Of all websites, e-commerce stores have arguably the hardest time attracting links. The typical etailer’s site lacks substantitive content, and as a result draws few natural links. To make things worse, link requests are often ignored due to the purely commercial nature of an e-store. Link building for e-commerce takes extra patience and creativity. Below are [...]

Stop for a moment and consider the goals of your website. Regardless of whether it’s a purchase through a shopping cart, a lead generation, white paper download, or a email opt, I’m going to bet every one of these actions requires a customer to use a web form. With web forms playing such an important [...]

Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot. As this marketing medium has matured, good ROI has become increasingly difficult to achieve. This post will focus on some tactics to keep your campaigns afloat in these competitive and changing times. SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s [...]

Speed kills. In the case of website usability, the lack of speed kills. Many have erroneously assumed the advent of high speed internet connections would make website performance optimization irrelevant. On the contrary, it seems as internet connection speeds increase, users simply become more impatient and demand faster browsing. Below, I’ve gathered some simple (and [...]

In some ways, it seems search engines have a grudge against eCommerce sites. Often times, I don’t blame them. Many online stores offer little useful content, including drymanufacturer product descriptions, poor internal linking, and no unique, user generated content. Without a doubt eCommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. Below I’ve gathered [...]

I suppose I can title this post “25 Email Marketing Mistakes I’ve Made.” But rather than focus on the negative, below I’ve outlined the best practices I’ve come to adopt over the years. Hope you find something here useful. Diversify your Content: If your entire email focuses on one product, service, or topic, you risk [...]

Hopefully, you’ve already begun to consider any necessary improvements to your site to accommodate the influx of holiday traffic.  Below I’ve compiled holiday improvement ideas for e-commerce sites. I hope you find something here useful. Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. How can you harness that traffic [...]

When you consider the competitive advantages of an online retailer, customer service is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. Many e-commerce sites, even the large well-known ones, are known for impersonal, mediocre customer service practices. And yet, the few e-tailors that differentiate themselves on serving their customers such as Zappos become well-known [...]

Imagine walking into a busy, high traffic grocery store. Despite the large number of customers in the store, you notice abandoned shopping carts strewn about the aisles and checkout lanes. For many online businesses, this example illustrates perfectly the predicament many online retailers find themselves in. Why? For one, I believe many online retailers rarely [...]

I suppose this post is a good prequel to 25 Ways to Improve Your Product Pages. An extremely crucial step in the buying process occurs on the product category page. Basically, product category pages show listings for all products within a certain category, and provide a link to get more detail on the product page. [...]