20
Aug/10

Cheap E Commerce Websites

by raesea under Business, Ecommerce, Small Business, Web Design, web marketing

We’ve all see these companies that offer really cheap do it yourself e commerce websites for a low monthly fee but are they really any good?

One of the most important things to remember when opening an online store is that you are competing against other companies that have been around for years.  You aren’t just going to get your products online and immediately start selling them.  You are going to have to convince people to buy from your website and your online store.  If it looks like it’s cheap compared to your competitors then they probably think your products are cheap and most likely won’t buy from you.

Treat your e commerce website like you would a brick and mortar business.  Think about the design and build it to sell not just to be functional.

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19
May/10

Website Tip of the Day

by raesea under Business, Conversions, Marketing, Small Business, Web Design, technology, web marketing

Sell your services on your website.

Some people believe it is enough to just put up a good looking website and put up information about their company. Once they do that…they think they are done. Even if you are doing SEO and/or online advertising you need to do more. We can’t stress this enough. Your website’s content should be selling your services and not just presenting people with your information.

Ideas for doing this include:

  • Creating Specials or Coupons on Your Website
  • Speaking to Your Competitors
  • Explaining Why Someone Should Choose You
  • Don’t Run From Objections
  • Get Input From Your Sales People On What Customers Want to Know

These may seem very simple but they are often overlooked or skimmed over.  Countless times we ask clients for this information and it is put together with very little thought about what selling strategies currently work for their sales force.

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26
Apr/10

Measuring the Value of a New Website

by raesea under Business, Conversions, Ecommerce, Marketing, Web Design, web marketing

Measuring the value of a new website.

The following will be helpful to both web designers trying to sell a customer on a website and those inside a company pushing for a new website and trying to get the correct amount in the budget.

We are approached to build a lot of websites and the cost expectations vary from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. There are many blog posts and articles that talk about what a website should cost to build and what factors affect costs but what about for the client? Is there a value to place on the website itself? How does a company decide whether it’s worth 50K to build a new website versus 10K or keeping their existing website?
Those aren’t easy questions to answer but let’s try:

First, what does your business get from the website? Does it get leads, sales, build your brand? All of these? At the very least, your business is probably getting leads from its website. Now, these could be cold leads or they could be people who Google your company name because they were referred to your company or saw some advertising. Many companies immediately start focusing on getting more leads by getting more people to their website but that’s not the place to start. Start with determining what your conversion rate is for your current website: do you get one lead for every 20 visitors? one lead for every 10? Anything below 100% means there is room for improvement.

But how do you improve that conversion rate? Some ideas include:

• The design of the current website
• The content of the current website
• The lack of relevant information on your current website
• Your competition has a better website

How many of those visitors end up going to a competitor of yours and using their product or service? What is your current website not providing or doing that would convince these visitors to buy or use your service? Once you start thinking about these questions, you can see the value of a website. Let’s look at a scenario

Company A
• one lead is worth $1,000
• current website gets 20 leads a month which equals $20K a month from the website
• current website converts visitors into leads at a rate of 10%

Why not start your cost analysis on that 10% conversion rate? If you invest in a new website with the goal of improving conversion rates to 15% within the first year, that is going to put a dollar figure on what that website is worth to your company just in terms of existing traffic. But don’t stop there.
How many of your customers come from referrals?

Company A
• 10% of new customers were referred by current customers

Ok, so it is safe to say that if your customer base increases then your company will get more referral customers. Now there are a lot of variables here and some overlap but this will help put some more value on the website.

What about the effect a new website will have on your competition? If you increase your conversion rates with a new website then one could assume that you will decrease the conversion rates of at least one of your competitors. What kind of effect could that have:

• Competitor must spend more on advertising
• Competitor must spend more on their current website

Both of these will cut into their margins. Let’s say, for example, there are 300 people everyday searching for Alarm Companies in San Diego and 40 people sign up each day with various companies. These numbers will remain the same whether you build a new website or not. If you invest in a new website and it results in your company signing up 5 more of these people a week..that is 5 less divided up between your competitors.

Finally, think about what other expenses your company currently has and how a new website could lower or eliminate those. Let’s look at some ideas:

• FAQ section could lower the number of customer service calls and the duration of them
• Providing marketing brochures to distributors could lower the number of calls and emails from distributors looking for these
• Putting Contact information in a clear and easy to read area of the website could lower inbound calls asking for this information
• Providing pricing parameters could eliminate leads from sources that a) cannot afford your product or b) are looking for a more expensive option
• Providing employment information and openings could eliminate or reduce referral fees to recruiters

See what others you can think of.

There are several other areas that we haven’t discussed including branding that should also be taken into consideration. In some cases, your company’s website is all that many know about your company and you may only get one shot at turning them into a customer or client. Also, your company should be tracking all of this information through a variety of resources (some free and some for a fee) look for more blog posts on how to do this or contact us.

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23
Apr/10

The Value of Google Adwords

by raesea under Business, Conversions, Ecommerce, Marketing, PPC, google adwords, pay per click advertising, web marketing

The Value of Google Adwords

Many companies have tried Google Adwords at one time or another and there are varying opinions on the value of this service. There are some that will argue that AdWords is a waste of money while other companies drive nearly 100% of sales through their AdWords campaigns. How do you determine if Adwords is something your company should be doing?

First of all, Adwords should NOT be looked at as an expense…you should be making money from your Adwords campaign. And this means that if you are spending $15K a month on Adwords you need to be selling enough of your product or service to cover that $15K, plus management fees for whoever is managing those campaigns for your company. Let’s take an example:

Company A sells products on their website and

1) Spends $15,000 a month on pay per click ads through Google Adwords
2) They pay an outside agency $2500 a month to manage this for them
3) They make a profit of 25% on everything they sell

They need to sell $70,000 worth of products from their Adwords campaign to break even every month. The profit on $70K worth of products is $17,500 which would cover their $15K ad spend and $2500 management fees.

Now, they should not expect to immediately reach these goals as it takes some time to optimize an Adwords Campaign but after a few months Company A should really be close if not above this goal. If they have been running an Adwords campaign for over a year and selling less than $70K worth of products a month from Adwords then why are they running this campaign?

There are scenarios where taking a loss on Adwords might make sense:

1) Building your brand – if your company just wants to get their products into as many hands as possible. Often new companies simply want to get their products into the market as fast as possible and are not as concerned with ROI at this point. Having 30K people using your products is more important right now than making a profit off of each sale.

2) Referrals – if your product has a strong referral rate then you need to factor that into the ROI of Adwords. If your company receives a referral for every 5 products sold then that needs to be factored into your ROI for your pay per click ads. Don’t ignore the value of referrals from products sold through Adwords that you otherwise would not receive.

3) New Campaigns and/or products – don’t expect to see a strong ROI right away from your Adwords campaigns. While this does happen, every product and industry is different and it takes some time to optimize a campaign

Let’s look at some reasons why your company might not have a strong ROI on its Adwords Campaign:

Your company has chosen to manage the campaign in house instead of using an outside agency with the experience and knowledge to properly optimize your campaign. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if you want to manage your own campaign but it’s a necessity to have someone who knows what they are doing and has the time to do it properly. Your employee needs to understand how to track everything and what changes need to be made to boost your ROI or hire an agency to handle everything (like us).

You are simply bidding on the wrong keywords. This is a very common mistake in pay per click campaigns. Companies continue to bid on keywords that do not result in conversions; either leads or sales. Again, this goes back to tracking but if you have been bidding on a keyword for 4 months and it has not converted, why are you still bidding on it?

If you believe that you are managing the campaign correctly and bidding on the right keywords with the right bid then your next step is to look at your website and landing pages for your ads. Does your website sell your services and/or products? Does it emphasize your strong points and speak to objections? Is it easy to read and is the code correct in all major browsers? These are just a few questions to ask your design department and marketing department.

One rule of thumb that we like to use is to determine if your competitor is also using AdWords and bidding on the same keywords…if they are it’s a good indicator that they are getting a return on it. Now, they could be just lucky or throwing away money but someone with a good eye can usually tell if their campaigns are being run correctly and efficiently.

Google Adwords offers businesses the opportunity to sell their products to consumers who are looking online for them. Two advantages of Adwords are that they can be setup quickly and are not dependent on your search engine rankings. Companies who do not want to wait for SEO results and want to immediately start selling may benefit from Adwords.

We usually recommend that companies use a combination of Adwords and SEO in their online marketing efforts.

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21
Apr/10

What is the Value of a Website

by raesea under Business, Conversions, Ecommerce, Marketing, Small Business, Web Design, technology

Check out our Brett’s marketing in progress blog today for RaeSea’s guest post. Here’s a teaser:

We are approached to build a lot of websites and the cost expectations vary from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands. There are many blog posts and articles that talk about what a website should cost to build and what factors affect costs but what about for the client? Is there a value to place on the website itself? How does a company decide whether it’s worth 50K to build a new website versus 10K or keeping their existing website?

Those aren’t easy questions to answer but let’s try:

First, what does your business get from the website? Does it get leads, sales, build your brand? All of these? At the very least, your business is probably getting leads from its website. Now, these could be cold leads or they could be people who Google your company name because they were referred to your company or saw some advertising. Many companies immediately start focusing on getting more leads by getting more people to their website but that’s not the place to start. Start with determining what your conversion rate is for your current website: do you get one lead for every 20 visitors? one lead for every 10? Anything below 100% means there is room for improvement.

Continue Reading

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20
Apr/10

Explaining Inbound and Outbound Links

by raesea under Business, Link Building, Marketing, Search Engines, Web Site Rankings

Links are extremely important for your search engine rankings and seo but what is the difference between inbound and outbound links?

Inbound Links: (links from other websites to your website) – Inbound links greatly influence website rankings because all major search engines such as Google, use inbound links to determine how to rank websites. In general, a website with many good inbound links will have high rankings on the search engines. These links also bring visitors to your website, thus the more links you have then the more visitors and hopefully new business you have.

Outbound Links: (links from your website to other websites) – There are positive and negative aspects of outbound links and not all aspects are SEO related. Links to other websites can add value to your website by providing them more information than your website is able to. Remember, people will eventually leave your website one way or the other and having some useful outbound links will only increase the experience of your website visitors.

The negative side of outbound links: – Any website that you link to will contribute to the overall image of your own website, so you want to make sure that these 3rd party sites are both helpful and that they provide correct information. Also, too many outbound links will “leak out” page rank and actually have a negative effect on your website rankings. Simple ways to keep this from happening is to remove outbound links from pages that do not need them.

Best Link Building Strategy: – The quality of a link is very important because not all links are helpful in terms of search rankings. A few high quality links will provide more benefit than a 100 bad links. Also, links from the main pages of a website are more desirable than links from “buried” pages. A general rule is the closer to the homepage then the better the link.

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20
Apr/10

Recap of the Optimization Summit in Dallas

by raesea under Branding, Business, Internet, Marketing

We recently attended the Optimization Summit in Dallas for Social Media. The format featured four to five two-hour workshops at a time, featuring topics on branding to pricing to SEO to email marketing to social media planning.

Brett over at marketing in progress has been doing some fantastic recaps of the workshops he attended. I’d like to invite all of you to read his recap on one of the better workshops with Geno Church.

Watch this video about the non-profit organization called Love 146 and check out Brett’s entire post.

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20
Apr/10

Tech Talk

by raesea under Business, Hosting, Hotspots, Internet, SEO, Small Business, technology

Web Design

Hyperlinks are the names for a link. A link can be anything from underlined text, buttons, or an image-and when clicked, will take you to another page, or sometimes the link can take you to another area on the same page (useful for long pages).

Home Page is the first page of your website and usually just your domain name (www.example.com).

Address Bar The white bar towards the top of your browser (internet explorer or firefox). It will normally have something typed in it that starts with “http://” or “www” This is where you type in the address of a website that you want to visit. Right now it probably says “www.raesea.com/tech-talk.php”

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the website address. For example, the URL of this page is http://www.raesea.com/tech-talk.php.

HTML Hyper Text Markup Language. This is the language that is used for creating websites. Some other terms used include “html coding” and “html website”.

ISP Internet Service Provider. The company that provides you with internet access (your internet connection) and related services is your ISP. (TimeWarner, Comcast, etc)

Meta Tag Located in the head section of the html of a web page. It is visible to search engines but not human visitors unless you specifically choose to view the code. Meta tags provide information about a webpage, like the topic (title), keywords, description, etc.

Sitemap This is an index to all the pages on a website. It should be accessible from every page of the site and is used for two primary reasons: to help users find what they are looking for on the site (better navigation) and helping search engines find all the pages in a website (great for large websites).

E-commerce

Shopping Carts – A shopping cart is a piece of software that acts as the online store’s catalog and generates the ordering process. Shopping carts can be implemented two ways: 1)as a piece of software integrated into the current site with the software hosted and maintained by the current owner of the website, or 2) they can be offered as a feature from a 3rd party service that will create and host a company’s e-commerce site. This 3rd party will maintain the safety of the store and the software updates to the store.

Merchant Accounts – A merchant account is a specialized bank account issued by a merchant processing bank that allows a business to accept credit cards such as Visa and Mastercard, debit cards, gift cards and other forms of payment cards. This acceptance is also known as payment processing, credit card processing or merchant card processing.

Hosting

Web Analytics – service offered that generates detailed statistics about visitors to a website. These include how many people visited the site, how many of those visitors were new or returning visitors, how they found the website, also what keywords they typed into the search engine.

Hosting – is the company that “rents” you space on their server for your website. In order for you to have an email address or a website, a computer somewhere, with all the necessary software, has to provide you with 3 things: an IP (domain) address, physical space to store the information and bandwidth that accommodates the flow of information that is taking place on your behalf. The company that provides you with these facilities is your host and you will pay them a fee for hosting your site and or email address.

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20
Apr/10

The Importance of Search Engine Submission

by raesea under SEO, Search Engines

Should I worry about search engine submission?

There are benefits to submitting your website to a search engine before they “find it” and these include:

  • Often times you will be listed faster
  • Submitting your website will help the Search Engine understand your website from the very beginning
  • It does allow you to help keep the search engines aware of big changes to your website

Read more about search engine submission here.

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29
Apr/08

SEO does not "run itself"

by raesea1 under Internet, Marketing, SEO, Web Site Rankings

I hear this a lot.  Clients or friends will tell me “Well once you set the SEO up then it runs itself”.  Umm, no it doesn’t.  SEO is not a one time thing and often times you can put more work into it months down the line than what you do at the beginning.   There are many aspects of SEO:

  • Constantly monitoring traffic – there are so many ways to look at traffic to your site and there are also so many different things you can do to a website that affect this, almost immediately.
  • Constantly monitoring your competition – a true competitor will be adapting their tactics to yours.  The moment you thing they are sitting still and letting things “run themselves” then you will get beat in the rankings
  • Changing with the market – there are many things that can affect how people search and what they are searching for.  Things like the economy, news reports, consumer fears, and momentum.  You have have to stay on top of these trends.
  • dead language – pay attention to how people talk from month to month, this impacts the searches.

Proper SEO will not run itself.  The determining factor in your ranking is often the number of quality links and these aren’t going to magically appear.

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