Magento Marketing & Growing an Online Business by Mark Hammersley

We recorded this video to help Magento store owners to understand how to optimise and work out where people are being lost during the checkout process.

I just wrote a post on Google Optimizer and Magento here – http://magebase.com/magento-tutorials/google-optimizer-on-magento-where-to-start-for-maximum-gain/

Yep this post – http://www.seroundtable.com/panda-23-13766.html confirms what we were seeing on the ranking reports on Monday. All my sites jumping up in the rankings – so we must be doing something right. That said all of my clients are eCommerce sites and mostly Magento which tend to be high quality sites. This is gain has probably come at the expense of the affiliate sites that redirect to merchants like my clients.

Of course I am happy though!

It’s clear now that SEO is a mature industry, there are so many people offering SEO and such a crowded market place. Everyone you meet seems to have a handle on SEO. For those people who have been selling SEO for years, this kind of freaks them out. They were used to being the only kid in town with a new skill and being the only choice to do the SEO optimisation. SEO has become such a commodity and there is a whole eco system behind it.

This is the same for me, I have been selling SEO for years BUT I am happy to see lots of people selling SEO. Why? Well lots of people selling SEO means lots of people buying SEO and more importantly it must mean lots of SEO customers must be making money from SEO. A reef of fish does not exist without the coral to feed on.

Its a mature industry and like hair dressing there are a whole load of hair dressers out there who you can use. BUT you just have to work out what types of customers your type of SEO is going to benefit the most and then target these customers. Not all SEOers are the same and we really need to add onto our game knowledge of conversion and this is why we need to focus. What converts well for a site selling Jewellery will not work for a site selling insurance. So you need to be working with an SEO company that can convert sales in your industry.

What about me? What am I good at? Well looking at past work I would say I have strengths in –

1) Mens Fashion and getting people to buy online
2) Creating a direct to market channel for OEM’s and distributors WITHOUT pissing off their existing wholesale business.
3) Promotions industry – getting people to become a lead for follow up
4) Marketing a magento site

Remember you should only listen to people who have done what you are trying to do successfully. A lot of people have advice to give, but unless it’s from personal experience then beware!

I always like to help new business’s find new customers quickly and for the lowest cost. I set something up this morning for a new start up and thought I would blog about it. There is nothing in the introduction for me apart from the kudos that comes from having a decent network.

This start-up company has an iPhone application that allows coffee shop owners to move their paper card loyalty scheme onto the customer’s iPhone. This app has proven to sell three times as much coffee and to dramatically reduce the waiting times of coffee buyers. Exciting stuff, but as you probably know having a great product is not enough. There are plenty of bankrupt entrepreneurs who have great products.

So what’s the route to market?

Well its obvious this app needs to be put in front of a lot of coffee shop owners and to show them the benefits. The best way to do this is to work with a company who already has a relationship with the coffee shops. So think about people that sell coffee, hot choc mix etc and then work with them.

Luckily I had just such a contact who sells to pretty much most of the coffee shops in the country and put them in touch. The best way for this to work for them is if the start-up creates a customer referral scheme (affiliate scheme) that pays out on every new customer. Its a case of setting the commission, working out how to track it and then paying it out.

Delivery of the marketing could be a flyer in the with the coffee delivery, a email to the coffee sellers customer list. The key is to make the people who own the customer database a really good offer to make them want to promote your product.

Google Page Rank lets face it is a pain. Its a measure that distracts you from the actual proper metrics that you should be focused on in your website. Instead of concentrating on page rank you should be focusing on

Revenue
Conversion Rate
Bounce Rate
Click Through Rate

also other things like average order value of cost per subscriber against value per subscriber.

However page rank is like a shiny object that everyone wants. Me too, I obsess over my sites page rank as its such a definite metrics in a sea of uncontrollable stats.

Anyhow I thought this post was interesting about how Google is now going to underplay the importance of page rank – http://www.seroundtable.com/google-pagerank-no-13645.html

Seeing some really big page rank changes after the update this week. My clients websites have really ramped up and one site has gone from zero page rank to page rank 4 in 6 months which is great. Whilst my clients have done well, my own sites have suffered and I guess this is because I have been neglecting them to work on client work.

Not seen any change in ranking though and if sites like flippa did not value your website on Page Rank then I would not really care about it as a metric.

Starting to see a lot of reports of the Google.co.uk results fluctuating this week. We saw some movement but nothing massive and will report back after my rankings report on Monday. Here is the thread that talks about some UK changes – http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4323897.htm

Hi guys and gals, I am seeing some SERP movement and on-line it seems to be Panda 2. Discuss!

This is going to be huge and really I cannot see why it has taken them so long to do it.

About 6 months ago I was searching for something on Google and I suddenly got frustrated that their was no social element to the results.  When you are searching for something to buy on Ebay you have a rating of how good people are, when you are searching for a video on YouTube you can see how many views the video has got etc.  Then on Facebook for ‘pages’ to like you can see which of your friends are ‘liking’ which pages.  It only makes sense to transfer this to normal search.  I.e when you search for Mens Shoes next to each search result will appear a little message telling you how many of your Facebook friends like this site.  This is really powerful and has worked really well to grow brands on Facebook.

The first step of getting social search going was Facebook opening up the ‘Facebook Like’ to get this available for every page on the internet.  With this kind of data starting to take shape it was only a matter of time before somebody did something with it.  Bing announced this very thing earlier this week and you can read about it here – http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2010/11/02/search-blog-bing-s-new-social-search-features-arrive-today.aspx (OK its only the USA at the moment but it will hit us in the UK and New Zealand shortly).

Ok but what about Google, surely they are not going to sit back and let Bing take search away from them?  No of course not and they announced their own approach too.  Google has been working on social search since 2009 but they only really anounced something major today – you can read about this here – http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/05/social-search-goes-global.html