Michael Evans – HellBound Bloggers (HBB)

Are You An eCommerce retailer? Explore These Propositions

When it comes to the eCommerce retailers, the biggest challenge they get to face in their Business is setting their brand or service apart from the crowd. If you’re different, this is the time to show your customers what makes you different. This is possible by incorporating value propositions that have the best impact on your online visitors who can turn out to be your loyal customers in the long run. Having the most effective value propositions not only boosts your conversion rate but also helps you drive more traffic and consequently more traffic.

We have listed a few interesting but useful propositions that can help you offer tough competition to others in the same market. To add, this is possible without getting involved in an extremely tough job and without actually having to lower the prices of products. Explore them and they should also help you in finding out where you actually stand.

Whether you’re an emerging online retailer or a successful and established one, take a look at these effective, tried and tested formulae –

Live Help on Your Site

Live help or assistance is a crucial part of any eCommerce site. Since the last thing you should expect your customers to have is patience, they usually look for live help on your sites and want someone to assist them instantly. It will help them make instant purchasing decisions and increase conversion.

Impactful Order Tracking

Since your customers want to know where and how their money is in process, they would be more than happy to keep viewing the status of the orders they have placed. They would also be willing to keep a track of shipping so make sure you offer them all of these.

Product recommendation

When a recommendation comes based on the purchases made in the past along with the mention of the products that have been most browsed, customers are sure to pay attention. Amazon is one of those sites that seem to firmly believe in this and you know the result – they are doing well. Since most of the customers are going to love the idea of being offered ‘logic’ behind a purchase, your site is up for an increase in terms of both traffic and conversion.

Special Coupon Codes in Promotional Mails

Offering your prospective customers those special coupon codes through your promotional mails is going to be a great move. It will help you in driving your customers to your online eCommerce store – instantly and effortlessly.

Gift-Wrapping Options

When customers are buying gifts for their family or friends, they want it to be visibly attractive and gift-wrapping option by eCommerce stores is one service that encourages them to make a purchase. Make sure that your eCommerce store offers your customers a gift-wrapping solution so that they turn to you for the same, again and again.

Informational videos

When you know you’re selling a complicated product, having useful and informational videos for the same is something that you can’t just afford to miss out. Let your customers understand how a video can solve their problems in terms of products’ usefulness. They will rather realize the value your product carries and what they get by buying it.

Listing out the best sellers

Customers are often perplexed and unsure about the purchase of a particular product. Mentioning the ‘best sellers’ is going to let them have a great deal of confidence in their purchase.

Free delivery/free shipping

‘Free delivery’ is what most of the customers look for, while making a purchase online. It is an essential factor that will help you stand apart from your competitors in the long run. Safety Matting 4U has been seeing a great boost in conversion despite maintaining a consistency in their product prices. This means you don’t have to alter your product prices for increasing conversion – have a free delivery option and it will make a difference!

Your eCommerce store can also offer best customer services with the help of a strong Social Media presence. Make sure that you stay away from any hidden charges and offer them clear (and possibly the safest ones too!) info on payments and shopping cart. Include discounts as highlights and make them feel comfortable by responding to their issues instantly. You can also target customers by offering them a comparison shopping.

Pay special heed to both the first-time and the loyal customers! Let them write reviews and be open to money back guarantees so that your customers can sense your confidence in your own services and products. You can also offer them good online resources such as a blog; promote transparency and start making the shopping enjoyable!

Google Adwords Enhanced Campaign and the Future ahead of Us

The launch of Google Adwords Enhanced campaign is certainly a game changer in the world of paid advertisement. This change, which is yet to get rolled out globally, is going to change the very structure of how mobile PPC works in particular. So, if you are one of those perfectionists voicing your support vociferously for the creation of separate campaigns for the desktop and mobile devices, I think time has come to rethink your strategy for mobile PPC campaigns. With Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns, you will be able to target different devices for the same campaign and that too without getting yourself muddled with its complexities.

However, before we go any further, we need to know a bit more about this Enhanced thing so that we can make informed decisions:

What is Enhanced Campaign All About?

People are now more connected than ever. They are using smartphones, tablets, TVs, Laptops, PCs and more to stay connected. Now, as they are using switching between devices, it is getting increasingly tough for advertisers to reach out to them when they might be searching for things that they offer. So, it is not just about targeting the specific devices, rather it is about targeting the right audience in the right context and in the precise moment when they are willing to loosen their purse string.

Previously advertisers were required to create separate campaigns for targeting different devices and believe me this led to total chaos. But thankfully with Enhanced Campaign, PPC marketers would not have to bother with this thing anymore. Just wait few more months and you will be able to target different devices, set different locations and different time zones and all these can be managed from a single adwords campaign.

The Obvious Benefits of Enhanced Campaigns

The biggest benefit of running an enhanced campaign is that you can set different requirements for a single campaign and Adwords will show your ads whenever it meets all the requirements successfully. For say, if you a restaurant owner, you can bid higher for those people who are searching for pizza within 1 KM radius of your store. Or, it could be that your store remains closed on Saturday, in that case you can lower the bid amount for that day.

And if this is not enough, you can show different ads to different people browsing from different devices right at the same time. For say, if you are selling hotdogs, you can show text ad with a store locator for people who are searching from their smartphones while showing text ads with sitelinks to “Contact Us” page of your website to other people who are browsing from their PC.

So, now we have an idea of the possible benefits of enhanced campaigns and now, we will be taking at it how this thing is going to change our life:

Ads are Going to Get Smarter

The best part of this Enhanced campaign is, what I have discussed earlier as well, that you can make changes in the ads based on the types of devices, times and locations. If you do not wish to make your ads appear on mobile, all you got to do is to down the bid by -100% which will successfully switch off all adds that will be appearing on mobile devices.

And if this is not enough, Google is going further to bring more feature in it. For say, you will be able to specify which kind of ad extensions you would like to show with a particular texts ads for Desktop users and which ones for the mobile users.

Tracking Mobile Call Conversion has got free

As we are all aware, tracking conversion that is done via calling directly from mobile phone is a tricky as well costly affair. But Google is going to change this scenario by making it easier for people to track the orders or conversions done over the phone. This whole thing will be based on Call duration and to add icing on the cake, you would not have to pay any penny for this.

The Cost of Mobile CPC will be much higher

As of now, there has been a huge gap between the CPC on desktop searches and CPC on mobile devices. As running a PPC campaign solely on the mobile platform is time consuming, there has been less competition on this domain. However, by making it easier to run a campaign on mobile devices, Google is certainly going to encourage advertisers to spend more money on this domain.

Google and Bing Are Lying! Disavow Links Cannot Save You

Meaning of the word “Disavow” is “Deny any responsibility or support for.” (via Google)

After denying the existence of Negative SEO, it seems Google and Bing have finally woken up to the reality thanks to the consistent pressured built by the webmasters. By promising to launch a new option in Google Webmaster Tools – Disavow Links, Google has made it clear that backlinks from bad sites can affect visibility of a website negatively and which is why you must “Disavow” links.

Bing has gone a bit step further by launching the option already. So, does this mean this new feature – “Disavow Links” is going to save you and your website from the onslaught of Negative SEO? You can take a leap of faith with the search engines as you are living in a democratic country but I will not. I have a doubt, a strong one indeed that, Link Disavow option is a just a gimmick, an attempt to make webmasters believe that the fate of their websites is in their hands. Now, if you are unable to see the reality, here are some pointers that you must take into consideration before coming under their coercion:

Dude They will not Change Their Algo: If you believe that Google or Bing will take cue their Disavow Links and will make changes in their algo just to safeguard the interest of your websites, you are living in a fool’s paradise. How come do you believe that they will take that pain to do that for you? Moreover, is it possible, humanly or non-humanly to make changes in a sophisticated algo developed by search engines in every now or then? Definitely, you cannot expect that Google and Bing will be doing extra work so that your website rank high in some competitive keywords. They are not running a search engine for charity; they are trying hard to keep their result page SPAM free just because it is the only way to beat the competitors.

They are Gathering Intelligence: You might be wondering if the search engines are not to use the signals from Disavow Links options, why the hell on earth they launched it? Valid question and the answer is they have launched it to gather intelligence. Search engines always try to solve things algorithmically but they are finding it tough to make their SERP neat and clean without human intervention. They have already realized that an algo, no matter how much sophisticated it is, is still lagging far behind from determining the quality of a web page. This is the reason why they are passing the torch to the webmasters. Webmasters, as we know, will do their best to safeguard the interest of their website and in doing so, they will start discounting those links are that adding zero value to their website. Since webmasters are quite capable of determining the quality of websites, they can inform search engines straightaway which sites are good and which ones are bad. So, search engines, regardless of the fact whether they are to respect the signals of “Disavow Links or not”, are going to have detailed information about the quality of a website right from the horse mouth, I mean the webmasters.

You are not Safe: Yes, even after Disavowing Links that you have not built, there are still chances that Google and Bing may override them, as they do not trust you or any other webmasters. Disavow Links will be treated as a signal, not even a strong one, and that means, if your website gets penalized because of bad links, you cannot expect an overnight recovery. It will be a painfully slow recovery, if the recovery ever starts.

So, Disavow Links is the one stop solution of the bad neighborhood links. You need to act proactively and try your level best to get them down as far as possible if you are to see a speedy recovery. Couples with link unbuilding and Disavowing them via webmaster tools, you can expect a recovery.

This article is written by Michael Evans. He is a social media analyst and he is also associated with Webarts that offers Search Engine Optimization services.

Panda Cannot Read English, Please Stop Talking Rubbish

When your blog gets interrupted by the vicious Panda, you like the rest of other bloggers put the blame squarely on the writers for all the mishap. Probably, you have made some contributions that have made your website an easy prey of an algo update from the house of Google, code named as Google Panda update. You simply cannot make me believe that an algo update like Panda have made the Googlebot powerful enough to judge the quality of the content. The world is still not such a great place. So, the concept of Panda checking the quality of the content manually is just a complete shit. So, you might be wondering what could have made your blog penalized if the quality of content is not such a decisive factor. The answer is not that straightforward and therefore, here I am going to share some probable reasons that could have incurred the wrath of the peace loving Panda:

Copy Content: Now I am not another dumb blogger. I know your blog does not contain a single duplicate article and you have never entertained such rubbishes. But are you damn sure that scrapper websites are not copying and pasting the same articles and thus creating almost hundreds of duplicate versions? Probably you are not. However, you could defend yourself by saying that you have got nothing to do with the scraper sites and it is the job of Google-bot to solve this issue. You are 100% correct but the problem is that the real world is seldom like this. Sometimes, Google-bot may fail to figure out who is copying whom. So, better safe than sorry. You should voluntarily bring this matter to Google’s notice by marking it as SPAM or just file DMCA and it will take down those scrapper websites from Google’s index.

Keyword Specific Content: Yes, I know it is hard to resist the idea of writing some keywords centric articles as they drive huge traffic to your website. But this has its own share of shortcomings. Having too many keywords centric articles are definitely a worrying sign. My assumption is when you are writing too many keywords centric articles, your blog come under the radar of Google. For say, if your blog has articles like these –

1) Great carpet cleaning services in Sydney

2) Awesome carpet cleaning business ideas in Melbourne

You are just inviting a penalty because either you are trying to boost the ranking of your website with those keywords or you are trying to earn some extra cash from Google Adsense.

Off topic Content: There are some bloggers who are always trying to squeeze out as much money from their blogs as possible and for that they do not mind posting random articles with paid links pointing to sites that are not at all related to the theme of the blog. You can find links of Poker, Viagra etc in those blogs and if this is not enough, they do not mind posting irrelevant articles in their websites. These types of blogs are easy prey of Panda. Do not make your blog an easy prey and for that reason you should not indulge in the luxury of posting irrelevant articles on your blog.

Thin Content: I am not ruling out the concept of having duplicate content can make your website penalized by Panda. Yes, there are still some chances of being scrapped out by Panda if your posts are totally rubbish and stuffed with innumerable keywords. Make your website content at least readable and make the content primarily for the users and not for the search engines and you would not have to fear Panda.

This article is written by Michael Evans. He is a passionate bloggers and he also contributes to a leading Web Design Library.

Over Optimization – A Fight Not Against Spam But Against Perception

So the great battle begins. Google is up in arm against saving the humankind from the unscrupulous activities of some bad guys masquerading as SEO professionals and it has got a new ammunition, more powerful than the last Panda update. It can drag you down to earth at any point of time and haplessly, you will see all your hard work is going to drain.

Google Webmaster Forum is buzzing with debates raging between website owners and bionic members, who seem to be coming from an alien world where nothing wrong ever happens. People are losing their rankings, businesses are going for a toss and some are even some are facing complete deindexing. Hell! Over optimization penalty has already been rolled out and the whole SEO world is going frenzied over it. But believe me this latest update is not about deindexing or penalizing those sites that have gone too far with their SEO activities or leveling the field, it is actually about fighting against the perception that a website needs to have links, tons of links to get better ranks in Google’s SERP.

What People Think about Over Optimization?

To be honest, people are crazy these days and you cannot blame them since they are seeing their websites toned by Google, their source of revenues is drying up and there are fewer alternatives (SEOBook’s latest post might be an interesting read here).

Below are some misconceptions about the over optimization penalty that are still doing the round:

1. Links Have Lost Their Importance

Definitely, this is not the case. However, there is no denying of the fact that Google is giving less and less importance on the Links and switching to some other signals like users stay, average time on the website, social signals and a lot more. All signals are now fine-tuned to find out the best website for a given query. Links are and will always be an important factor but that does not mean, you will channelize all your effort to get as many links as possible, rather you should come up with amazing design, write compelling content, do some off line promotion and do an A/B testing in Google Adwords.

2. Keywords have Lost Their Importance

I have heard some SEO guys saying if you are targeting keywords, you are dead. Yeah, this is quite true to some extent. Keywords stuffing can land you on troubled water and you might see a massive fall in ranking. Do not use keywords insanely, rather focus on the brand image of your website and use them whenever they feel and fit good. No need to force them, place them whenever they feel good and you are happy.

3. Negative SEO

This is the new catchword for all SEO guys who have lost the ranks of their website in one way or the other, or whose website has seen a drastic fall from favor from Google. All they have to blame the negative SEO, a new myth designed to pass the ball to competitors. They are shouting like this – I am not building these links. You know it is my competitors who have built to get my website scrapped by Google. Believe me; I am not lying. Negative SEO is a myth. Stop whining like a little brat who has caught doing something wrong. Since there is tough time ahead, I do not think your competitors will have enough time in hands to spend their resources just to get your website banned by Google.

What Google Thinks About Over Optimization?

This is the most interesting part of the whole story. I do not think Google has launched a holy war against sites that are spamming heavily or trying to give not-so-smart people their share of web presence (which is long overdue). Nope, rather Google is trying very hard to change the perception of people about SEO. It tries to make people aware that search engine optimization is not just about getting links, tons of them by doing something that hurts users’ experience and that does not add value to the website as a whole. And I must say, Google has done a considerably great job. They have made bad guys terrified and good guys are coming back to the limelight and thanks heaven, those days of $200 is coming to an end. However, there are some hiccups along the way. SEER Interactive found them out of the whole game, but they have bounced back and this time, quite strongly. Since Google is still fine-tuning the algo, it is quite expected that there will be some bumps along the way. This over optimization thing may or may not bore well for your website or your career, but you can be sure of one thing – days of cheap SEO are coming to end and hopefully, we will see its end soon enough.