Category Archives: Marketing & SEO

Tips for online retailers: How to optimise your store for search engines (part two)

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In part one, we covered the first two subjects in our online retailer’s guide to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), using your keywords effectively and producing regular, quality content.

In part two, we will cover two other important aspects of SEO, social media participation and link building, and how to tackle them with confidence.

Dive into social media, and keep swimming.

One of the most recent Google updates increased the amount that social media activity counts in search engine rankings. Now, your engagement in social media will enhance your SEO efforts as well as increase your reach and popularity.

Put your best business hat on and go forth and participate in social networks such as twitter, facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. Set up accounts under your brand name and share images and stories, ask for opinions and comment on other people’s posts. Retweets, shares and comments on your social media content are taken into account in search rankings.

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Tips for online retailers: How to optimise your store for search engines (part one)

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Like most people setting up an online store, you probably know you should be optimising for search engines to get more qualified traffic. The trouble is, you may not know where or how to start.

Never fear! we’ve put together this two-part blog post to get you up to speed in no time.

Let’s kick off with a quick refresher on why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important.

SEO is not paid search marketing such as Google AdWords. We will look at that in a separate post. SEO is a bunch of techniques that you can apply to your web presence to help you get into Google search results without paying for advertising. It’s commonly called ‘organic’ search.

Search engines send out ‘robots’ to find your web content and index it so they can refer to it quickly during search queries. Once your content is indexed, the search engine can then list it in the organic search results for the relevant search query. The whole process is very complex and highly automated – it relies 100% on the information the robots can find.

Therefore the ‘trick’ to good SEO is for your content to be easy for the robots to find and highly relevant to the keywords your target audience will use to search.

Luckily for you, your Spiffy Store is already brilliantly formatted and coded to be search engine friendly, but you will still need to use your keywords in the right places, create interesting content, embrace social media and build links to your site to improve your search engine ranking.

We’ve broken four basic SEO principles down into manageable techniques that you can do yourself. In this post we will cover using keywords correctly and creating quality content. Using all four elements will make a real difference to your search engine rankings, pushing your pages further up the results listing towards that coveted first page position.

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Tips for online retailers: How to choose the right keywords for your online store

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“Keywords” are the words and phrases people type into search engines to find the content they’re looking for. As this is how most people will arrive at your online store, you need to spend time choosing the ones that will get you the most relevant traffic. Then you need to use them on your website.

You may have a good idea of the phrases people use when looking for your products or services on the Internet, but it’s important to use some proper research to back up your hunches. And anyway, you can uncover some fresh ideas.

Here’s how to get started…

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Google’s “Trusted Stores” E-Commerce Certification Program

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Google recently announced a new e-commerce certification program called “Trusted Stores”, where stores that go through an approval process with Google will be allowed to add a “Google Trusted Store” badge to their online store.

Google intends for the trusted store badge to give consumers a boost of confidence when shopping online, and it comes with a $1,000 guarantee to cover the purchase… which should really help to increase sales in your online store when the program is up and running.

The way it works is when a visitor to your online store hovers their mouse over the trusted stores badge, a live “report card” type tooltip will pop up. Easy to understand grades like A+, A, B and C are awarded for quality of service features like customer service and fast or reliable shipping.

Right now it’s just a pilot program with a limited number of retailers, but all Spiffy Stores owners can apply to participate by filling out this form. There’s no guarantee that Google will accept your application… as it’s currently only in Beta, and you’ll need a great history of reliable shipping and great customer service for them to even consider your application.

Learn more by watching Google’s overview video below, or click here to watch it on YouTube.

Adding URL Redirects makes migrating your online store even easier

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A URL redirect can help your customers find your products on your new Spiffy Store site when you migrate from another software platform and your old links are still cached by the search engines. This makes the whole migration process easy and painless as you don’t run the risk of losing sales because your customers can’t find the right products.

In simple terms, a URL redirect lets you map from one web page address to another, and this is the kind of feature that you’ll find supported by most modern ecommerce and online shop builder software.

However, here at Spiffy Stores we like to provide our store owners with the best possible tools for running their online stores, so we decided to go just that little bit further to help you solve your problems without actually creating more work for you.

If you look at the URL Redirection solutions offered by other hosted e-commerce providers, you’ll quickly see that in most cases they don’t offer any form of pattern matching or wildcard support for the redirections. This means that for a large store, you may be forced to enter many thousands of redirection mappings to support the full range of possibilities. Even worse, some don’t even offer a bulk import/export feature, so you have to type in all your redirects by hand.
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Google Shopping arrives in Australia!

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Google have just announced that they are launching both the Google Merchant Center and Google Shopping in Australia!

If you’d like to use Google Shopping to reach more customers, just log in to your Spiffy Store Toolbox and head over to the “Marketing >> Product data feeds” section.  You can then set up a new feed for the Google Merchant Centre by following the instructions in that section.

When you’ve done that, the next step is to log in to the Google Merchant Centre, create a new feed , and choose Australia from the drop-down menu. If you’re new to the Google Merchant Centre, we recommend reading the “Getting Started” articles in the Google Merchant Help Center.

Store owners that choose to advertise their product catalogue can also do so using AdWords’ product extensions as well.  Product extensions use the product information submitted by the retailer and automatically display the extra information within ads, where relevant. To learn more about product extensions, visit the AdWords Help Center.

Happy shopping!

Enhanced product tags

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Here’s a small but useful enhancement that has just been released for your Spiffy Store.

We all know how important it is to add tags to your product, as they help your customers find the right product and add extra information about your product that search engines can use to help you get a better ranking for your online store.

Well, we’ve just made it easier to add more descriptive tags to your products. From today, you can create multi-word tags which means that your tags can more accurately reflect the terms that your customers will be searching for.

When you create or edit your tags, they will now be separated by commas, which means that you can include multiple words in a single tag.

Now you can create a tag for ‘spiffy stores online store software’, rather than being restricted to the single words, ‘spiffy’, ‘stores’, ‘online’, ‘store’ and ‘software’.

Don’t forget that product tags are also used in the keyword meta tags for your site, and whilst these are going out of style, they are still very important to use.

Covetish.com added to your store data feeds

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With an emphasis on local fashion, Covetish.com enables their members to seek what they covet like never before, searching across hundreds of fashion retail sites in a single click.

Developed for an Australian audience seeking all their favourite brands in one place and an international audience hungry for Australian fashion, content is sourced from designers, high street brands, boutique retailers and established online stores.

With over 1,000 brands to covet, members edit their style from a comprehensive catalogue of what’s available online.

For more information about the Covetish.com Merchant Program, visit the Covetish.com site.

To add a covetish.com data feed to your store, you first need to sign up for the covetish.com Merchant Program, and then create a feed in the Marketing section of your Spiffy Store.

New Data Feed functionality: Get more exposure for products in your store

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We’re pleased to announce that Spiffy Stores now provides data feeds for popular shopping comparison sites.  By using the new XML data feeds built into our online store software, you’ll now be able to attract more visitors, which should convert to sales.

Online shopping is one of today’s growth areas, and many customers want the best price they can get when purchasing online. This is where price comparison sites can help online shoppers get the best deal. For you, as a merchant, these sites can help you get a wider exposure for your products in a cost effective manner as your products will be seen by a larger number of customers who are shopping on line for similar goods.
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