April 8, 2010 | No Comments »
For many retailers, particularly those with a long history of retailing in the physical world, the Internet is an ominous dark cloud, and even thinking about websites brings a sense of dread. Are e-commerce websites going to steal your business? Will your customers desert you for Swell.com?
Not likely. Internet sales are still a small part of total US sales: E-commerce is less than 4% of US retail sales. Some market segments have much smaller percentages: 1% in Apparel, and 2% in sporting goods. E-commerce is important, but, despite years of hype, online purchasing is not how people buy products. As analyst Greg Sterling says,
The dominant paradigm has emerged: online “shopping,” offline buying.
Nearly all consumers use the Internet for research, and then nearly all of them buy in physical, real-world, brick-and-mortar stores. Yahoo calls it ROBO: Research Online, Buy Offline.
So, don’t be worried about other e-commerce retailers. Don’t worry about not having an e-commerce website. But, you should be concerned if you don’t have any web presence. Retailers don’t need to maintain their own websites, but they do need to make it easy for consumers to find and connect with them. Fortunately, this is getting easier every day, particularly with directories like Yahoo Local, Google Local Business or CitySearch and business-capable social networks like Facebook Fan Pages.
March 2, 2010 | No Comments »
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.
February 24, 2010 | No Comments »
We’ve launched a new set of microsites in the last week. These microsites each represent the products from a single brand that are sold at a single retailer. Each site is designed to help consumers find the local surf shops that sell their favorite brands.
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.
“We need customers to find us no matter how they search on the web. Whether they type in a city, zip code or a neighborhood along with our company name — we need our retailers to pop up in the search, and the Front Window microsites are making this happen.”