3 Ways Ecommerce Websites Can Grow or Maintain Organic Search Traffic

Given the measurement, SERP, and PLA challenges, what can an e-commerce site do to maintain or even grow their organic search traffic? Three things:

1. Adjust for Tracking Issues

To quote Tony Stark, "It’s an imperfect world, but it’s the only one we’ve got." In this imperfect world of attribution, it’s important to recognize that:

• You can’t rely purely on your analytics system;
• You must adjust your organic search reporting to estimate "no query" and "mobile" traffic properly for more accurate numbers; and
• All attribution models have inherent biases, so interpretation and intuition are critical - don’t just rely on last click. Ask questions about your assumptions and the implications of each attribution model you use. Last click is a poor representation of the value of organic search given that consumers may begin their journey on organic search, but end it via an affiliate program or a branded paid search ad. Plus, with more consumers beginning their purchasing process on smartphones, connect the dots between a first click on mobile and a purchase in-store or elsewhere online.

2. Measure and Mitigate Cannibalization

Rankings alone won’t cut it if the starting line for organic results is further down the page. So, periodically test a sample of queries (ideally from the head, torso and long-tail) to see how the SERPs evolve over time.

Looking for relationships – correlation and causation – between the locations on the SERP, organic ranking for that query, conversions and revenue can be quite revealing. As many have noted, ranking first in both the organic and paid results for any given query solidifies the brand’s reputation with the customer and increases conversions. Also, as you’re thinking about organic, work with agencies and solution providers that have technology and expertise across both organic and paid search.

3. Get Strategic

Continuing the status quo without any creativity and optimization will yield diminishing returns and/or increasing costs-per-acquisition. If the head and torso clicks are drying up, look to the long-tail to make up ground.

In the long-tail, there is less competition (both for organic and paid, which means there’s often less downward pressure on the organic-listing location on the SERPs) and stronger signals of customer intent. Strategically targeting the long-tail in a scalable way can pay dividends.

If faced with less organic traffic, make sure those clicks you do get turn into customers. Work with the rest of your e-commerce team to make it effortless for those prospects to find what they are looking for, whether on the desktop or mobile device.

When you measure and optimize, net-new customers will still come walking through your virtual door. Plus, in an age when Amazon reigns over many categories, acquiring, converting and cultivating net-new customers is the key to unlocking more revenue potential.

Know more in detail about 3 Ways Ecommerce Websites

Read more

How Panda-Proof Your Website

Since Panda first hit the scene two years ago, thousands of sites have been mauled. SEO forums are littered with site owners who have seen six figure revenue websites and their entire livelihoods evaporate overnight, largely because they didn’t take Panda seriously.

Last year Google unleashed the most aggressive campaign of major algorithm updates ever in its crusade to battle rank spam. This year looks to be more of the same.

When you have a business or blog hosted online, you need steady and huge amount of traffic to the site. It should also be user friendly to drive the traffic. Attracting organic traffic from search engines can be the effective and cheapest way. But post panda effect, online marketers feel attracting traffic from search engines has become relatively tough. Google panda is a set of algorithms designed to get rid of low quality hosting websites or which are less user friendly.

Five Tips in Panda-proofing Your Website

• Avoid depending on auto generated content, this content are not on the favorites of search engines. If a search engines recognizes such content on your site, it will be regarded as spam content. And you might lose your traffic. 
•  
• Try to write unique content as your posts every time, pay specific attention on the length of the posts as well. A well detailed and lengthy post is entitled to be useful to the user as it will contain more information on that specific topic. The length of the posts should be at least 400 words and get rid of all the articles which have low content from the search results. You should also note that Google panda causes a wide-site penalty as opposed to page-by –page penalty. So, if one of the pages has low quality the whole site might be shut down. 
•  
• Get rid of all the pages that add little or no value to the site, such as disclaimer, about us, contact. Either assigns no index tags to all these pages or Robots.txt to stop crawling of these pages where ever possible.
•  
• Learn and implement SEO techniques on the site. A well researched and applied search engine optimization is likely to have positive impact on the site. Prior to writing the posts do a thorough research of all the high searched rich keywords and try including them in your post. But avoid stuffing keywords in the posts; this may affect the quality of your site. Build quality back links to your site. While looking for the back links be aware the Back links should be within your niche and from popular and authorized sites else they won’t be adding any benefits.
•  
• Building social media relations can be handier in tackling the panda effect. You can start with creating pages on popular social platforms such Google+, Face book, twitter and Digg. Link back these pages with your site and add various share bottoms on the site. Social trust adds huge difference to the rankings, specially +1 vote of Google. Google can give you high ranking based on these votes even if the posts may not be optimized, owing to the trust of the user on the social networks.

Read more

Facebook’s Graph Search: the Ultimate Personalized Discovery Engine?

Facebook Graph Search is a social search feature the company announced Jan. 15. The feature is currently in private beta with a waitlist for individuals and businesses. You can join the waitlist here (scroll down to the bottom).

Facebook’s announced plan is to roll it out gradually to hundreds of thousands of individuals first (English only), then more broadly for PC-based users, then for non-English languages, and then on mobile.

It isn't clear how quickly this expansion will occur, but several Facebook product people are on record saying they still have work to do to figure out how to scale the computationally intensive searches across millions of concurrent users. (Think of crawling a user’s social and open graph connections across hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of nodes for every search.) Non-trivial engineering challenges stand in the way of mass availability of this feature set.

The potential for Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is huge. Brands, digital marketers, and publishers can and should be doing a number of things right now to benefit from it as it reaches critical mass.

A simple rule of thumb is that the more content that gets shared, liked, or commented on through Facebook, the greater the chances of discovery of that content through Graph Search.

What is Facebook Graph Search?

What Does it Do?

It's a very cool feature. When I type in a query, such as “friends who have been to Rome, Italy,” Graph Search traverses all of my relationships and those of my friends to find people who have visited Rome. It then pulls back these people and displays them alongside relevant content. This is a simple example that illustrates the difference between the kinds of results Graph Search returns and how search results from Google (or Bing) would appear.

Another key aspect of this feature is how it appears to include implicit affinities and experiences, in addition to explicit likes and shares people have done through Facebook. When you think about the significance of that, it’s pretty impressive.

Based on the content I’ve shared, as well as the check-ins, posts, and comments I’ve made, plus the images I’ve tagged, etc., Graph Search can infer what I like, where I’ve traveled to, and so forth. The inclusion of implicit affinities is only possible due to Facebook’s massive scale and could ultimately be the component of Graph Search that makes the results valuable enough to get people to use the feature.

What is it Good for?

• People Search – Finding people you’re connected to who have specific interests and experiences
• Local (and Vertical) Search – Finding a business and/or events that friends have visited and/or liked
• Media and Entertainment Search – Finding TV shows, movies, music, and games liked, watched, etc. by your friends

How Will Facebook Monetize it?
Facebook hasn’t announced how they will monetize the feature. The obvious opportunity is to charge for sponsored listings much like AdWords. There are a few other options as well, including:

• Syndicate aggregated data to advertisers. Data would show what people are searching for, who/what they’re finding, etc.
• Creation of premium audience segments for targeting across the network via the FBX.

Find more for Facebook Graph Search

Read more