and are in the final stages of the web application architecture. Subscribe to our blog to stay informed on development & marketing updates. Our goal at WebBizIdeas.com has always been to help people start internet businesses. The best way we have found to do that is by example. So when we mean post updates we mean we will literally tell you our entire marketing plan, show you our site architecture, design, and practically every part of the business idea before it launches!
We are looking for feedback & suggestions so don’t be shy to comment.
The problem was their website, diabetespeoples.com, did not have a substantial market share online. With many losing their health care benefits the rise of finding cheap diabetic supplies has grew substantially online.
Diabetes People’s Healthstore wanted to switch their marketing efforts online focusing heavily on search engine optimization, comparison shopping, re-design their website, and leave responsibility of increasing retail sales to a business development company; so they could focus on running the business.
The website re-design brought DiabetesPeoples.com onto the same playing field as their competitors. The professional design is eye pleasing, easy to navigate, and most importantly search engine friendly. Although our development team focused on many factors here are a few explanations of changes we made:
Product Images: Customers can not touch a product when they shop online. Good product images helps build trust for online retailers. We had our graphic designer add a liquid chrome shadow effect to all product categories to increase the brand value of the products.
SEO Architecture: The client had 106 products on their old site. Our internet marketing team performed massive keyword research for each product to ensure no SEO/link value opportunities would be missed in our future marketing efforts. Our team re-wrote each Product Title, Page Title, and Meta Keywords to match the search engine behavior of Diabetic Buyers. Breaking up the products by both categories & brands will eventually allow us to rank the client on the first page for keywords such as Accu-Chek, Ascensia, Easy Touch, Freestyle, BD, Medisense Optium, One Touch, Precision Xtra, SurceComfort, and others.
SEO Content Writing: Our content writing team collaborated with our internet marketers to ensure product descriptions were also receiving the maximum amount of value for keywords we will be targeting in the future. Great care was taken to write product descriptions with the proper keyword density, the right medical terminology, and most importantly to SELL.
Comparison Shopping: Our eCommerce Development process includes an application called ‘Data Feed Manager.’ What a data feed manager does for an online store is gives the ADMIM the ability to export all product information. This data feed can then be easily uploaded to comparison shopping sites like Shopping.com, BizRate.com, Shopzilla.com, NexTag.com, PriceGrabber.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo Shoppping, Google Shopping, and more.
Link Development: Our internet marketing team has started the long process of building high valued one-way links. We will update you on this process in the future.
Integrating with USPS API is easy if you know what you’re doing, unfortunately usps.com doesn’t help much when it comes to this. Here is what you need to do to make the software work with USPS (this was written for version 3.6.3).
Step 1. Go to here: http://www.usps.com/webtools/ and click the sing up by the Access USPS Website Tools in the right side.
Step 2. Fill out the information and wait for an email to come to you. They say it will take 24 hours but it normally takes about 20 minutes. (make sure to check your junk email)
Step 3. In the email you will see a username and password. Pay attention to that and the phone number at the bottom. The rest of the email is useless to you because it’s about testing information that is irrelevant to pinnacle cart.
Step 4. Go into your admin area, rollover cart settings, shipping management, click real time shipping configurations, then scroll down to the USPS section. Where it says: USPS Web Tools User ID. Copy and paste the username from the USPS API email.
Step 5. Call the number at the bottom of the email (ICCC Staff) to activate the production url. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t test the url because pinnacle cart has already done that for you. In about 5 minutes you will get another email with your production API url. The call may take some time so feel free to email, but I would rather hang on the phone and make sure it got done. (MAKE SURE TO CHECK YOUR JUNK EMAIL)
Step 6. Copy the production url from the new email you got from USPS. It should look something like this: http://production.shippingapis.com/ShippingAPI.dll . Make sure you paste this url to BOTH SECTIONS: Server URL for USPS Rating Too and Server URL for USPS Tracking Tool. IMPORTANT, if you don’t call to activate your username this will NOT WORK. You need to take step 5 to make sure this is activated. Don’t use the secure url because this will not work also.
Step 7. Once you have activated the API url you can click on the real time methods tab at the top of the page (you are still in the shipping methods page). On this page you will need to select all the USPS methods from the Carrier Method Name box (it will say international methods at the top of the box in bold and italic). Good USPS shipping methods to select are: USPS express, USPS standard postal, USPS priority are all normal shipping methods you can offer. The others are for more unique situations but if you want to offer them I would suggest contacting your local post office to understand what they are. You can also scroll down further to offer international shipping in the same section.
Step 8. As you select carrier method names it will default the rest of the settings on the page. I would suggest keeping those settings because 99% of them are correct. Make sure to add all the shipping methods individually.
Step 9. The last step is making sure you add weight to each of your products. If you don’t have a weight on each product this shipping method will not work. To add weight rollover categories/products, then manage products. From here you can click on the edit icon to change the weight on each product.
I hope this helped you set up your USPS shipping method in pinnacle cart. If you need any more help please contact www.webBizIdeas.com for custom website design and business development.
This is Jeff Foster, I am the Internet Marketing Director for WebBizIdeas.com. I wanted to give you a brief overview of an idea I had suggested to you earlier.
Online Advertising Spending (Automotive Market): Despite a struggling economy (especially within the automotive industry) 0nline automotive advertising increased by 17.70% from 2006 to 2007. In fact according to a report on the automotive advertising, produced by Borrell Associates, showed one of the greatest disruption in consumer buying habits was the internet; meaning consumers change their decision on what car they buy (right before they buy) by using the internet…That is one large reason why automotive companies are pouring money into online advertising.
Automotive Clubs (Market): I estimate 25,000 Automotive Clubs world-wide. I was able to produce a database of 2,500 U.S. Automotive Clubs by just searching in Google! If the average membership of these clubs were 50 people, it would bring the market to 1,250,000 automotive owners who are club members. Many of these clubs charge a yearly membership fee, leaving 1,250,000 potential customers paying a residual monthly or yearly fee.
Automotive Clubs (Website Design): I can say from experience automotive clubs have extremely poor websites. Many automotive clubs are non-profit organizations with websites created by a member with limited programming & design knowledge. End result, many automotive clubs need a website or a better website.
Initial Research: I talked to the marketing director at http://www.corvettesnccc.org/. Their organization encompasses over 100,000+ corvette owners world-wide! They disclosed that web development within their clubs is a large concern, but the club lacks the capital and time to build a custom site. They are looking for a free or inexpensive way to do this.
Automotive Club Community: (this is the idea)
I want to build a community for Automotive Clubs owners to help them manage their members. The website would be free at first to register for members & club owners. Club Owners would receive a ‘business’ profile and car owners would receive a ‘user’ profile.
Automotive Clubs would be able to create their own club website, post events, list sponsors, list members, recruit members, upload club pictures & videos, and most importantly manage their members.
Club owners would choose if their club would be public or private. They would be able to decide if how much to charge members for yearly membership fees. Each club would be able to mass e-mail all members informing them of events. They would have an easy & free way to manage their own club website.
Users would be able to search for clubs by city, state, and country. Users would be able to request to join clubs. Users would also be able to create their own profile and communicate with other car owners.
The website would make money (1) charging a fee to process yearly membership fees (2) charging a listing for classic cars for sale in a ‘classifieds’ section (3) Cross promotion within the Automotive Industry (4) Selling Customer Databases or Providing an Advertising Mailing Service to Targeted Car Owners (5) Advertising.
These are just five ways the community could make money. A good internet business owner knows that although he “owns” the website, the community also “owns” the website. A good internet business owner will analyze & listen to his members to find additional revenue models. As this business grows additional revenue models can be developed. We already have a great domain name, I am an expert in search engine optimization, and our company specializes in building social networking software.
If you have the capital to build & market & maintain this business we have the resources to make this internet business successful.
Finances Needed: $50,000-$120,000
Programming: Website Architecture & Blueprints are needed to determine (under 1,250 hours)
Graphic Design: Less than 100 hours
Initial Advertising Material: $5,000 – $25,000
Marketers: $500 – $5500 a month from WebBizIdeas.com
Domain: Already have talked & met with the owner of AutomotiveClubs.com
Multiple high quality images are the secret to any great jewelry website. When I was ring shopping with my fiancée we must have looked at twenty different websites. The jewelry websites that kept our interest and got our business had high quality images. They didn’t have any crazy coding or fancy ecommerce application. They were really simple with multiple images at different angles.
Keeping it simple focused our attention on the jewelry and if we wanted to purchase or not. We could easily see pieces we liked and examine them in more detail. The most important part about high quality images was it showed the differences between the jewelers. We could see the craftsmanship between the different jewelry. Without the high quality images all the jewelry would have looked the same to me.
Some of the websites had rotating features that panned around the entire piece of jewelry. That’s a great feature but doesn’t need to be there if you’re on a budget.
Here are some examples of sites with high quality images and some with low quality images. Which would you purchase from???
Google is rolling out new applications since they now have a new platform; Google Caffeine. There new launch is a product called Google Social Search. This new search is important in two main ways for business owners which you need to be aware of:
Business owners need to heavily promote & manage social sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,Linkedin, and others. It also means photo sharing sites such as Picasa Web Albums & Flicker are important. It also means means blogs & local search sites such as yelp and citysearch are important….SO PROMOTE SOCIAL SITES IN WEB DESIGN. sites like CJ.com are pretty obvious that they want people to follow them from their home page.
Importance #2
Business owners need Quality Content. Why? When you are signed into your Google account (many business owners are always signed in) Google is showing results from Social Circles in the result! How crazy is that.
That means if we get all of our clients to follow us on Twitter, or all interested business owners to connect with us on Linkedin, or people follow us on YouTube.com. THIS MEANS WHEN WE PUBLISH NEW CONTENT THEY SEE THAT CONTENT IN THE SEARCH RESULTS.
Wow? What a great way to target your target market. Google is practically telling everyone with this new addition that CONTENT is the new LINK VALUE online!
MINNEAPOLIS, MN — Internet marketing expert Jeff Foster will host two free webinars designed to teach businesses and website owners how they can increase search engine traffic using proven internet marketing practices.
The one-hour webinar, titled ‘How to Increase Search Engine Rankings’ will be offered on both January 15th and February 16th from 11:00 AM to noon EST – at no cost to attendees.
A webinar offers the same educational benefits of an instructor-led seminar. However, because it is conducted entirely online, costs and logistical problems associated with live training are eliminated. Participants simply log into a secured website and have access to live video and audio.
Google jumps on the social networking bandwagon and has introduced SearchWiki. When a user is signed into their Google Account and does a search in Google they will see new tools next to each search result. These tools allow users to move / delete / add / comment on search results. Although the comments can be made public (only to others who are signed into their Google Account) the positions they change are only visible to them.
SEO Implications
Although Google has publicly said SearchWiki will have NO affect currently on normal organic search results, the future could. Google is always looking to make their search results better and knowing if 10,000 users don’t want to see a Wikipedia result #1 for every search result may be great information.
