Ecommerce – the good, the bad, and the ugly

Selling on the Web

One of my favourite aphorisms is “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”.  Using Web and email, you can reach customers and project your presence just as effectively as big, long-established corporates. In fact, if you’re nimble and smart about it, you can outplay them.  Not all the clients I see necessarily believe this at first – they assume that the big guys have brand, reputation, and infrastructure behind them, making them invincible. Well, here’s an example of my online shopping experience last month that nicely illustrates how all of that counts for nothing and how a bit of passion makes all  the difference.

Too many pizzas meant I neeeded a new suit with room for growth. Being a man of a certain age and conservative tastes living outside a major city, the obvious choice used to be Marks and Spencer.  A visit to the local store soon confirmed that I am no longer in their target market. The only options available were a visit to Manchester or buying on the Internet. I had no time for the former during business hours, so ecommerce seemed the obvious choice.

Buying clothes on the Web  offers fantastic possibilities (access to huge range of styles, fabrics, colours, and ability to compare prices) but also has a few potential barriers (you can’t try for fit, can’t feel the fabrics, colour can be deceptive onscreen, and you can’t walk out with the product). But, good clothing ecommerce sites can overcome the barriers for would-be customers through:

• Listing stock levels for each item
• Offering fast delivery options with information on expected arrival dates
• Having good quality images of the products
• Using modern tools to allow the customer to get a more confident view of the product  (magnifying glasses enabling detail view, 360 degree rotation, images of the clothes on models, detailed specifications listed)
• Giving good guidance on sizing
• Providing a simple and efficient returns and exchange service

Here’s what happened when I gave it a go …

The bad ecommerce experience – Austin Reed

Austin Reed is a big name, trading for over a hundred years. Their website declares their own brilliance thus: “Austin Reed has transformed itself from a traditional business into a dynamic and progressive group, boasting over 70 outlets in the UK with international licensees across the globe.” So, you’d imagine they’d got the hang of retail? Maybe they have instore, but online is another matter.

I thought I’d do a test purchase before committing to a  large-ticket item. Just as well I did. I ordered a plain black belt. Everything should have been pretty straightforward. The website allowed me to see the products in detail using a magnifier, and picking the size was simple.

Delivery was fairly quick. Unfortunately, though, the belt delivered was a completely different product. I rechecked on  the website to make sure the error wasn’t mine – sure enough, the product was nothing like the description. Austin Reed provide a simple returns procedure, with a prepaid postage label. Rather than return for a refund, I wanted to exchange for the product listed and displayed on the website. So, instead of sending the belt back, I emailed their customer service team asking what the correct product code was.

It took 6 days and two chasers to get a reply. That message didn’t even include the usual bland, insincere corprorate apology that we have come to expect and cherish nowadays. The content also did not inspire confidence in Austin Reed’s ability or enthusiasm to get me what I had ordered: “We will endeavour to send the correct item, however if we are unable to locate this item we will have no choice but to refund the item back onto the card you used for the purchase.”  As they clearly didn’t know their own stock and website, I decided to cut my losses, and sent the item back for a refund.

The refund did come through reasonably promptly. However, Austin Reed quietly kept £5 of my hard-earned money, presumably for the postage cost involved in their erroneously sending me the wrong product!  I also see today that the incorrect product details still haven’t been updated on the website, even though they’ve known for 3 weeks that the entry is wrong.

Needless to say given that bad ecommerce experience, I wasn’t willing to risk buying online from these guys for a larger ticket item. So, they lost a potential sale worth several hundred Pounds due entirely to poor organisation and lack of interest. They have also gained this critical online review. A classic example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The better ecommerce experience – Charles Tyrwhitt

Charles Tyrwhitt is a relatively young upstart compared to Austin Reed. However, they are strong at online selling and marketing. I took the risk of buying the new suit from them because of the following:

• The website displayed product information well and in ways relevant to me as a prospective customer (well categorised; easy to filter by style, colour and product characteristics; good and helpful product images)
• There was clear information on stock levels and availability (including expected dates for out-of-stock items)
• Delivery options and timings were clearly stated
• There were customer reviews providing me with more information and confidence

I’m now the satisfied owner of a Charles Tyrwhitt suit. I wouldn’t say its the best suit I’ve ever owned, but it was delivered on time and met specification and expectation. Customer service was slick, with informative confirmation emails along the way worded in such a way that I felt the company cared about the order and my custom.

Selling online – the lessons

My conclusions are that – if you approach ecommerce in an appropriate and businesslike manner – you can outperform larger and well established competitors.  Investing in an ecommerce solution that quickly builds confidence in visitors who may never have heard of you, and helps prospective customers smoothly to the checkout can put you ahead of the competition.  But, remember that it is not just about the ecommerce website itself – if your customer care or order fulfilment is sub-standard you will quickly lose business and reputation. Online selling may be an exciting new channel with its own quirks and challenges, but it is still subject to the traditional principles of effective retail management and marketing. A little enthusiasm also goes a long way!

When the campaign ends…page titles

There is always a worry that after spending thousands of pounds on an SEO campaign with an agency, your site will lose its positioning in the SERPs once the campaign is over and you begin to add new content yourself.  Therefore I have come up with a guide on adding content to your site to help you overcome this worry and to continue the work where your search engine optimisation agency left off.

When adding new content there are 6 key areas you need to be aware of.

• Page Titles
• Paragraph or Section Headers
• Words in bold and italics
• Internal links
• Images and Alt Tags
• Keyword selection

For the purpose of this first article I will focus on Page Titles and how they can be “optimised” for search. Before I do that a quick explanation of page titles is probably in order. The page title is what you can see in the top bar of your web browser – it generally shows the website’s name and some blurb about the business or the site. It is prime SEO real estate and a very quick and easy way to improve your on page optimisation.

For a number of reasons page titles are one of the most important aspects of search engine optimisation. Firstly, because they are the first thing that is displayed when a search engine shows your page, so they should always be relevant, concise, descriptive and encourage people to click on your result. Secondly because they are the first thing a robot will see when it comes to your site and thirdly because they are a great way to get some more keywords onto the page and make your site relevant to the crawler for a search term.

When coming up with page titles there are several schools of thought on how to structure them. The two predominant theories go:

(A)    Company Name |Section | Product or Service
e.g.
ABC Ltd | Mountain Bikes | The Brilliant Mountain Bike 2.1

(B)    Company Name | Brief description of what is on the page
e.g.
ABC Ltd | Specialists in mountain bikes such as The Brilliant Mountain Bike 2.1

I personally prefer the second variant as it gives a description of your business which then appears in the SERPs, giving your company a more human face and encouraging people to click on the result. However, when done well either option will help your positioning and continue your site on its way to a page 1 result.

The Kent House Design and Technology Seminar

Throughout the year Kent House run a series of events on various topics including SEO, Design, Website Development and Internet Marketing. On 22 June we will be holding a free seminar on Design and Technology and how getting the balance right can improve your online presence. The event will take place at Keele Hall, Staffordshire.

Download the PDF Invitation for more information.

For this upcoming event we have secured the services of Julius Wiedemann – author of Guidelines for Online Success and one of the World’s leading experts on design and marketing. Julius will be giving the keynote presentation and plans to focus on the evolution of design online and take a look at how design has changed how we do business from branding to emails to mobile marketing.

Our very own Kevin Holdridge, will discuss ways in which design, technology, and marketing can work harmoniously together online. He will show examples of how many companies get this badly wrong, thus wasting their money and damaging their market position.

The seminar aims to help local businesses and organisations understand how to get the best return from investment in online channels such as the Web and email. It will do this by focusing on how to get the relationship right between the technology, design and marketing of a site.

The event would be suited to anyone with an interest in marketing, design and websites and more critically people interested in making their website work harder for them by achieving better results in the Search Engines. I have included the event program below.

If you are interested in attending, please register online or alternatively send me an email with all of your details.

Event Program

Session 1
How we got here – A brief on the evolution of media, communication and design.

Session 2
Your site – Design and Usability – How to integrate great design into your site without compromising on usability.

Session 3
Return on Investment – How to maximise your investment in the online world.

Session 4
Design, usability and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – How to design an effective, easily navigated site yet still do well in Google.

6 Tips to help you get the best return on your investment

You did it. You got yourself a website because prospects and customers kept asking for your web address. And you’d heard how much business small companies could generate from a website. So, you paid a Web developer handsomely for a beautiful site with the latest Flash animations, or had your brother-in-law build it on the cheap.

But your site’s been up for a while and it hasn’t brought you any business. What’s gone wrong? Here are the six things you can do for maximum results.

1 Make it part of your marketing strategy

Be clear what you want the website to do for you and then make sure it’s designed to do that well, whether reaching new customers, providing new services to improve customer relationships or improve cross-selling and repeat orders.

As with any marketing medium, your site must focus on your customers’ interests – not yours. Your site should be easy to use and tell customers exactly what they need to know.

2 Promote a positive image and user experience

Get the basics right so you don’t alienate users. Ensure the site looks professional, works properly, doesn’t oblige the user to install extra software and is user friendly. Websites that are too slow, crash in the middle of the transaction or ask for unnecessary information will alienate users.

3 Embrace Internet marketing

Google currently indexes billions of web pages. For your site to be found by customers and prospects you need to get your Internet marketing right.

The site itself should be optimised to get the best possible results in the search engines for your target keywords. A competent web developer can make sure the site is designed and built optimally. But, you also need to make sure that the text is well written for optimisation and is regularly updated. Use a web-savvy copywriter for best effect.

Get links to your website included on other relevant sites. Done correctly, this will improve your results in the search engines. You might even consider temporarily buying links on premium sites to get a quick initial boost.

Done properly, pay-per-click advertising is easily the most focused, cost-effective, and measurable marketing tool in history. You can easily dip a toe in the water through a small-budget Google AdWords campaign.

4 Reach out – use email

Websites only work when a user goes to them (the ‘pull’ effect). Get better results by combining the ‘push’ approach of using email to reach out to customers and prospects. It’s easy and cheap to reach people through email, and especially email newsletters.

5 Be sticky

‘Stickiness’ is a measure of how well a website encourages users to keep coming back. There are some tried-and-tested ways of building stickiness:

• Regularly give things for free (maybe a downloadable briefing paper or promotional offer). The cost to you can be small with online delivery.
• Provide an online customer helpdesk
• Build an area for customers only where they can get access to premium resources
• Add new and relevant information

6 Stay fresh

Make sure you have good content management facilities so it is quick and easy to update the content and structure of your site without having to pay – and wait for – your web developer to do it for you. Then have a plan to ensure you make at least monthly updates.

Kent House offers a free no-strings appraisal of your site with recommendations for improvement. If you’d like some advice on how to get more from your web investment, give us a call on 0845 638 0700 or drop us an email at info@kenthouse.com.

Search Engine Market Share

This is just a very quick check in to give you the latest update on Search Engine Market Share.

Google is still number one with a share of 73.32% of the search market. Yahoo! comes in distant second with 15.78%. Ask, MSN and Live are at 3.93%, 3.52% and 2.11% respectively.

Although Google has the largest share, it is important to remember that 16% of the world’s internet surfers is a HUGE number and one which could make you millions – moral of the story, don’t forget the little guys when thinking about search marketing. The almost frenzied need to get to page one and number one on Google should not overshadow the fact that  Yahoo!, Ask, MSN and Live are equally as important and worthy of a certain percentage (maybe 16%?) of your time!

Google AdWords Professional

Last week I passed my Google AdWords exam and have to admit that it was an unwelcome return to my university days of blind panic and “have I done enough??”.  However, panic was unnecessary, I passed and I have the logo to prove it.

There is remarkably little online outside of Google itself that can help you towards acquiring the accreditation and this really surprised me, surely with the number of people out there working in SEO and PPC someone would have written something, a cheat sheet some detailed help but no! One thing did seem to crop up time and again on forums and blogs– a general consensus that the questions are vague and open to interpretation. I could not agree more and this increases the difficulty of the exam considerably.

However drawing on my experience and the fact that I had swotted up on all things AdWords related in the AdWords Learning Centre, I passed and am safely among the ranks of the qualified for another two years.

If you have any PPC or SEO questions, give me a call or send me an email, I am always happy to help.

Internal Optimisation – Header Tags

A great place to start with SEO after you have decided on your keywords, is your section headers – your <h1>’s to <h6>’s. These are simple to change for even the most technology-phobic among us. When a Search Engine Robot is scanning your site it will put more emphasis on these than on the underlying copy. Therefore always try to include your keywords in your headers.

If you are lucky enough to have a copywriter to fill your site for you, always remember that although headings like “we do our best for you” may sound great and look “glossy” they are useless for SEO. A more suitable heading would be “ABC Ltd’s customer service policy is the best in Manchester” or “ABC Ltd’s customer service policy is the best in the toy making industry”. In these headings you have your company name – assuming you will want to be found under your company name – and either your location or your industry. These will more than likely be among your keywords and therefore carry more weight for a Search Engine if they appear in a section heading too.

Always use header tags. If you are building a list, the list title should be a header, if you have a table, the table label should be a header. Additionally, every page should have at least 3 sets of header tags, for example a <h1> for the page title, a <h2> for main section headings and a <h3> – <h6> for lists, image labels, table names, sub-sections and so on. Always remember to include at least one of your keywords in each of your header tags.

The Kent House development team always set up header tag templates for <h1>’s to <h6>’s as standard and they are exceptionally easy to apply in SiteManager. However, whoever your web developer, they should do the same and if they have not, challenge them on it, it is a very basic part of any website development and should not be neglected as it is a key part of SEO and a key part of any site’s look and feel!

Tracking your marketing emails

When you send out an email marketing campaign, you’ll probably want to know how well received it has been. After all, that is one of the advantages of using email instead of snail mail for your marketing. How many paper mailshots have you sent that haven’t even been opened…? I don’t know either!

Using email tracking, you can not only find out who has opened your (HTML) emails, but you can also find out what links have been clicked (across both plain text and HTML emails) within your campaign.

This is incredibly useful for two reasons, firstly you will now know how many people on your list are actually opening your emails and secondly you will know what sort of links are appealing to people.

Tracking email openings

Unfortunately, you can only reliably track the opening of HTML emails. An HTML email by its very nature will at some point have to go and ask a server somewhere for some sort of data (most commonly, an image). Software can recognise these requests and use them to figure out that an email has been opened. This technique can then be cleverly adapted to put in a unique request for some data for each recipient opening the email. That way, you can see exactly who has opened the email.

You can also see when a user opened an email, which could potentially be very useful information for marketing purposes. It could be used to determine what day of the week or time of the day to send future campaigns.

There is a slight flaw with this method; if a recipient forwards their email to 20 friends, each time a friend opens it, it’ll be counted as an opening from the original recipient. A bit of common sense when analysing your statistics is required! I’m sure you wouldn’t be complaining that your campaign is being forwarded on anyway, it means more people are reading it!

Because plain text emails are simply text, they don’t make any requests to the server, so it’s a lot harder to track openings of emails. Links in plain text emails can still be tracked, so if you notice a recipient has opened a link but their opening of the email hasn’t been logged, it’s likely that they’ve opened the email as plain text.

It can be quite exciting to have a look at your statistics after sending out a campaign, however, don’t expect everyone on your list to open your email, it’s often only around 20% of your list of recipients that are recordered as opening the email (possibly less, if there are a lot of plain text recipients) but it’s still far more cost effective to send to 1000 recipients and have 200 people open it than to send out 200 paper mails!

You could use the open statistics to collect a new list of recipients, specifically the ones that didn’t open your campaign. You could then send them another one a couple of days later that starts with something like “We noticed you didn’t open your last email, maybe we can tempt you with these better offers?”.

Tracking link clicks

As well as whether the email has been opened, you can also track what links people have clicked on (and again, when they clicked them).

It’s a similar method to tracking the openings. Basically, the server sending out the email campaign acts as a stepping stone to the recipient’s route to the destination link. The email campaign’s link doesn’t go directly to the intended URL, instead it goes back to the email sending software. The email sending software recognises the unique request, logs a “click”, checks which URL it maps to, and then sends the user on to their destination… in an instant! It’s a bit like passing through a turnstile.

Finding out what your recipients are clicking on can be very useful. Lets say you’ve sent out a marketing email with three different offers in it, with a link for each to a page on your website with more details about that offer. A quick review of your link statistics could tell you which offer of the three was clicked on the most. Knowing this information can help you decide on offers for future campaigns.

Going slightly deeper, you could target individuals by using links to determine their interests, and then send them follow-up emails with details of products/services that are tailored to those interests.

All the links in your campaign are automatically tracked if you have tracking turned on, so you can also use link tracking to see if and when recipients have unsubscribed themselves from your email campaign (and if you send a lot, which campaign prompted them to unsubscribe could be useful information).

You can also see if and when users have clicked the “webversion” link.

The webversion link, when clicked, opens a copy of the recipient’s email in their browser. It is usually presented as “If you are having trouble reading this email, click here to open it in your browser” (because HTML email is extremely delicate and you need to know all of its quirks to get it to display correctly across all the incarnations of email client) and is very wise to include.

If you find that your webversion link is getting a lot of clicks, then it’s quite likely there’s a technical problem somewhere in your campaign, and something you’ll probably need to get fixed before the next one goes out!

It’s worth noting that you can make a webversion uniqe to each user, in which case all the tracking will still work even if a user is viewing their email in their browser.

A quick note about the look of the links themselves. They’re obviously dependent on the style of the rest of the email, but you probably do want them to be prominent. The standard is blue, underlined text (when using a white background), but there is a bit of leeway, it’s certainly not something to overlook!

An example…

Over the Christmas period we decided to send out an E-Christmas card to our colleagues. It was a bit of fun, but also contained a few tracked links. You might remember receiving it… if so, we hope the turkey still has pride of place on the mantlepiece!

The email in its original state can be found here. Note the code to invoke the first name into the text to give the email a bit of personalisation (you might find me talking about that in another blog entry!), there’s also the webversion link which won’t work as it’s automatically generated at the time of sending to make each user’s webversion unqiue.

After that email was sent out, we regularly checked the statistics, finding out who was opening the emails, and whether they were clicking any links. One particular recipient appeared to be opening it repeatedly, which we soon realised probably meant that they’d forwarded it around their office, which did bring a smile to our faces.

I’ve also just taken another look at the statistics, and it seems one recipient opened the email on the 9th February! That’s got to be a record for the earliest card for Christmas 2009!

Obviously, as I said, that “campaign” was just a bit of fun, but it did prove the power of tracking, and if you didn’t download the PDF, we know who you are!

Search Engine Optimisation FAQs

Whenever a prospective client comes to meet with us about a new SEO Project they always have a list of questions relating to their SEO Campaign and I have compiled a list of the most popular questions below. Hopefully after reading through them you will get a better idea about the limits and the benefits of SEO and perhaps start to see how it could help you and your business.

Can search engine optimisation techniques be applied to any website?

Yes, as long as your site is not password protected as this will not let the search engine spiders collect information about your site. Poor website design and development, as well as unsuitable website technologies can also hinder the search engine spiders. As search engine optimisation is used to improve a spider’s ability to index sites more easily, this would be achieved by removing these barriers when the website is redeveloped.

Will the appearance of my website change after it has been optimised?

This will depend on the structure and coding of the site. Usually, the coding and underlying navigational structure can be improved for search engine optimisation without changing the appearance of the website.
Changes to the look of the website may only be necessary if it uses elements that cannot be replicated by the use of alternative techniques. These include elements such as frames, JavaScript navigation, Flash, dynamic content, or pages that require the user to login in order to see the content. However, in most cases, the use of alternate techniques and coding can mean that the look of your pages remain visually unchanged.

How do you know which keywords and phrases should be used?

Firstly we take a list of keywords and phrases provided by the client. As the client is an expert in their field, they often have a vast knowledge about their clients, products, services and customers, which leads to the generation of the first keywords and phrases list.
Secondly, the words and phrases are analysed and the KEI (Keyword Efficiency Index) is generated for each of them. This is a statistical score that is generated from the number of times the word or phrase is searched for, against the number of competing pages. This allows us to see which words and phrases would be best used on your site, and for which search engines it would be best for.
Thirdly, after seeing our evidence-based report advising you which keywords and phrases will be the best for you, you make the decision which ones you want to use and which ones you don’t.

What is the difference between ethical and unethical Search Engine Optimisation?

Ethical search engine optimisation involves using only high-ranking keywords and phrases that are relevant to the content of the website in order to improve its position on search engines result pages (SERPS).
Unethical search engine optimisation involves deliberately using high-ranking keywords and phrases that are unrelated to the content of the site in order to misdirect traffic to the site and artificially inflate the website’s ranking in the search results. This reduces a search engine’s ability to return relevant search results, and so many of the main search engines have identified a number of search engine optimisation techniques that are unacceptable to use on web pages. If a search engine finds that a website has used these techniques, they may impose a ranking penalty or ban the site from their index.
An ethical search engine optimisation will not involve any technique that is recognised as being unacceptable to any search engine and our company takes pride in offering the most ethical SEO services to our customers.

How quickly can you see the results from the search engine optimisation?

Unfortunately, it can take some time for search engine optimisation to generate results. It depends on a number of factors, but primarily the competitiveness of the keywords and keyphrases used in the search engine optimisation. This can be anything from under a month for uncompetitive key phrases, from 3-6 months to get into the top 30 of a large search engine, or up to a year to achieve stable first page rankings in the main search engines. On average, Google requires an extra three months to get the same results. We therefore recommend that clients who need instant website traffic initially have a “pay-per-click” advertising campaign alongside the SEO.

I have been with an SEO Company for the past year, but still have a page rank of 0 and I am not appearing anywhere near the first page on Google – why is that?

Like most web related areas, SEO has a number of unethical companies promising first page results and high page ranks in the first few months but delivering very little. This poses a huge problem for both the client and experienced SEO companies offering good results based on genuine research and hard work!
In order to combat this what we would suggest is asking your SEO company to deliver regular reports on your website’s performance for a set of targets that you set, this way you can challenge the results they are getting for you and you will soon know what type of company you are dealing with! However, be realistic in your goals and know that you are never going to be top of the search results for very competitive keywords like “toys” or “bikes”. A good SEO company will be able to target keywords that suit your company and which you have a realistic chance of doing well with.

I want to appear top of Google by next week – what can I do?

Using organic SEO, this is not going to be possible for you to achieve and do not believe anyone who tells you it is. In a situation like this when you are not willing to wait for organic SEO to take its course you should look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising. This is a great way to get yourself on the first page of Search Engines overnight. People are often worried about PPC because they are not aware that you can set a daily budget for the amount of money you want to spend, this means that you will not end up with a huge bill at the end of your campaign. Instead you can monitor or get an outside company such as Kent House to monitor your campaign on a weekly basis and judge how successful it is for you and make little tweaks that can have a big impact on your results.

Understanding SEO and other nasty internet marketing acronyms

Before I get started let’s deal with SEO, Search Engine Optimisation. It is easy for those of us in the know to talk about SEO, SEM, PPC, CPC, keywords and so on but are we aware that there is a whole world of people out there (some of them marketers!) who do not talk in acronyms, do not understand them and do not therefore understand us?!
As a marketer, I am always keen to ensure my message is being understood so for my first few blog entries I am going to do a basic jargon buster and SEO breakdown to help people understand the ABCs and 123s of SEO and other internet marketing abbreviations and terms. Of course I’m not going to make you an expert in a few short articles but perhaps in future it will save you from being “acronym-ed out” of high-brow marketing conversations!

The Internet Marketing Jargon Buster

SEO        Search Engine Optimisation

The act of “optimising” your website so that it appears higher in search engine results for your chosen keywords. In its most basic form, this involves working with your website to improve content, architecture, labelling and ease of navigation as well as getting some relevant inbound links to your site. It can also include the length of time your website has been in existence for, your page rank and your hosting provider. Search Engine Optimisation does not occur overnight but can take from 3 to 6 months to see any improvement – but it is well worth the effort!

PPC        Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click advertising is a fantastic way to achieve 1st page Search Engine results overnight. Things I love about PPC include the ability to set a campaign budget, set maximum cost per click values and how trackable it is! Most of the major search engines offer this service from Google’s AdWords to Yahoo!’s Search Marketing to Microsoft’s adCentre.

CPC        Cost Per Click

Cost Per Click is a PPC Advertising term and basically means the amount of money it will cost or does cost you when someone clicks on your advert. With most PPC Advertisers you can set the maximum amount of money you are prepared to spend for a click for each of your keywords (yet another reason I love PPC Advertising!).

SEM        Search Engine Marketing

This term covers both SEO and PPC and deals with any marketing activity involved with improving your position in the Search Engines. It is also worth noting that some people are only referring to PPC Campaigns when they talk about this.

Keywords

I guess I am now as guilty as everyone else, I have used this term several times already and you may not know what I’m talking about – sorry! There must be some words and phrases that you want to be found under when a searcher searches – very simply put, they are your keywords. They may include your business name, your main product and service and some other details about you such as “books – next day delivery”. Before you start optimising your site you need to come up with a list of keywords and then work your optimisation strategy around these words and phrases.

Impressions

Everyday millions of searches are done online, each time someone searches for a keyword you have included in a PPC Campaign and it is shown on the search results page that is an impression – you should not be charged in PPC for impressions just for Clicks. Impressions are also a measurement used by online publishers who sell advertising space on their site for example www.thesundaytimes.com. They will sell advertising space – banners, skyscrapers and buttons – based on the number of impressions your advert will get.

CTR    Click Through Rate(s)

Leading nicely on from impressions… Click Through Rates take the number of clicks your advert has had and express it as a percentage of the number of impressions your advert has had. CTRs can sometimes look depressingly low but it is very dependant upon what the nature of your business is and also how much competition there is in your area.

These are the basic terms used in internet marketing but I will delve deeper into each topic as 2009 progresses. If you have any questions on SEO or would like me to do an article on any particular marketing subject send me a quick email to yvonne.conway@kenthouse.com and I will be happy to oblige!