March 2, 2010 | No Comments »
HubSpot reports that blogs that are frequently updated receive 7 times more organic search traffic:
A follow-up study shows that the mere act of blogging does not guarantee more site traffic. Anyone can set up a blog and leave it idle as initial excitements fade. Businesses that actively manage their blogs, however, fare much better than those without blogs.
A study of 2,168 HubSpot customers shows that businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.
Via Small Business Search Marketing.
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Bird Rock Surf Shop
If you have a website for your small brick-and-mortar business ( and we hope you do ) you’d probably like to have your customers be able to find you online. You want customers to get a link to your site in a search engine when they do web searches that are related to business, and to do that, you need to optimize the content of your website for those searches. While there is a lot of good advice about optimizing for local searches at places like Local SEO Guide there is one tip that is both important and incomplete.
If a customer is doing a local search on a search engine, the customer is likely to use the name of a city, neighborhood or zip code, and that local term may not be the one in your address. Including your address on your web site is not good enough.
Suppose you have surf shop in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, but you also serve people from Mission Beach, Bird Rock and La Jolla. You customer might be doing any of these searches:
- surf shop san diego
- surf shop pacific beach
- surf shop 92109
- surf shop la jolla
There are probably several dozen searches that the customer might use, so in addition to your address, your website should also include the zip codes and neighborhood names that you serve.
Also consider that your customers might be searching for a particular product, such as Sanuk sandals. Your customer might be searching for:
- sanuk bird rock
- sanuk 92037
- sanuk mission beach
- … etc …
So, you’ll want to have your zip-codes and neighborhood names on the same page as your top brand names.
Clarinova’s Front Window microsites do this automatically when the retailer enters the zip code and brand names for their stores. For instance, the Sanuk microsite for Mitch’s Surf Shop includes this text at the bottom of the pages:
Mitch’s Surf Shop serves the communities of North City, Cardiff by the Sea, Del mar, Rancho Santa Fe and Solana Beach. Mitch’s Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92075, 92091, 92007, 92014 and 92130.
Here is the text for the microsite for the Sanuk microsite for Pacific Beach Surf Shop:
Pacific Beach Surf Shop serves the communities of Pacific Beach, Bay Ho and San Diego. Pacific Beach Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92109, 92169, 92167, 92037 and 92138.
Text like this helps ensure that what every your customer’s search for, they will find your website.
September 12, 2009 | No Comments »
Virtually every presentation I sit through on the topic of Internet marketing mentions the duplicate content penalty, often claiming that having other sites scrape content from your site will adversely impact your Google rankings. A typical expression of this penalty is:
Duplicate Content Penalty – How to Lose Google Ranking Fast
Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites across the internet.
Here is what Google’s webmaster tools help site has to say:
Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.
And from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
Before diving in, I’d like to briefly touch on a concern webmasters often voice: in most cases a webmaster has no influence on third parties that scrape and redistribute content without the webmaster’s consent. We realize that this is not the fault of the affected webmaster, which in turn means that identical content showing up on several sites in itself is not inherently regarded as a violation of our webmaster guidelines. This simply leads to further processes with the intent of determining the original source of the content—something Google is quite good at, as in most cases the original content can be correctly identified, resulting in no negative effects for the site that originated the content.
Finally, also from the Webmaster Central Blog:
Duplicate content. There’s just something about it. We keep writing about it, and people keep asking about it. In particular, I still hear a lot of webmasters worrying about whether they may have a “duplicate content penalty.”
Let’s put this to bed once and for all, folks: There’s no such thing as a “duplicate content penalty.” At least, not in the way most people mean when they say that.
(Emphasis mine.)
So, you really don’t have to worry about duplicate content, and if you write or speak on this subject, please stop scaring people.
December 22, 2008 | 4 Comments »
A recession is part of the normal business cycle, and we will get through this one, just like all of the others. But things will be different in the next business cycle. The change will be an opportunity for the companies that understand it and address it.
This recession has been particularly hard for independent retailers, with many going out of business and many more business failures to be expected in the next year. When the next recovery comes, I think the retailers that will replace those that closed during the recession will be very different.
December 17, 2008 | No Comments »
Today, the Wired Magazine blog The Long Tail writes about the “Rise of the Retail Blogs”, blogs that retailers are moving to the front page of their websites, rather than being buried in the back. The reason is
November 18, 2008 | No Comments »
No one runs a business alone; at the least, every business is engaged in a complex web of dependencies with other businesses and consumers. And, like a marriage, these relationships require attention, nurturing, and a bit of work. Neglecting a key relationship can result in disaster, and today many of those key relationships involve the Internet. As a couple must work together to manage money or raise children, manufacturers and retailers must work together to present their brand images and make sales using the Web.
Apparel manufacturers have long relied on their retailers to sell their products to consumers. About 90% of the apparel market (by company revenue) consists of retailers with revenues of less than $2.5M per year and manufacturers with revenues of less than $50M per year—the realm of the smaller brands and independent boutique retailers. In this portion of the market, manufacturers work with 300 to 3000 retailers each, and the retailers carry products from 25 to 100 manufacturers. The market is very interconnected.
Consumers see this as a two-tier market where they are aware of two types of brands: the brand of the manufacturer and the brand of the retailer. They care about both and have an affinity for both. When consumers use the Web to research a product—and about 90% of consumers do—they will visit the manufacturer’s website to learn about the product, and then they will look for the websites of retailers to find out where to buy the product.
Boutique retailers are small businesses and don’t often have the time, money, or Internet skills to build excellent websites. Since many of the activities required for Web marketing can be centralized, it makes the most sense for manufacturers to drive the Web marketing strategy, creating the policies and tools to help retailers build websites and market products online. Furthermore, since each retailer can have 100 or more manufacturers, manufacturers should work together to create a single system or model for the retailers to use, rather than expecting them to do things a different way for every manufacturer.
This sort of cross-industry coordination is difficult but will be necessary if the smaller 90% of the apparel industry wants to compete online with the larger 10%.
October 29, 2008 | No Comments »
Link building is incredibly important when promoting a website, both because the links are a conduit for traffic to get to your website, but also because links improve a website’s ranking in Google. The basic process for a lot of link building is conceptually simple — you just ask another website for a link — but as the web becomes more sophisticated, getting links from many websites has become more like a more traditional process: getting an editorial in a publication. For many of a website’s most important links, link building is PR.
PR Couture has mad this point even more clear with two articles on:
From a (non-ecommerce) business perspective, the primary purpose for a website is marketing, so it is unsurprising that traditional marketing practices would seep in.
