Ever wanted to research your competition’s prices to make sure you are competitive online? In the past the only way has been to visit each website in turn to checkout the price against your own.

Now Google has added more enhancements via filters to the main search engine which makes this research a doddle.

FIRST – have a look at the standard Google search engine view for any product…….

SECOND – click on the “More Shopping Sites” filter in the left hand column

Check out the lists of products and prices available for all your key online competitors. You can easily see what prices and options are available online for your customers.

This is a very powerful search tool not just for your own research but for customers to check out prices across the online options more easily. However, I wonder how many customers will actually click on these filters and make use of the extra functionality provided by Google. Even if customers don’t use the filter, then it’s still very useful for your business market research!

Have fun……

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Google shopping or Google base is a free service offered for eCommerce website owners to upload their product information for free.

Website browsers can find quick information about products on the SHOPPING tab or directly from page one of Google. This is a great tool which can provide excellent additional coverage for your products online.

Below are 5 reasons to upload products to Google:

Reason 1   – it’s free and easy to setup if your eCommerce software supports it

Reason 2   – increases your coverage on the search engine of exising keyword phrases

Reason 3   – can be used to cover alternative keyword phrases which you don’t cover from your website

Reason 4  – can put your product on page one of Google when your website product page is struggling to be there

When people click on the Google shopping option they often see a grid list of 20 products, with bigger images and no text about the product. In the past the only option was a list of 10 products per web page with a short description. So make sure you checkout how your products appear so you can adjust your upload accordingly to make the most of what Google has to offer.

Any good eCommerce online website solution should provide integrated Google product uploads directly from your content management system. Have a look or ask your website provider and start uploading products for free onto Google.

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Phew! April has really been an exciting month for me and I now have my own online shop live selling great, stylish kids hats for toddlers to early teens. Been great fun selecting the suppliers for the online shop, taking photos of the hats and loading all the stock onto the website.  I now have a full range in stock for both girls and boys.

Website is another one on the open source Magento platform and this time I implemented it myself. Been a steep learning curve but I’m pleased with the results. Now need to start building up the traffic and making some sales. Some hot sunny weather for the bank holiday weekend would also help ……..

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Well, been a really busy time recently completing all the final testing and preparation to launch the new Airways Airsports website specialising in online sales of Paragliding, Hang Gliding, Paramotoring and Microlighting Equipment. Pop across and check the website out at shop.airways-airsports.com.

Website has been developed on the new open source Magento software and is based on an off the shelf template to control design costs. Also implemented a sexy loyalty points system as well to support the business’ unique marketing campaign where they reward customers for both buying from them and for flying cross country on their equipment.

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Many thanks to all the businesses who attended my spring seminar on “How to Increase Website Sales” mid-April in Matlock. It was good to see both some familiar and some new faces attending the event. Everyone was busy scribbling down notes and ideas to implement on their online shops! So I hope to see great things from their websites over the next twelve months.

Watch this space for the next planned free seminar to help your online business grow.

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Last Wednesday evening I was invited to deliver a presentation on website search engine optimisation  (SEO) by Jane Stretton who runs this Derbyshire/Staffordshire Wire group. My talk was about the “5 Step SEO Lifecycle” providing the attendees with a more structured process to attack and conquer SEO on their websites. One of the key points I stressed during the talk was that SEO is not a one off exercise. If you wish to implement SEO and be on page one of Google, then it is a continuous, never ending process to maintain that page one position. So for most small businesses it is not cost effective to pay an SEO consultant to continue with this activity forever! Understanding the what, how, why and where of SEO is an important skill for small business owners to implement.

With over 2o people attending the presentation, most with their own websites, there were lots of interesting questions asked during the session. At the end of the session several of the attendees signed up for my “Strictly SEO” workshop programme to be launched in April 2010 – more on this very soon…..

Many thanks for all the great comments emailed by attendees about how relevant and useful the content of the presentation was. And also thanks to our host Jane Stretton who puts a great deal of time and effort into making the Ashbourne Wire group so inspiring and successful.

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Many small businesses try out Google’s adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) online marketing. Often they have received a free voucher through the post encouraging you to signup and try it out. It is in fact extremely easy to setup and run a Google adwords campaign – in around 30 minutes you can bring more customers to your website.

However, without some basic guidelines on how to setup, manage and optimise your adwords account, many small businesses find themselves with a large bill from Google at the end of the month and very few additional sales or leads.

Unfortunately this puts many small businesses off using Google adwords in future which is a shame as a correctly managed and optimised campaign can produce great results. Below are a five simple tips to help small businesses  avoid some of the biggest mistakes when setting up a PPC campaign:

1.  Content Network VS Google Search

Google Search = ads displayed on the standard Google search engine in the sponsored ad section.

Content Network = Google showing your advert on any website across the internet

Initially run your campaign only on the Google Search network excluding “Search Partners”. Once you have a viable campaign running here, then look to create a separate one for the content network. Never mix the two in one campaign to control your costs.

2. Split Campaigns Into Multiple Ad Groups

Within each campaign setup multiple ad groups, each one containing very similar groups of keywords. You can then match the adverts more closely to the keywords.

3. Don’t Send All Adverts to Your Home Page

Always send visitors to the MOST RELEVANT webpage for the advert. This is another reason for implementing (2) above as it allows you to send visitors to the best matched website page for the keyword phrase they input to Google.

4. Always Check Your Keyword Quality Score.

Google adwords keyword quality score needs to be at least 7 or above to ensure you are not being over-charged for clicks on your adverts. Anything below 6 and your keywords and not matching up with the webpage you are sending visitors to and the campaign is unlikely to be profitable.

5. Make Effective Use of Negative Keywords

Always research and setup negative keywords on campaigns and ad groups. This ensures that you are not paying for irrevelant clicks for your campaigns.  A great example of this is the company bidding on the keyword “night stands” which was not working out at all profitable. When they investigated the actual keyword phrases people were finding their advert and clicking on it for, they discovered around 50% of the traffic came from the keyword phrase “one night stand”……..!  They setup “one” as a negative keyword and the campaign immediately became profitable.

Bonus TIP

Finally, I think the most important thing to understand about PPC advertising is that you must be prepared to continuously montior, tune and optimise the whole E2E sales funnel. So long as you have the time and inclination to work on these areas then PPC can be an extremely profitable advertising medium for your business.

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Had some great feedback last week from several of the small business website owners who’ve downloaded and implemented my free “10 Step SEO Healthcheck” guide. One business has trebled it’s traffic in a few months, another has moved up to page one of Google for a target keyword phrase and also increased traffic and sales!

It’s great that this document has helped these business owners. If you want to find out how well your website is performing on the search engines, pop across to my website, download your copy and start improving your website’s ranking, traffic and sales!   “10 Step SEO Healthcheck“

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Been meaning to add some quick reviews of useful small business website tools for  a while. So here is the first one…..

Last Autumn I ran some hands-on email marketing workshops for small business owners. I spent some time researching the best email marketing tools out of a list of about twelve. There is a huge range of options on the market such as Aweber, Mad Mimi, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Benchmark Email, Campaign Monitor, dotMailer, iContact and Swiftpage.

I was looking for a simple to use solution, without too much clutter and functionality to confuse the user. It was also important that the costs started out reasonable and scaleable for future email list growth. For most small businesses they just need the basic emailing functionality, non-technical email newsletter creation and good website integration for Google Analytics and link tracking.

My final selection was Mad Mimi which is perfect for the small business owner. Having trialed it myself and with my “Non-IT Literate” clients the product has come up trumps. They also have an excellent online support team who are very helpful and available online during US working hours. Providing you only want to add one website signup list then this is a great tool to dip your toe into email marketing.

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So you have your new website launched, you’ve started your marketing campaigns to bring traffic and hopefully sales. How do you know how many people are visiting your website, where they are coming from and what they are doing once they arrive at your website?

The answer is to implement website analytics tools as part of your website design and internet marketing strategy ensuring you can test, track and tune the whole process once it is live.

There are many tools available on the market falling into two categories:

1. WEB SERVER BASED TOOLS
Tools installed on your web server capturing information about all traffic on your sites from your website log files. These are often included in your web hosting package – check out what you have already. Some common examples are Webalizer, AWStats & Analog.

2. TOOLS EXTERNAL TO WEBSITE
External tools which require small snippets of code to be embedded within all web pages you wish to monitor. The market leader in the field is Google Analytics which is free, provides e-commerce analysis and also links into Google Adwords PPC analysis. Other providers are Yahoo! Web Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst & Microsoft adCentre Web Analytics.

More About Google Analytics

Some of the many statistics you can track with the market leader, Google Analytics are:

• Site visits per day/month;
• Comparisons with previous months/years data;
• Map of where in world visitors are from;
• Info about which browser visitors used;
• Numbers of direct access, other website referral or search engine visitors;
• Which pages are most popular, how long visitors spend on each page;
• Website visitor was referred from;
• Keywords used to find site via a search engine;
• Bounce rates for each landing web page (ie. %age of visitors who only visit one page and leave the site);
• Site Overlay feature showing you what percentage of users click on which web page
• features providing identification of unpopular or unused areas to be tuned;
• Goal setup and tracking (eg. Goal = sale, track which web page in the sales process loses the most customers);

Google Analytics also has a reporting feature where you can setup your own bespoke reports tailored to your website.

Why Would I Use One on My Website?

• To monitor useful information about visitors to your website;
• To enable split testing of your website and PPC marketing campaigns;
• Monitor conversion rates, sales values, bounce rates, popular web pages;

Possible Requirements to Consider If I Need One

• Always implement Google Analytics;
• Make sure your website developer includes inclusion of Google Analytics code into ALL required web pages;
• Ensure your support & maintenance agreement includes Google Analytics code inserts for all new web pages;
• Setup both sorts of tools on your website to provide cross reference data validation;
• Specific analysis tools may provide additional useful information;
• See what is provided already with your web host before implementing additional tools;
• Will you monitor your website statistics yourself or will someone else – document and agree what information you want, when and how this can be varied;

Examples

Google Analytics: Overview Statistics

Google Analytics:Summary of Website Traffic Sources

Google Analytics: Goal Funnel Visualisation

Above is a very simple example of a goal visualisation with a home page only containing a sign-up form. Completing the sign-up form and clicking on the button is the goal or call to action on this website. After signing-up the website redirects you to a Thank-You web page which is the “goal” web page which 23% of website visitors actually did in this case.

If this was your sales goal process you would include all web pages throughout the sales process to see how many and at which point customers left your website. You would then need to look at what was causing them to leave your website BEFORE completing their purchase.

Further Information

Website analytics are a MUST HAVE on your website – without them you have no information about how well your website is achieving your website objectives.

Signup Page For Google Analytics

Signup Page for Yahoo! Web Analytics

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