Online checkout and delivery is a key retail battleground for 2013. Most problems with online delivery originate from a poorly optimised checkout.

A telling expose by the Independent on Sunday (“The great online delivery scandal”) revealed that during December 2012, an estimated 225,000 parcels each day failed to arrive when promised. Failing to live up to promises is damaging for your brand – an Econsultancy survey of 1,000 UK consumers found that 50% would not shop with a retailer again if they failed to deliver on time.

My May 2013 guest blog for Postcode Anywhere looks at good practice tips for ensuring your checkout provides an excellent user experience, helping you to reduce your abandonment rates.

Please read the full article and share your comments.

Thanks, James.

But what does usable mean? A good definition is “fit for use” or “convenient to use”. Usable design matches form structure and content with visitor goals.

It’s good practice to think of form completion as a sales conversation: how does the form need to speak to people to reassure them and address barriers to completion? You’ll see online forms using conversational and informal copy styles to try and achieve this.

In my latest blog for Postcode Anywhere I take a look at form design and provide 10 usability tips based on personal experience and good practice learning.

Please drop by to read the article and share comments.

Thanks, James.

However, there are several reasons why this basic recommendation isn’t necessarily true or accurate:

1. The ‘fold’ is a myth
The mind-numbing variety of devices (it’s estimated there are about 6,500 and counting!) means that the fold is not a fixed entity and depends entirely on the device type accessing your landing page.

2. Your CTA should be placed where an action is most likely to be taken
New visitors to your landing page may not know who you are and what you do. These people are less likely to be willing to commit to an action immediately as they need to know that you are reliable and trustworthy. Therefore, expecting them to take action as soon as they land might actually put them off staying on your landing page – it can seem like an over-zealous salesperson.

3. Putting the CTA above the fold could detract from important content
When you need to persuade visitors and address their potential barriers to conversion, you need persuasive copy to take main stage. A prominent CTA could detract from visitors seeing/reading this copy and adversely affect their likelihood to take action.

In my latest blog for Smart Insights, I look at different options for placing your primary CTA and provide case studies of good and bad to help illustrate the impact of positioning.

You can read the full article, with lots of examples from B2C and B2B companies, on the Smartinsights.com website.

Thanks, James.

Over the course of an hour, ecommerce and digital marketing professionals bandied around the key skills that email marketers need to be thinking about. The chat was centred around good practice for email marketing and tips & tricks of the trade.

The output is this handy reference guide to email marketing compiled by Dan Barker.

If you haven’t heard of #EcomChat before, then please give me a shout and i’ll be happy to explain, or visit Ecomchat.org for a quick summary from my irreverent co-host, the indefatigable Dan Barker.

Thanks, James

1. Mobile & multi-channel
2. Customer experience

Please take a look through the slide deck and if you have any questions, give me a nudge. I hope you find it useful.

Thanks, James

Back in September 2012, myself and fellow Ecommerce Consultant Dan Barker decided that there was a gap in the market for an ecommerce centric industry chat.

Why? You may ask.

Well, we both regularly get asked ecommerce questions via social media channels (Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn being the most common) and we also tap into the fountain of knowledge that is our followers.

There is a constant flow of, and demand for, knowledge sharing. This blog takes a look at what we have learned launching a Twitter chat and the mistakes we’ve made along the way.

We have found that the social channel is a wonderful source of information, knowledge, opinions and ideas.

With a wide range of skills amongst our follower base (strategists, digital marketers, analysts, tech agencies, developers, designers etc), there is a wonderful blend of complimentary knowledge that can be mutually beneficial.

So, we thought that an industry chat would be the perfect way to bring this knowledge group together to create a regular forum for sharing. #Ecomchat was officially born on October 15^th 2012.

You can read the full blog on Econsultancy. Please drop by and share your thoughts, experience and ideas.

Have you launched a Twitter Chat? Are you planning to?

If you have other examples of Twitter chats that are doing a good job of engaging people, please also share.

Thanks, James

Why is content relevant to SEO?

There are several ways in which content can support SEO by boosting search presence:

1. Content drives search presence
It’s simple, to be found by searchers and search engines, you have got to have something for them to find. But to compete it needs to be outstanding content. Moving into 2013, content is still king as it helps you build webpages & other content assets (e.g. videos) that can be indexed. This applies to database driven product pages for e-commerce as well as CMS driven content pages like Buying Guides and Articles.

2. Content variety can increase SERPs penetration
Search results pages contain multiple content formats: webpages, videos, images, products, social content etc.

Intelligent content marketing programs build multiple content formats around keyword targets to increase the number of possible listings in SERPs.

Multiple content formats included in main Google index

3. Fresh content is good
New and updated webpages send signals to search engines that say your content is “of this moment”.

Online searchers respond to ‘new’ content that provides something they didn’t have before.

Regular updates and additions to XML sitemaps encourage search engines to crawl your site more frequently.

4. Unique content has value
Unique, relevant content has been a quality signal for search engines for a long time. However, since 2011 the likes of Google have increased the value they place of ‘high quality’ content. The Panda/Farmer update is worth learning more about.

Duplicate content isn’t valued by search engines and makes it harder for them to decide which piece of content is the original and best to display. If you cram SERPs with repetitive content (e.g. repurposed content you took from somewhere else), it’s unlikely searchers will perceive the value in what you are offering.

This also means understanding how to avoid content duplication on your website. For example, you might have an HTML content page for which you also create a pdf version. This could produce 2 URLs:

• www.mysite.com/articles/seo-guide.html
• www.mysite.com/articles/seo-guide.pdf

Both have identical content. It’s good practice to tell search engines which is the primary version, as this helps them display the most relevant version to searchers.

I recommend reading Tess Neale’s article on duplicate content and canonicalization for a more thorough explanation.

You can read the rest of the blog on content marketing and SEO on the Smart Insights website.

Thanks, James

Why is Voice-of-Customer relevant to SEO?

Consider this scenario: You’ve got a webpage ranking well for a primary keyphrase. It’s driving muchos traffic, but your bounce rate is over 90% and has blown the site average for organic landing pages. As a result, you start to see your ranking drop. The search engines are starting to think your webpage isn’t so great after all.

You can dig into your web analytics data to find out what is happening – visits, bounce rate, time-on-site etc, but…

What web analytics data won’t tell you is why that’s happening

This is where voice-of-customer (VoC) programs can help. VoC techniques help you get information direct from your customers to start overlaying context to the data.

For example, an on-page poll can ask visitors what they would most want to see on the page to help them achieve the goal for their visit. This insight can be fed back into landing page optimisation projects to improve SEO landing pages and help tackle issues with low engagement (high bounce rate, poor conversion, low per visit value etc).

What Voice-of-Customer techniques are relevant?

There are many, many to choose from, for example Dave has listed them on a customer feedback tools post, so here I’m going to pick out the ones that I’ve used the most often and I know other digital marketers use commonly.

You can read about the techniques for using voice-of-customer data for SEO on the Smart Insights website.

Thanks, James.

Why is regular analysis required?

The world around us is forever changing which impacts online behaviour. The key reasons for this are:

1. Online search patterns change

This is driven by several factors, including social trends and fads. A fad can drive a surge in specific search activity, only for this to wilt quickly.

A great example is retail fashion – each season has its theme and only a few of these themes will stand the test of time. Also some trends are cyclical/seasonal so will phase in and out of search e.g. Knitwear – popular at Christmas and through Winter.

Screenshot – declining and rising search keyphrases in the UK market

2. Search engines update algorithms.

The bête-noire of search. In 2012 a few companies have been hit hard by the two big impact Google updates, Panda and Penguin. Their traffic and rankings took a nose dive as their sites fell foul of a change in how Google assesses page quality and relevance.

Source: http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/google-panda-farmer

Take a look at the SEOmoz algorithm change history to see how frequent changes are. Google has also started regular search quality highlights this year which show around 30-50 new filters and features monthly.

So, it’s essential you monitor SEO traffic KPIs regularly (at least weekly, if not daily). Ranking can be a useful benchmark but average rank can be misleading, as it will fluctuate naturally. For example, personalised search on Google means one person could see your webpage in position 1, and the next in position 10. An average rank of 5 gives you little meaning.

3. The visitor mix to your website changes

As your brand and marketing grow, the demographic mix of visitors inevitably changes. Via social media, you might have a boon in 18-25 year olds engaging with you. Via email marketing, you might attract a slightly older audience.

It’s important that you monitor your SEO data to learn how this impacts on search queries and the blend of brand/generic keyphrases driving your SEO KPIs.

This can be particularly helpful when planning landing pages. As the blend of keywords/phrases change, you can identify gaps in landing page coverage and use this knowledge to inform your content marketing plan.

4. Social & economic pressures affect buyer behviour

The recent economic woes are the most salient example. A reduction in disposable income (driven by rising costs) feeds through to changing shopping baskets – less ‘luxury’ items, lower average order values, more discounts/vouchers redeemed, higher basket abandonment etc.

This can significantly impact search behaviour. A glance at the SEO reports might demonstrate a rise in the variety of question-led searches e.g. “what is the cheapest DVD recorder”.

Screenshot: example question led search queries showing in Google Analytics

5. Your business changes

For example, if you’re an e-commerce retailer, your product mix is likely to change over time. This means your marketing focus will need to evolve to match the product set, which has a significant impact on SEO (e.g. old webpages needing to removed from the index or 301 redirects to avoid dead-ends).

How do you know what impact these changes are having on your website performance? Through analysis. By analysis, I mean the three key strands:

1. Web analytics data
2. Voice-of-customer data
3. Learning through testing

If you are following the good practice guidelines contained in this SEO series, then you should already be planning your SEO to mitigate this uncertainty e.g. regular keyword research, producing quality content, using social media to raise brand awareness and increase content sharing/voting.

To read the full article and find out what this means for SEO and ongoing analysis, please click through to the Smart Insights website.

Thanks, James

We’ll be focusing the discussion around three key questions. In our experience, the first two are the most common discussion points when companies start to flesh out their Christmas trading plans and the last one is just plain interesting!

Question 1:
What are the key on-site actions that need to be taken to ensure a website is ready for Christmas trading, including dev work?

Question 2:
How should e-commerce teams be using their marketing channels to drive Christmas sales?

Question 3:
How can pureplays compete effectively with multi-channel retailers given the disadvantge of having no store presence?

Please join in on Twitter using the hashtag #ecomchat. After the chat we’ll post a write-up including any links shared by chatters.

For more information contact either @jamesgurd or @danbarker via Twitter.

Thanks, James & Dan.