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The SEO Failings of Major UK Highstreet Retailers

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

Posted by Tom_C

I recently read a couple of posts on e-consultancy about the state of play with major UK retail brands and how they perform online. First was 10 things Asda could do better online, which while I enjoyed didn’t touch on any of the SEO failings of these companies. Kevin’s Supermarkets ignoring SEO for major keywords post touched more on SEO which was nice but I wanted to go into a few more meaty things so here’s my review of the state of play with SEO for major UK highstreet retailers.

While the point of this post is to highlight common mistakes and not to call out individual brands, inevitably I’ve mentioned specific names as examples. This isn’t an attempt to cause offence and I appreciate that even if you know what the right answer is it can be difficult to implement using legacy systems.

Keyphrase Targeting

Who said keyphrases were important? Sometimes you’re just too cool for school. Don’t listen to all those other guys telling you how important keyphrases are – surely it can’t be that important can it?

10 SEO and Marketing-Friendly Title Tag Formulas

by on Sep 23, 2008 (0) Comments

You want keywords in the title tag. Your marketing VP wants the brand. You know he’s wrong, because search engines are structured thinkers. He knows you’re wrong, because the title tag shows up in the search snippet and branding matters:

title-tag-snippet.png

Now what?

How Persuasive is Your Marketing?

by on Sep 22, 2008 (0) Comments

We know that SEO can deliver traffic, but we know from experience that traffic alone is not enough.

Skeptical consumers require more from your websites’ proposition to relinquish their reservations. This requires persuasion and persuasion marketing.

SEO, relevant and persuasive copy as well as usability all need to work harmoniously in order to shatter prior expectations about what users need from a website in order to take action. One aspect presented without the proper balance of the other can leave the visitor on the fence when it comes to making a decision to purchase.

Transforming a prospect into a customer involves multiple emotional and intellectual layers to facilitate trust. Often, the resolve of the prospect is weathered by a natural layer of mental and emotional buffers to offset the sales process. Just consider it natural reaction to being bombarded from disruptions from advertisements attempting to breach their awareness from every angle.

If you realize it or not, your pages are waging an argument of relevance, persuasion and validity. If you win, conversion occurs, if you lose, then your just another stepping stone for your competition who has structured a better offer, argument or call to action.

Qualified Impressions Translate Into Sales

by on Sep 20, 2008 (0) Comments

Its not always the quantity, but the quality of visitor impressions that make the difference. Qualified impressions that translate into leads, sales or click through conversion are the true basis of SEO.

Out of every 100 visitors that visit your site, how many fill out a contact form, pick up the phone, download a special promotional? If you answered 15-25 visitors, then your pages are optimized for lead generation and conversion. Granted not every visitor that finds your site is going to want something from it, the idea is to set the stage for quality vs quantity and the right type of visitor who has a genuine need for your product.

Search Engine Mannerisms

by on Sep 18, 2008 (0) Comments

When you constantly crawl thousands of search engine result pages daily (just to understand the behavior of cause / effect and the search engine algorithm) you start to notice the mood swings of search engine mannerisms which are the residual fragments, routines and traces the algorithm leaves behind.

In light of all seriousness, following are some of the “in-house” SEO nicknames we have dubbed these occurrences around the water cooler to identify these phenomenon.

Just like wine, pages get stronger with age, so the more pages you have about a topic (aging) in your site, the better chance your sites pages have when real page rank, trust rank and website authority is achieved.

The Importance of (KPIs) Key Performance Indicators for SEO

by on Sep 16, 2008 (0) Comments

When it’s time to determine how effective an SEO, advertising or marketing campaign is, the need to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) as benchmarks to measure goal conversion, time lines and tactical objectives.

Performance benchmarks exist for a very specific purpose, to measure conversion and marketing objectives, but KPIs also allow us to extend beyond one-dimensional thinking and truly develop long-term strategic and pivotal advantages.

Landing Pages and Bounce Rates

by on Sep 12, 2008 (0) Comments

Landing pages or how to create landing pages that convert is an intriguing and debatable topic. Depending on visitor expectations and the relevance to the topic covered can make your pages candidates for high bounce rates (higher than 50%) vs. a successful conversion rate of 5-15% for pages that hit their mark.

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