Is it ok to buy links?
First off, why buy links? Links are the primary indicator of a site’s popularity. One-way links from high-traffic context-related sites are particularly valuable. The more links you have, the nearer you get to the top of the engine.
Google encourages users to report paid links, as some kinds of paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines. However, Google doesn’t ban paid link activity entirely, and seems to accept that is “a normal part of the economy of the web”, when done properly. And ‘properly’ means making sure Google knows this is a commercial relationship:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you’re retaining an agency to buy links for your site, you must make sure that these guidelines are adhered to, or your site will be regarded as part of a spam network. Once Google has identified a spam site, it’s relatively easy to identify all the back-linked sites, and to penalise them accordingly.
So, it’s ok to buy links, as long as you do it properly, but if you attempt to pass PageRank - i.e., not identifying that inbound links to your site are part of a commercial relationship, you may be Google-slapped.
Google Trends for Websites
The latest incarnation of Google Trends doesn’t just give you trend data on keyword searches, it also gives you great analysis of where else your target customers are going. Take a look at this analysis for MyMemory.
Not only will this analysis show where else your customers are going, but it also shows the keywords they’re also searching for. This kind of data usually costs lots of money (HitWise), and now you can have it for free. Enjoy!
Adwords are not advertising
Imagine that you’ve got a high-street store - you stand at the door of your shop and you grab the next passerby and say: “Please don’t come in and browse. Only come in if you’re going to buy. Only come in if I’ve got what you’re looking for. In fact, look here I’ve got a printer cartridge for a Hewlett Packard 57 printer. Do you have an HP 57 printer? You do? Do you need a cartridge for it now? Ok, you can come in.”
This is what Adwords is like, and the beauty of it is that there are millions of people passing by, and you don’t pay when they see your Ad, you only pay when they clickthrough. Out of those millions of passerbys, your job is to find the few that want your product at your price. If they like your competitor’s Adword better, that’s fine, let someone else pay for the clickthrough. You don’t want them, you only want customers who want you. Refreshing isn’t it?
This is the ultimate in request marketing. We’re only interested in consumers who want our product. There’s no persuasion. There’s no tempting a customer to buy something he or she doesn’t want. Adwords aren’t really advertising. They’re precise units of information delivered to consumers who’ve requested them.
There are mega-brands out there using Adwords to build brand, build reputation etc etc. I’m glad I’m not burning those dollars. The best Adwords are highly specific, leading to dedicated landing pages that deliver exactly on the promise of the Adword. Think of it as the haiku of advertising. 3 lines, 95 characters, no over-capitalisation. Short and to the point.
Adwords are not interruption marketing. Browsers are in front of their computers, on-line, searching to buy your product. When they click on a specific, targeted Adword, they’ve just given you the biggest buy signal you’re going to get. Don’t be alarmed then when you see CPCs running into several pounds. If CPCs are expensive, they’re working in your market, and you need to work out how they can work for you.
What should I budget for an ecommerce start-up?
It’s a good question that gets answered in lots of different ways. I’ve got £30k to spend on this site, and it should be better than Amazon.com is a quite frequent approach. Your web agency will always want to know what your budget is - in some ways it’s a fair question; how else can they know what they’re going to build for you.
But when you budget, you’ve got to think way beyond the site build. You should see the site build as opening the door of your new office. More often than not, clients come with an expectation that they’ll spend £8k on the website, and their Adword budget for year 1 is £2k. I’ve seen this 80/20 approach operate at all levels. It’s wrong (not Pareto, he’s never wrong). You’ve got to flip it. Spend 20% of your budget on the site build, and 80% on Adwords, link building and content work (spread this over twelve months, and don’t expect a return in year 1 - you’ll get one, but it’s nice to be surprised).
So, you’ve got a £10k budget. Spend £2k on the site, and £8k Adwords. Or, £20k on the site, and £80k on Adwords. That’s how it works.
Is hypertext important to Google?
It sure is. Hypertext is ordinary text with hyperlinks embedded in the copy. You should never see instructions to click here. Hypertext content is not meant to be read lineally. Instead, reading hypertext is random, chaotic, slightly disorientating as you hop around from one text to another, gleaning the bits you want, as you build your own story.
Older readers really struggle without the prop of a linear structure, and they also struggle with the notion that there isn’t a closed text (if you print out your emails, or your favourite web pages, you belong to this group).
But hypertext is foundational to the web, and so Google rewards texts (content, blogs etc) that have rich internal contextual linking. These are texts that have been well crafted, and also texts that encourage readers to hop off somewhere else; they are texts that want to help; not to sell. You should always encourage readers to hop off to a site that might be more helpful, if you’re site isn’t helpful, make it helpful, don’t encourage a buying decision that is invalid.
Funnel Analysis in OS Commerce
Google Analytics has a great tool which enables you to analyse how your sales funnel is functioning on your website.
Ecommerce sales are just like any other sales. You fill the funnel, lots fall out, and at the end you get a sale. The trick is to make sure that you’re funnel is a funnel, not a leaky colander.
Google Analytics lets you chart each stage of the funnel for analysis. Here’s what a funnel should look like if you’re using OS commerce. I’ll post shortly on the results of this analysis.
How to eat an elephant, (how to make an online mega-brand)
Making a new online store really work often feels as unachievable as eating the ubiquitous elephant. The answer, of course, one mouthful at a time. Here’s a selection of tasks you could consider as a mouthful. You just need to do one of these a day:
- Negotiate or create a meaningful hyperlink from an external website to your site (ideally, on a content link from a site with appropriate context, e.g. Rosehip. Reciprocal links (where the other site links back to you) are not worthless, but have less value.
- Add new and compelling content to your site. If you keep improving the content on the site, the GoogleBot will revisit more frequently. And frequent content changes are a powerful signal to Google that your site *must* have relevant content.
- Make a tweak on an adword campaign (but do remember to split-test, and pull weak ads quickly).
- Read your Analytics Data, find the most exited page, and change it!
- Write a blog entry that someone will want to share
- Approach a possible affiliate partner
- Make a cheese and ham sandwich
- Drink a cup of coffee
- Will be at ten soon, all good blog lists come in tens
- Remember to forward this post to a friend.
How to achieve a 25% conversion rate on Google Adwords
Does this headline sound impossible to you? Generally speaking we consider a 10% conversion rate to be a good cross-industry average, but if you get everything just right, it’s possible to exceed 10%.
The key to achieving stellar conversion rates is rigorous testing and analysis of the data. First of all, make sure you’ve got the right tools to hand. You need Adwords Conversion Tracking set-up, and you need Google Analytics set-up, and then you need to link both accounts. When you’ve done all that, you’re ready to play.
Run your Adwords for a few days. Make sure your Adwords follow the usual rules. Now you’ll have some meaningful data to play with. Analytics will tell you exactly what’s going wrong with your landing page. The first thing I look for is the bounce rate. The bounce rate measures what percentage of visitors leave the moment they enter. You can expect a reasonable amount of organic traffic to bounce, it’s the nature of the web. But if you’re bouncing +50% of your paid traffic you’ve got one of three problems:
1. Your Adword is misleading. You’re offering a £7.99 Adword, but landing them at a £12 product page.
2. Your Landing Page is uncompelling - the visitor likes the Adword offer, but is unconvinced upon arrival.
3. There is a technical problem - 404 - page not found sites don’t sell much.
Your next port of call is the exit page analysis. Analytics will tell you how long people are spending on your site, where they enter and most importantly where they leave.
Back to 25% conversion rate on Healthspark. As you will recall this is a start-up store which is best described as in beta release. We’re doing loads of testing, and landing page analysis. We currently have PayPal and GoogleCheckout, but are waiting for the bank to provide a Merchant Account so that we can have an integrated payment system. My gut feeling was that payment was hindering sale conversion. This is often the case, customers are fickle, and a slow site, or anything slightly unusual will spook your potential customer.
However, Analytics revealed a high bounce rate on the Rosehip page, and it turned out that the default offer was putting customers off. The Adword itself gave a specific price offering of £7.99, but the options on the landing page defaulted to a 2 for 1 offer at £12.99. Switching this default option off lifted the conversion rate from 5% to 25% with a cost per customer acquisition of £1.50.
What this anecdote reveals is that micro-testing, and daily improvements on both your Adwords, and ecommerce platform are crucial if you want to win.
How to choose a domain name
Don’t worry about choosing some snazzy brand name. Choose the country extension for your primary market (e.g. .co.uk) (don’t be tempted to create duplicate sites at different country extensions).
Choose a URL that contains your target keywords, and if necessary break it up with dashes. (See this post from Matt Cutts - Google does not penalise URLs with dashes).
Browsers are searching for their target product, not your brand name - give them what they want!
AdWords viel zu teuer?
I’m in Berlin this month working on a consultancy project and my forthcoming book. You would be amazed at how much work government agencies are putting into small businesses.
There are small business agencies like the Industrie-und-Handelskammer zu Berlin - they are a well-funded agency that provides practical consultancy, and funding for websites and emarketing. Then there’s the Bundesministerium fur Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMT) that provides high quality research papers for businesses of all shapes and sizes. This is a nation that is taking the internet and its opportunity very seriously.
And now to this post, the BMT reckons that B2B Ecommerce in Germany is more advanced than any other EU state (twice as much as the UK), and that B2C ecommerce is expected to be worth 580 billion Euros.
Imagine my surprise then when I created Healthspark’s first German Adword campaign.
The average price per keyword, I reckon is 50% lower than UK counterparts, and many target keywords aren’t even being competed for. Furthermore, many Adword advertisers are producing Adwords with atypical Adword gaffs, namely:
- no specific product
- no price information
- generic campaign
- generic landing pages, with no specific opportunities for action.