SEO - Beware of images & research your keywords

It has been a few weeks since I posted on the blog, but August has been a quiet month for me, especially as I am in a new business.

I have been involved in a couple of pieces of work where small businesses aren't seeing anything from their websites.

It seems that small businesses are still missing key points during the development of their websites, which is a real shame. Could be poor or no advice from their web development companies.

Taking a look at the two examples.

1. Pictures and Graphics
It may be true that pictures say a thousand words, sadly not in the case of search engines. The site I reviewed was nearly all pictures, which looked great and someone had obviously spent a lot of time on developing these great images. Google however wasn't able to find enough worthwhile content to rank the page in the search results. Key phrases and keywords were nowhere to be seen.

The other problem with pictures is, if all your content is graphical it will restrict your ability to update the site at a later stage. Unless of course you have in-house graphic capabilities, which for most small businesses is unlikely.

2. Keywords and Key phrases.
If you are running a small business and expect to attract most of your business from the local area then check out the number of searches for your business type and the area name. EG Accountants Norwich. The Google keyword tool is a great way of researching your keywords. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You will probably find that there are several hundred searches for in , if this is the case make sure you have them in your home page and the key phrases are mentioned a number of times throughout the site.

If you need some help in either of these areas why not get in contact.
http://www.msicommerce.co.uk/contact/contact.asp

Developing my customer proposition

As a small business owner it can be a challenge developing a customer proposition, as the easy answer is - we want everyone’s business. Personally I have decided that I want to focus on SMEs and in reality it is mostly the SEs that I can offer the most benefit to.

In order to be a viable option to this group, low cost solutions is a key point. Previously I have worked for a business that offers its services to small businesses at £86 an hour. The result is that many of the small businesses don't have any work done on their sites.

Taking this part of the customer proposition there are a number of my internal processes that need to be managed in order to maintain low cost – ie production, or in my case development. The best way to keep this cheap at the moment is off-shore. It is very difficult to compete with the resources offered from other parts of the world. With a strong pound it means good value resources can be acquired in the likes of India, Eastern Europe or Mexico.

Developing a virtual team is relatively easy these days and the internet offers access to a wealth of developers and businesses across the world. The use of business tools is vital to keep things on track. Recommended tool include:

1. Collaboration area. This is somewhere to capture all your project information. Emails are ok, but if you have more than a couple of people working the project it can quickly get out of control. People missed from emails, information captured in emails but no where else. An online site allows all the information to be stored in one place and searched at a later stage. See my previous notes on Google site.
2. Messenger service. Skype or MSN Messenger a quick and easy ways to communicate with team members. Quick questions are fine, don't try to hold long conversations though. People don't type that quickly and creativity is best done in a call.
3. VOIP - Small businesses can easily afford access to VOIP services and they provide cheap calls to all parts of the world. If you want really cheap ie free, get a headset and use skype. The people you are working with will need the same system.
4. Screen sharing - Have you ever had that feeling that someone isn't seeing what you are when you are trying to explain something over the phone. "Its next to the green circle" " What this red line?" "No, below the redline" " What the picture?" "No, to the ....." sound familiar. For a small fee per month you can remove these issues with a screen sharing application. GoTo Meeting is relatively cheap and can remove hours of "No, below that".

So now I have my team based in 3 different locations it doesn't cost the earth to communicate with them. The operations side of the business is run with cost in mind allowing me to deliver great value services at prices designed for SMEs.

eBusiness - Integration of websites with 3rd party applications

Recently I have spoken to two businesses that are interested in an eCommerce website. Both are established businesses running retail websites. One ecommerce website was more successful then other but the issues were identical. Rather than integrating the websites into the necessary third party applications someone was having to copy and paste data between two systems!!!!

The first point, in both cases, was that the "Someone" was a business owner, who no doubt has far better and more important tasks to be completing on a daily basis. It no doubt felt right at the time when they made the decision, after all, it is an important task that needs to be done right. The reality is that paying yourself £60k a year to do data processing is not good use of resources.

The second is the exposure to risk that can occur with a manual task. In one case it was the payment details, so that chance of getting card details incorrect during the process are slim as the banks have numerous checks to ensure the details match up. The other was account and order creation, which could result in incorrect orders or missing details. When the numbers are small the risks are less but as a business grows the room for error increases.

eCommerce & eBusiness should be about reducing manual overheads and the automation of processes to reduce the risk of error. Ok there is the chance that something can go wrong with the software, but with good levels of testing the risks can be reduced and with log files errors can be easily traced.

This rant leads us back into the use of Kaplan and Norton's strategy map, which I will pick up next time.

eMail subject line

I have seen some interesting result from a recent email marketing campaign that I thought may be of interest. Interesting but in reality not that surprising really.

The email was for a summer sale for a maternity company that I work with. The email subject line was set as "Re: Summer sale 50% off all clothing". On the face of it this appears to be a fantastic offer, but when reviewed against a previous email it inspired just slightly fewer people to open it (percentage wise).

Two previous emails produced better results using keywords in the title, in the cases in question "Maternity" and "Baby".

Relevancy is a key theme that plays a role here. We are bombarded with sale headlines from the hundreds of companies in our emails all the time. People are now switching off to a general sale and not surprisingly. Generally when I go to a sale it is all the rubbish that the store couldn't shift. Chocolate fondue sets was one mentioned by a top retailer recently.

Sadly the company in question doesn't have accurate data on which users have viewed particular items, we are therefore unable to tailor the emails to individuals. We can however use Google Analytics to show us what the majority of people are looking at but not buying. We can then use that for the basis of the next email, being sure to take out the customers on the email list that have purchased the product recently.

Future emails might therefore read Re: 50% in our summer sale.

I would obviously welcome your thoughts on this.

Customer Proposition Continued

Earlier in this blog I did start some ramblings about customer propositions and I thought it might be time to carry on where I left off.

Having identified our customers and segmented them, we have started to build propositions that should suit each of the segments or where segements over lap the propositions may suit more than one. It is then important to build up the messaging around that propositions.

The web allows you to easily deal with a number of different propositions, as it is realitively cheap to build 2 websites with slightly different branding to appeal to two different markets. This way you are providing clear messaging to two different groups without confusing either group.

A company that has built up the multi brand messages well, is N Brown a provider of fashion to multiple sectors. The following chart shows a breakdown of their brand propositions taken from a presentation by their CEO Alan White at the recent Drapers online fashion event.

The image lays out how the various propositions fit into the market. As a small business it is unlikely that we will be setting up quiet so many different propositions but it does provide a clear picture of how it can work.

In generating a customer proposition you need to look at a number of key aspects these are indentified as the following by Kaplan and Norton: Price, Quality, Availability, Selection, Functionality, Service, Partnership and Brand.

These are quite important as they will require an internal focus to ensure your business is set up to deliver them.

Online Fashion Retailing

I recently attended the Drapers Maximising revenue through online fashion retailing event in London. It was a well attended session with leading industry speakers. Before getting into the business end of the discussion, I must point out that their decision to serve sausage and mash at a buffet, with no seats, tiny table and only provide a fork was interesting. I managed to eat meal without spilling th e food across the floor, which is more than can be said for a previous visit to Bath University who now have an interesting red wine stain on their carpet.

A couple of key points that came out of the session:
1. It is critical that businesses pro-actively manage their online customer service. Some might say "We do this already." But are you aware of what you customers are saying about you elsewhere. Where as in the past a customer would tell 10 of their friends about a bad experience they can now tell the rest of the world. The larger businesses are now tackling this head on and offering a space for customers to feedback even if it is a bad comment. Ultimately this gets bad comments out in the open, but at least it gives the company an opportunity to respond positively. Starting a blog or forumn in a similar style provides customers with a great space to feedback and even small businesses can participate.

2. Free returns good or bad?
eCommerce businesses need to overcome trust issues in order to get customers to buy for the first time. Free returns provides an excellent means to show customers how good you think your products are. One comment was that it can even encourage larger order values as customers pick a couple of items thinking "I'll return those because I am not too sure". But as we all know once you have it in your hands it becomes difficult to send back, for many reasons. Worth noting - don't be afraid to be strict on your returns policy, if the product isn't in a fit state to be resold, send it back to the customer and explain why you will not refund. If you are worried about the impact of free returns why not give free returns as an offer.

Some great ideas. A more detailed summary of the key points will follow on MSI Commerce site.

Developing eNoise

The web provides a great way of generating some eNoise for your business. e-what I hear you cry.

The internet has numerous channels for interacting with your audience. An example would be a blog similar to this one where you can post you ideas and thoughts and allow others to comment.

There are many other similar outlets that allow you to generate a buzz around your company and many of them are free. Search for networking opportunities online and you will find hundreds varying in size from regional sites (business scene) to multi nationals such as LinkedIn.

Most are free to join and some will let you publish articles and general ramblings for free. I have recently joined a number of these as a means of generating some online activity for my site. Business Scene offers the chance for local face to face networking which can be a great channel for driving traffic to your website through your business cards.

Other ways for generating a community around your business include the generation of groups on sites. These are more appropriate for some businesses rather than others. An example would be Facebook, here you can generate a group and showcase your products and company.

As with any online activity there is an overhead associated with it all so you need to choose the one that is most appropriate for your audience, don't be afraid to ask your customers where they look.